Governance

This summer saw an extremely slow rate of independent agency nominations coming from the White House, and witnessed also a similarly glacial pace of confirmations emerging from the Senate. While this trend got slightly better over the course of the fall, with the Senate finally making significant movement on the nominations already presented before it, few new nominations have emerged from the White House since July 18, 2023.  

Ever wonder who’s behind gross smear campaigns to sink qualified Biden administration nominees? Look no further than the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a little-known rightwing opposition research organization housed under the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) umbrella. The oppo shop was founded in 2021 with a simple goal: “to take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration.” Since then, AAF has targeted over twenty nominees with slanderous, bad-faith attacks. The strategy has been relatively successful thus far, especially in derailing racial and ethnic minority and female nominees, including Saule Omarova, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Carlton Waterhouse, and Gigi Sohn.   

As long as one party remains totally united behind a man who attempted to overthrow the government by force, was the most corrupt president in American history, and undermines the public’s faith in elections at every turn, the future of American democratic self-government is at risk.

Sounds scary. But what if I told you this was a great opportunity for fun and profit? Silicon Valley–backed startup Kalshi is attempting to expand the amount of gambling on the country’s elections with the introduction of an “event contract” centered around congressional elections. Simply put, the firm aims to allow traders to bet on the event: Which party will win control of Congress?

On July 25, 2023, military leaders in Niger, along with members of the Presidential Guard, enacted a coup against President Mohamed Bazoum. Led by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, a Nigerien military officer and self-appointed President of Niger’s military junta, coup plotters detained the democratically-elected President Bazoum, as well as members of his family, threatened to kill him in the event of any military intervention in the coup, and most recently put him on trial for treason.

Despite widespread rumors of an emergent coup in the country, the United States was reportedly “blindsided” by it, and scrambled to respond. Of course, American intel regarding the actual political atmosphere of the country was hindered in no small way by the lack of State Department personnel staffing embassies in the region.

All last spring, as the looming threat of default swallowed up all the oxygen on the Hill, every other serious crisis demanding political attention played second fiddle to Republicans’ manufactured disaster. In May, President Biden said his “hope and intention” was to “find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it.” A lawsuit brought this May by 75,000 federal employees challenging the constitutionality of the debt limit offers just that opportunity. 

So why is the Justice Department actively fighting to get the case dismissed, likely limiting the federal government’s capacity to govern effectively?

In response to the emergence of the structure of a potential deal between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy, Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser issued the following statement: 

“There are three aspects to the substance and coverage of this debate that have been infuriating.”

There are a lot of things you could say about the GOP’s proposed plan to reduce the deficit. But if we want to be more expansive than just calling it “batshit crazy” and washing our hands of the whole clown show, as we think Biden can and should, then we could point out that the GOP plan is an expression of profound hostility to the idea of a federal government that serves anyone besides war profiteers.

This is the latest installment of a new biweekly blog series from RDP. Every two weeks, we call out ongoing trends in media coverage of the Justice Department’s focus and priorities, giving context from our past DOJ oversight work as needed, with an eye to the impact of DOJ capacity and resources, as well as alignment with the Biden administration’s professed goals.

This is the latest installment of a new biweekly blog series from RDP. Every two weeks, we call out ongoing trends in media coverage of the Justice Department’s focus and priorities, giving context from our past DOJ oversight work as needed, with an eye to the impact of DOJ capacity and resources, as well as alignment with the Biden administration’s professed goals.

Despite years of our best advice, and indeed the better judgments of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other progressives in Congress, government watchdogs like Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) and others, nearly one year ago President Joe Biden disappointed his responsibility to the public and to his own economic agenda by renominating Donald Trump’s hand picked head of the Fed: Jerome Powell. Biden bafflingly stuck by Powell despite his years of betraying labor unions, environmental groups and frontline communities, and the middle class. As a result, broad coalitions of folks concerned about the climate crisis, about the long term safety and stability of our financial system, about attacks on labor and the working class, about housing insecurity and the long term impacts of the pandemic, mobilized against Powell’s renomination because his storied track record of, well, making each of these things (and more!) worse.