Friday, February 10, 2017

Censure (supplement)

TO: Representative Gary Palmer, Alabama 6th Congressional district

This supplements the preceding Censure entry.

A. Impeachment effort already underway
An impeachment effort is already underway, as reported in this January 27, 2017 article Hundreds of Thousands Sign Petition to Impeach Trump for Violating Constitution over Biz Interests.The impeachment effort is being led by the organizations Free Speech for People and RootsAction.

B. Please answer the below
NBC News reports the following about Rep. Chaffetz yesterday  ‘Do Your Job!’: Rep. Jason Chaffetz Faces Angry Town Hall Crowd in Utah.

I tweeted you the video in the report and asked about the President's oath of office and "faithfully."
As the video in the link shows, Rep. Chaffetz does not get beyond saying, as to President Trump, he is exempt from the "conflicts of interest" statute. 

Can you please answeer: Have you raised with Rep. Chaffetz and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee the questions I posed for you in November, to wit:
1. What is the relationship between the constitutional oath of office to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States" and the exemption for the President that is provided in the "conflicts of interest" statute? What does the word "faithfully" mean in the constitutional oath of office? Can President Trump do anything he wants in service of the interests of his businesses and his family, or does the word "faithfully" limit what President Trump can do?
2. If the word "faithfully" limits what President Trump can do, do you think President Trump understands that?
3. What is the role of Congress in overseeing whether the President is "faithfully" executing his office? Can Congress impeach the President if it determines that the President has failed to faithfully execute his office? What if the President has one view of what "faithfully" means, and Congress has a differing view?
Can you please provide some information on this, Rep. Palmer?

C. Bigger picture
The novel case of President Trump and his businesses raises big picture questions of how governance and electoral politics are going to be conducted in the country.

President Trump is opaque about ideas he may have, but there are inklings.

One inkling is President Trump's "art of the deal" mentality and his picking of individual companies to "target" and "negotiate" with personally for implementing his policies. This is novel in a President.

This form of governance is autocratic and needs contrasting with regular modes of governance by the Executive Branch. The regular modes start with Congress passing laws, making appropriations, funding programs and incentives under the law, and specifying punishments for non-compliance with the law. The Executive Branch executes the laws Congress passes, including by means of administrative agencies which act by general rule making and by enforcement in particular cases for which there are administrative and judicial protections for those against whom enforcement is sought.

The Trump businesses could be used by President Trump as an adjunct of this autocratic mode of governance. President Trump could use his extensive web of business contacts to elicit support for his legislation, including that they contact their Congressional representatives to urge the representatives to support Trump legislation. Trump could couple his requests with indications of favorable treatment of business interests of his contacts who help out, and Trump may even signal that failure to support Trump legislation could be met with some unfavorable business treatment by the Trump administration.

"Pay to play" risks would increase greatly.

For further elaboration of the foregoing matters, please read Trump Inc.

Don't you agree that the Committee, Congress and the country need to get a handle on what is going to happen with the country's governance and politics? Don't you think this should be done by the Committee taking up its responsibilities regarding President Trump and his businesses.

Update 2/15
The below op/ed piece is deserving of consideration related to above.

The Wall Street Journal

The ‘Blind Trust’ Snake Oil

American voters have bigger things to worry about than Trump’s business interests.


By 
265 COMMENTS
Let’s just say the precedents aren’t good.
Lyndon Johnson was the first president to place his family assets in a blind trust. That didn’t stop him from installing a special phone line, bypassing White House operators, so he could apply presidential suasion for the benefit of TV and radio stations nominally owned by Lady Bird.
Leonard Goldenson, who led ABC at the time, later complained about the president calling up and strong-arming him over the network’s decision to take a college football game away from Johnson’s Austin TV station.
And does anybody think Mike Bloomberg did not involve himself in the running of his financial news empire while mayor of New York City? Halfway through his term, even Mr. Bloomberg dropped the pretense, conceding that, while he “stayed out of the day-to-day stuff,” he regularly spoke to his executives about financial matters, major product changes and lawsuit negotiations.
Yet nobody should doubt that politicians like Mr. Bloomberg and Johnson were concerned, first and last, with political success. When American presidents abuse their offices, it’s for political reasons. Biographer Robert Caro tells of Johnson threatening to block the merger of two Texas banks unless the Houston Chronicle, on whose board one of the bank presidents sat, dropped its hypercritical tone and endorsed Johnson for president in 1964. (The paper did.)
To expect Donald Trump to be unaware or indifferent as to how his businesses are faring in the hands of his kids is unrealistic. Sadly, however, the discussion has been too much influenced by Richard Painter and Norman Eisen, former Bush and Obama White House ethics lawyers, respectively, who have been exploiting the situation to drag out their 15 minutes of fame unconscionably.
They appear everywhere, in op-eds and on TV, encouraging a false idea that a president without business interests is therefore somehow a president devoted to the public interest. Their ideal of a president is almost like Silicon Valley’s dystopian vision of AI, namely a computer that knows what’s good for us and intends to do it without our input.
Messrs. Painter and Eisen fret continually about an “appearance of conflict,” when the thing to worry about is the nonappearance of conflict, the hidden reasons a president favors one course over another that are often lost on everybody but the special interests at his elbow.
Will foreign leaders feel obliged to check into the Trump hotel when visiting D.C? We can take this as a given. Who, when seeing the president, wouldn’t want to be able to say how nice the stay was at his hotel? So what?
Will his overseas buildings become terrorist targets? If so, all the more reason for local partners to take his name down, even if they have to keep paying for its use. It’s the host countries, not the U.S., that have the obligation of protecting local landmarks from terrorist attack.
Will the Trump children parade around in semi-regal fashion, signing deals that wouldn’t otherwise come their way if their father wasn’t president? Again, so what? Two words: Billy Beer.
Of all the things to fret about with President Trump, these are the least important. But ankle-biting America—a longstanding facet of our national character—is getting a chance to air the sanctimony and resentment on which it thrives.
Messrs. Painter and Eisen are the embodiment of the aphid side of the law—the side that glories in the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, irreparably confusing form and substance. Like a two-man Supreme Court, they’ve ruled, based on nothing, that the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause means a president can’t own a stake in a business whose operations might be patronized by a foreign government official. Well, then, sell your McDonald’s shares, ambitious U.S. politicians, lest an Indonesian junior minister stop by the drive-thru window.
Unfortunately the aphid side of life is the side that Washington specializes in. It supplies full-time occupations for rule makers and rule enforcers plus their cheering section, the lobbyists and lawyers who make a living by hindering other Americans from going about their business.
Don’t doubt, though, that these forces are a threat to any president who offers his opponents so many opportunities to tie him and his businesses up in lawsuits.
The more likely outcome is that Mr. Trump’s businesses will wither on the vine while he attends to his presidential duties, not exclusively limited to issuing ruckus-causing tweets. We may not have our new president to kick around after a couple of years, as he hurriedly hands over power so he can go back and save his flagging business empire.
By the way, for urban dwellers, aphids, or “plant lice,” according to Wikipedia, are “small sap-sucking insects” that are “among the most destructive insect pests on cultivated plants in temperate regions.”
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Thursday, February 9, 2017

Censure

TO: Representative Gary Palmer, Alabama 6th Congressional district

On January 9th, Rep Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (on which you sit), said the Committee will continue to investigate Hillary Clinton's private email server. (See CNN story here.)

As to President Trump's potential business conflicts, Rep. Chaffetz reportedly noted that the law‎ exempts the president of the United States, and called the push from Democrats to launch a committee investigation on Trump's business ties "premature at best." (See CNN story here.)

I tweeted you yesterday asking whether you thought President Trump is "faithfully" executing the office of President when he tweets in favor of Ivanka and against Nordstrom in connection with the business relationship of Ivanka and Nordstrom. See Ivanka and Nordstrom.

The potential problems that President Trump's businesses pose for his being able to fulfill his constitutional oath to "faithfully" execute the office of the President have been obvious since November.  Have you given any consideration to them as I requested in Priority questions for AL legislative delegation?

I don't know whether Rep. Chaffetz still thinks that investigation into the Trump businesses is "premature at best," but I think urgency is getting to be needed.

Urgency is needed because so much about President Trump is novel, questionable developments are rapidly occurring and revealing new elements of concern, and there is an expanding amount of information needed to be obtained, understood and evaluated by the Committee. If the Committee ultimately decides that corrective action needs to be taken against President Trump, that should be decided sooner rather than later.

It is up to you and other members of the Oversight Committee to consider and judge the novel situation presented by President Trump.

Quite simply the country has never had an outsider businessman becoming President, and bringing along a very large business organization, which operates domestically and in many foreign countries.

Some of the possible problems associated with the the novel situation of President Trump's businesses have been identified.

The Democrats on the Oversight Commitee sent a seven page letter to Chairman Chaffetz on November 28, 2016, which gave a starting list of problems.

On January 11th, President-Elect Trump had a press conference in which he set out what he was going to do to separate himself from his businesses. This plan has received a large amount of criticism as not doing enough, and the matter is far from resolved. After he took office on January 20th, lawsuits were started against President Trump under the emoluments clause.

While some of the possible problems have been discerned, others are being learned only as time goes by.

Further, President Trump's nature and style have the potential of tremendously exacerbating problems. His tweeting regarding Ivanka and Nordstrom has resulted in his taking up cudgels for the personal interests of Ivanka and his family and stoking more divisive battle between his supporters and opponents who are leaping into the fray.

This is a mess, it is detrimental to the country, and it is almost certain to get worse.

To me, it seems that the Oversight and Government Reform Committee has a responsibility to not duck the mess, and to take up the problems that President Trump and his businesses are creating for the country.

You and the other Republicans on the Oversight Committee are going to have to decide: Are you going to shirk your responsibility by not addressing the problems, or are you going to discharge your responsibility and investigate, evaluate and judge the novel situation of President Trump and his businesses.

Please keep in mind these important questions:

1. What is the relationship between the constitutional oath of office to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States" and the exemption for the President that is provided in the "conflicts of interest" statute? What does the word "faithfully" mean in the constitutional oath of office? Can President Trump do anything he wants in service of the interests of his businesses and his family, or does the word "faithfully" limit what President Trump can do?

2. If the word "faithfully" limits what President Trump can do, do you think President Trump understands that?

3. What is the role of Congress in overseeing whether the President is "faithfully" executing his office? Can Congress impeach the President if it determines that the President has failed to faithfully execute his office? What if the President has one view of what "faithfully" means, and Congress has a differing view?

If the Oversight and Government Reform Committee decides to investigate, evaluate and judge the situation of President Trump and his businesses, the Committee should consider whether censure of the President by the House of Representatives would be an appropriate action to take if the Committee thinks corrective action by Congress is called for.

Update 2/10/17. See Censure (supplement).
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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Ivanka and Nordstrom

To Senators Sessions and Shelby and Representatives Byrne, Roby, Rogers, Aderholt, Brooks, Palmer and Sewell:

Can you please comment on whether President Trump is faithfully executing the office of the President when he tweets in favor of Ivanka and against Nordstrom in connection with the business relationship of Ivanka and Nordstrom? For background to this request, please see Priority questions for AL legislative delegation and Chaffetz letter.

  
 5 hours ago
My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by . She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!
56,910 replies16,352 retweets80,072 likes








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Saturday, February 4, 2017

Dodd-Frank

In his inaugural address, President Trump pledged: "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer." And "You will never be ignored again."

With President Trump's announced goal of rolling back Dodd-Frank, who is he looking out for? Is President Trump looking out for the forgotten men and women of our country, or is he looking out for Wall Street?

The Dodd-Frank Act helps to prevent the big banks from cheating Americans and crashing our economy. We must fight to stop the Republicans from gutting Wall Street reform.


Add Your Name To Join The Fight
It's time to demand Wall Street reform and fight for a strong middle class.
Sign Up
MY.ELIZABETHWARREN.COM

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Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Palmer letter

I have read Rep. Palmer's letter Kicking Off the 115th Congress, dated January 31, 2017.

I think the voters in the Alabama 6th Congressional district could use another letter from Rep Palmer.

I think Rep. Palmer should make inquiry about Steve Bannon.

In the below USA Today article, Steve Bannon seems to be a scary guy.

Rep. Palmer should say which words of Steve Bannon that Rep. Palmer agrees with and which words he disagrees with.

Rep. Palmer should say whether voters in the Alabama 6th Congressional district should find ways to voice concerns about Steve Bannon, or whether Rep. Palmer thinks voters in the 6th Congressional district should not have worries about Steve Bannon.

Senators Sessions and Shelby and Representatives Byrne, Roby, Rogers, Aderholt, Brooks, and Sewell should all do similarly for their Alabama constituents.




USA Today
Steve Bannon’s own words show sharp break on security issues
Published 5:26 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2017
Stephen Bannon has warned that Islam is “the most radical” religion in the world and that the United States is engaged in a struggle for civilization against Islamists. USA TODAY
Steve Bannon, who has ascended in just months from relative obscurity to become one of President Trump’s most influential advisors, has said that Islam is “the most radical” religion in the world and the U.S. is engaged in a civilizational struggle potentially leading to “a major shooting war in the Middle East again.”
Trump installed Bannon this week as a member of his National Security Council, taking the unusual step of installing a political adviser on the powerful White House body responsible for shaping security and foreign policy.
Far more significant may be the views he brings to that table, which represent a sharp break from how previous administrations approached security issues, particularly around Islamic terrorism.
In dozens of hours of audio recordings reviewed by USA TODAY of his Breitbart News Daily radio show in 2015 and 2016, Bannon told his listeners that the United States and the Western world are engaged in a “global existential war,” and he entertained claims that a “fifth column” of Islamist sympathizers had infiltrated the U.S. government and news media. Those recordings, preserved online, offer an often unfiltered window into the thinking of Trump’s interview-averse senior adviser.
The views mark a stark shift from foreign policy doctrine under the previous two administrations.
In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush was cautious in his public statements and gave a speech in which he said, “Islam is peace.” In a radio show last May, Bannon said those were “the dumbest” comments made by Bush during his presidency. On his radio show, Bannon repeatedly made sarcastic references to Islam as a “religion of peace.”
University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said it’s “unprecedented to have someone who doesn’t just harbor those views but seems to have no compunction basing decisions on those views” as a member of the National Security Council.
“It seems like we’re headed for more of the jaw-dropping steps like the immigration order,” he said.
Bannon left a position as the executive chairman of the right-wing news organization Breitbart in August 2016 to become chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign, and after the election, he was named the president’s chief strategist and senior counsel — a position equal in rank to the chief of staff.
His role in shaping Trump’s domestic and foreign policy has grown increasingly apparent in the early days of the administration. Bannon played a role in shaping a flurry of executive orders, including one that temporarily blocks immigration from seven majority-Muslim nations.
“He's got a tremendous understanding of the world and the geopolitical landscape that we have now,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, defending Bannon's place on the security post.

Diverging from longtime foreign policy
While hosting his radio program, Bannon made statements that diverged from decades of U.S. foreign policy.
“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years, aren’t we?” he said in March 2016. “There’s no doubt about that. They’re taking their sandbars and making basically stationary aircraft carriers and putting missiles on those. They come here to the United States in front of our face — and you understand how important face is — and say it’s an ancient territorial sea.”
The United States and China have a tenuous relationship in part because China is entangled in a dispute with Japan and other Asian nations in the region over an important trade channel in the South China Sea and the country’s attempts to assert its dominion by building islands topped with military installations.
During an interview in February 2016, Bannon expressed alarm about China and Islam as he talked about a Breitbart story proclaiming a mosque at the North Pole, although it was actually in a northern Canadian village hundreds of miles away.
“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat,” he said. “Talk to us about this mosque on the North Pole.”
In January 2016, Bannon discussed various threats facing Europe in the late 1930s and evaluated Islam alongside fascism and Nazism.
“This is when Europe’s looking down the barrel of fascism — the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Stalin and the Russians and the communist Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. And obviously Hitler and the Nazis,” he said. “I mean you’re looking at fascism, you’re looking at communism. And to say that — what so blows me away is the timing of it. You could look in 1938 and say, ‘Look, it’s pretty dark here in Europe right now, but there’s something actually much darker. And that is Islam.’ ”
Emma Ashford, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said public statements by other members of Trump’s National Security Council indicate their views are not in alignment with Bannon’s, setting the stage for debate on the council.
“I think it’s very good that there is internal dissent on these issues — particularly when you look at how unorthodox, and frankly repulsive, some of these ideas that Bannon expresses are,” she said. “I think the fact that there’s opposition can only be a good thing.”
The White House did not answer questions from USA TODAY about Bannon's radio statements.
A native of Richmond, Va., Bannon served as an officer in the U.S. Navy after attending Virginia Tech.
Bannon’s military personnel file, obtained by USA TODAY, shows he was regularly promoted during his seven years of service. Senior officers wrote that Bannon had earned their “complete trust” and praised him for his “outstanding performance.” Bannon earned a master's degree in government from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard and worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs.
Despite that background, the radio shows featured frequent tirades against the “globalist elites” who he said encouraged policies that benefited the wealthy and powerful to the detriment of the working class.
“I’m the patron saint of commoners,” he said in one segment.

Immigration concerns
Bannon often spoke on his radio show about his concerns over immigration from Muslim-majority countries to Europe and the USA. Many of his concerns are rooted in his perception of cultural differences and sharia, or Islamic religious law.
“These are not Jeffersonian democrats,” he said of immigrants to Europe from Muslim majority countries in April of last year. “These are not people with thousands of years of democracy in their DNA coming up here.”
“I think that most people in the Middle East, at least 50%, believe in being sharia-compliant,” Bannon said in December 2015. “If you're sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you."
Susan Hennessey, a former lawyer for the National Security Agency, said Bannon appears to misunderstand the basic features of sharia and seems to use the term “sharia-compliant” as shorthand for observant Muslim.
“Listening to his words carefully, he is saying observant Muslims don’t belong in the U.S. and isn’t modifying that statement to be about immigrants,” she said. “Plenty of natural-born American citizens are observant Muslims. Those people are every bit as American as Steve Bannon is, and they have real reason to fear his role in the White House.”
On his radio shows, Bannon often provided figures about immigration from Muslim-majority nations that are either exaggerations of disputed numbers or lack basis in fact.
“And some of the statistics are, what, like up to 5-10% believe in radical — in radical jihad. I’m mean you’re talking literally — they said thousands, hundreds (of) thousands are coming in. Say the number is 3 million,” he said in April 2016. “You start to get some pretty big numbers. Particularly if half of these believe in sharia law or over 60%. Right? I mean the numbers are staggering.”
During a show in December 2015, Bannon told a guest he heard an additional 1 million Muslim immigrants would enter the USA in each of the next two years.
“If we didn’t hit the pause button today, is it already locked up that we’re going to be importing at least a couple of million Muslims whatever happens?” The guest agreed, “Absolutely.”
In truth, the Pew Research Center estimates the U.S. Muslim population is 3.3 millionand forecasts that it will double — over the next 36 years, not the next few years. About 100,000 Muslims arrived in the USA each of the past few years, Pew said.
‘We’re at war’
On Breitbart News Daily, Bannon’s words often centered on the idea of a global clash of civilizations.
“To be brutally frank, I mean Christianity is dying in Europe, and Islam is on the rise,” he said in an interview in January 2016 with a Breitbart reporter.
In November 2015, Bannon told his listeners it was time to have an “adult conversation” about national security.
“Some of these situations may get a little unpleasant,” Bannon said. “But you know what, we’re in a war. We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.”
Bannon often criticized elected officials and the media for failing to condemn Islam after terrorist attacks. After the Pulse nightclub attack in June 2016, he lashed out at the media and politicians for not casting blame on the religion and suggested they may be subservient to sharia, or Islamic religious law.
“The way the media is presenting this, it’s almost like they’re conforming to blasphemy law,” he said. “They will not criticize Islam, the president of the United States will not criticize Islam. Mrs. Clinton will not criticize Islam. Do you get a sense that the media in the West — and I mean in London and in the United States — is almost working under the precepts of sharia law right now?”
Concern about brewing conflict, he said, was a fundamental concept behind Bannon's media enterprise. “Our big belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we’re at war,” he said.
"It's war. It's war. Every day, we put up: America's at war, America's at war. We're at war,” he said in December 2015. “Note to self, beloved commander in chief: We're at war."
Contributing: John Kelly





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Wednesday, January 25, 2017

South Dakota

This blog entry is first to inform Alabamians about the anti-corruption story going on in South Dakota that is reported in the below Washington Post article, with a video from The Young Turks posted following the article, an email from the organization @RepresentDotUs appended reporting on national publicity resulting in the vote of the South Dakota legislature being delayed, and a further email reporting that, in a vote, the South Dakota Senate ran over SD voters.

@RepresentDotUs and other reform organizations are endeavoring to push out information about this South Dakota story as widely as possible in the public domain. I urge that @RepresentDotUs and the other organizations use tweeting banks as a tool for doing this. To understand the tweeting bank tool, see How should tweeting banks be used.


The Washington Post
South Dakota lawmakers are showing us that populism is a lie
A voter-approved ethics reform measure is about to be tossed aside.
By Patrick Lalley January 25 at 11:50 AM
Patrick Lalley is a South Dakota writer and journalist who has covered Upper Midwest politics for 25 years.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The working-class sincerity of President Trump and his band of Rust Belt revolutionaries will be decided over the coming months. In the meantime, there is a test case for ruling elites and 21st century populists alike here in South Dakota.
Once the bastion of prairie-style Democrats, such as George McGovern and Tom Daschle, this state is now as red as a lazy August sunset. South Dakotans backed Trump by 30 points in November. But they also passed a wide-ranging anti-corruption measure intended to limit the influence of campaign cash and interloping lobbyists.
The establishment is disturbed.
Now the South Dakota legislature has convened, intent on overturning the voter-approved law, officially known as Initiated Measure 22. They’re so concerned they want to invoke an “emergency clause” that would allow whatever is passed to go into effect immediately.
The emergency for South Dakota lawmakers is that voters just expressed deep concern about their ethics. Lawmakers suggest the measure that passed is unworkable, that voters didn’t know what they were doing. The response? Wipe it out.
That is, to put it kindly, tone deaf.
What exactly constitutes an emergency in South Dakota? We don’t have hurricanes here, though we have started naming our blizzards. But the emergency in the eyes of the legislature appears to be severe restrictions on free dinner and drinks. Well … that, and public financing for elections.
Initiated Measure 22 made four significant changes. It lowered limits on campaign contributions for legislative, county and statewide candidates and increased reporting requirements. It installed a two-year ban on lobbying and limited gifts to former state officials. It created a system of public financing of elections under which citizens could assign small amounts of money to candidates of their choosing. And it formed an ethics commission to oversee all this reform.
[How clean is your state government? In all but three states, not very.]
Immediately after the law passed, two lobbyists resigned from the state transportation commission, citing a conflict, and some lawmakers groused about losing all those goodies. South Dakota lawmakers make a paltry $6,000 a year plus some mileage reimbursement for their trouble, so gratis grub helps pass three months in Pierre, the nation’s second-smallest capital city.
The Republican governor and legislative leaders contend out-of-state interests, who took advantage of cheap media and general isolation, fooled the good people of the state with a poorly crafted measure.
Voters were “hoodwinked by scam artists,” said Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R). The law is clearly unconstitutional and needs to be repealed, state leaders said. Don’t worry; we’ll fix it, they said. Trust us.
But that’s kind of the point: Voters nationally and in South Dakota said they don’t trust the old crop of politicians. For evidence of that, just look at Trump.
South Dakota has a long history of allowing the people to write laws directly. It was the first state in the nation to adopt the initiative option during the height of the populist movement in 1898, as disaffected Midwest farmers fought back against real and perceived monopolies.
Drey Samuelson is one of the chief “scam artists” involved with IM-22. The Nebraska native served as former senator Tim Johnson’s (D) chief of staff for 28 years and co-founded TakeItBack.org, the group that pushed the measure locally with backing from a Massachusetts organization, Represent.us. Putting reforms such as IM-22 allows people to sidestep lobbyists and other influence in ways that would never happen in the South Dakota legislature, Samuelson said.
“The key is that powerful interests can control a legislature fairly easily, but it’s much harder, not impossible, to control the entire state,” he said.
Opponents of IM-22 in the legislature found a sympathetic ear in a circuit court judge, who put the entirety of the law on hold to allow the inevitable challenge to the state supreme court.
That hasn’t slowed the march in the legislature, however, where the phrase “repeal and replace” has found a comfortable home in a new context. This is where it’s instructive for the red-tie crowd in Washington: How far can lawmakers push back against the will of the people?
South Dakotans were influenced by a couple high-profile scandals involving the embezzlement of piles of cash by folks on the fringes of government, contractors who took advantage of a naive — at best — bureaucracy.
[Trump’s nominees are putting us all at risk by ignoring ethics laws]
The one persuasive rationale the Republican powers that be in Pierre have offered for tossing the whole thing out so urgently is that the state may, honestly, not be able to afford it. The public funding portion of the law is estimated to cost about $5 million annually, but could go up to as much as $12 million. That’s real money is a small state with fewer than 1 million people and no income tax.
A likely pot of money is education funding. “I believe it’s not responsible to use taxpayer money to fund political campaigns at the cost of education,” Daugaard said. “And I’m certain that the voters of this state did not support that.”
The script for repeal of the law seems set. The emergency clause requires a two-thirds vote, which the GOP majority in the statehouse can get just from its own members.
Still, beware the politician who pushes back too far against the will of the people, said Brad Tennant, a professor of history at Presentation College in Aberdeen, S.D.
Despite South Dakota’s rich history with voter-initiated laws, not that many of them have passed, said Tennant, who specializes in politics and history of the Northern Plains. So tinkering with one that actually succeeded is particularly dangerous for lawmakers.
“There are some concerns,” Tennant said, “but if you’re going to change it or replace it you had better give us something better that still reflects the desires the people had hoped for.”
South Dakota is a conservative state for sure, but the populist thread is long. The People’s Party National Convention was held in Sioux Falls in 1900, nominating famed populist William Jennings Bryan for the presidency.
The People’s Party was the product of that 19th century populist revolution.
Bryan lost in 1900, of course. He also lost in 1896 as a Democrat and in 1908, again as a Populist.
Trump did what Bryan never could: Bring what purports to be the people’s agenda to the White House. That same populist enthusiasm hasn’t reached the state capital in South Dakota, apparently.
“If it doesn’t work, that’s one thing,” said Samuelson, the former Johnson aide. “But to immediately repeal it when it hasn’t had a chance to work, that’s dangerous.”

The Young Turks video


Update 1/27/17
From: hq@represent.us
To: rdshatt@aol.com
Sent: 1/26/2017 9:27:10 P.M. Central Standard Time
Subj: BREAKING: We delayed repeal 
This is huge. Politicians in South Dakota were fast-tracking their plot to declare a fake "state of emergency" so they could gut the Anti-Corruption Act passed by voters.

Robert -
This is huge. Politicians in South Dakota were fast-tracking their plot to declare a fake "state of emergency" and gut the Anti-Corruption Act passed by voters.
But Represent.Us members spread the news about their plan so far and wide on social media, it provoked a wave of national attention and local outrage. South Dakota politicians were deluged with calls from angry voters and the story hit MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and more.
We created so much public outrage and national attention they delayed the repeal vote. Now, we've got just 5 days to make sure undermining the people is the worst political decision they'll ever make.
Our members are organizing to pack the Senate chambers. Will you chip in to help fund the trip for activists coming from across the state?
The new vote is Wednesday, February 1st. We need to raise $10,000 by Tuesday at Midnight to make this work. Here's the plan:
  • Offer transportation to students, elderly and others who can't make the trip on their own.
  • Spread the word with paid promotion on social media so Facebook's algorithm shows this event to every South Dakotan who's sick of establishment politicians thinking they can run roughshod over the people's government.
  • Hire a professional videographer to make sure this moment is captured and shared across the country.
Our campaign is working. These politicians don't like the scrutiny, and they don't like the media attention.
They're hoping that rescheduling this vote means we'll lose steam. That the media will go away so they can still gut the Anti-Corruption Act, but avoid a national outcry.
We need your help to show them that fundamental American values like accepting election results and respecting the will of the people will survive in America.
Will you make a donation to help fill the room on Wednesday and show politicians across the country that the voters won't stand for repealing the Anti-Corruption Act?
Thank you for joining us in this fight.
Josh Silver
Director
Represent.Us

Update 2/1/17
From: hq@represent.us
To: rdshatt@aol.com
Sent: 2/1/2017 6:15:07 P.M. Central Standard Time
Subj: BREAKING: Senate repeals Anti-Corruption Act



Robert:
After thousands of emails and calls from voters, protests outside the capital, and a standing-room-only crowd in the Capitol balcony chanting "Respect our vote!" the South Dakota Senate brazenly voted to overturn the election results anyway and repeal America's first statewide Anti-Corruption Act.
The repeal bill is on its way to Governor Dennis Daugaard's desk. Sign this petition to send an immediate email to Daugaard so he knows the whole nation is witnessing a U.S. Governor overturn the results of a free and fair election, undermining democracy in the process. https://act.represent.us/sign/veto-1069/?t=2&akid=12262.356697.oW8TcN

Together, we've used social media, phone calls, and newspaper ads to make repealing the Anti-Corruption Act a political nightmare for every politician involved — and they deserve it. South Dakota politicians are lying to voters to give themselves false political cover. It's appalling.
Sources tell us that the outgoing Governor is concerned about his legacy, and this kind of negative attention is exactly what he's trying to avoid.
We need to remind him, publicly, that a legacy of ignoring cronyism and corruption is unacceptable. That ignoring the will of the people comes with a heavy political price. Moments like these give us the opportunity to leverage the full power of our nationwide network behind a cause we all believe in. Let's use it.
We need to show the Governor that the whole country is watching. Attacking democracy won't be tolerated. Will you sign and share the petition demanding a veto?
Then call the governor: 605.773.3212
This is not normal. It's not ok. We will not stand for it. Our democracy is at stake - and it's up to us to defend it.
Dan's headshot Dan Krassner
Political Director
Represent.Us
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