The Week Ahead

January 26, 2025

I’m not sorry.

I’m not sorry I supported Kamala Harris, a leader with courage and strength and integrity.

I’m not sorry I supported a vision of an America that was committed to fairness and justice, an America that was true to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of a country grounded in the rule of law. That vision is still worth striving towards. We cannot give up. We must move forward.

As we start the week ahead, the thought that guides me is this: Donald Trump may be our president, but we don’t have to accept his dark, transactional, self-serving view of America and who we are.

Over the weekend, Trump placed Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes in VIP seating at a public presidential event. Rhodes is newly released from federal prison, where he was serving his 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other January 6-related crimes before Trump commuted his sentence.

Let’s not make any pretense about what’s going on here. At a minimum, Trump is normalizing what happened on January 6, giving the presidential seal of approval to that horrific day. Beyond that lies the possibility, which it would be irresponsible to ignore, that Trump exchanged pardons for loyalty, gathering his pool of supporters to be deployed at a time of need. That is not to get ahead of ourselves with wild speculation. But releasing the mob from prison means we need to confront this possibility with seriousness. And it sets the tone for how we evaluate other actions Trump takes. Enough bothesidesism and bending over backwards to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. It’s important to evaluate Trump’s ongoing efforts to accumulate and centralize power in his hands against the possibility of an anti-democratic imperial presidency.

It’s worth remembering in this context that both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have had flattering things to say about Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, who has cloaked that country’s erosion of democratic values with the law, for instance, amending media laws to make efforts to restrict the press lawful. Trump claimed he had a mandate to reform after winning what turned out to be a very close election. He may have a mandate to bring down the price of eggs and gasoline, but he is far from having one to erode fundamental rights and democracy itself.

Confirmation Hearings

The new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, is on the wagon, or at least hopefully so, since he said he would stop drinking if confirmed, which happened Friday evening. This coming week, Robert Kennedy Jr. gets his hearing on Wednesday to head Health and Human Services. Kash Patel’s hearing to head the FBI is also slated for Thursday. Neither is qualified for the position they have been nominated to serve in, lacking both the experience and the judgment to take on the role.

A lot has already been written about Patel’s notorious revenge list. Then, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats tweeted a video Patel had shared that showed him using a chainsaw to cut off the heads of Democratic leaders, including members of Congress, and to slice through media outlets.

Patel will, perhaps, say it was just a joke. If it was, it’s one that is disqualifying.

Trump Tries to Fire Inspectors General

Trump continues to make moves towards an imperial presidency. Over the weekend, he fired at least 17 inspectors general. The IGs are charged with investigating fraud, waste, and corruption in federal executive branch agencies. The Friday night email from the head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel advised IGs at the departments of State, Energy, the Interior, Defense, Transportation, and others that their positions were being “terminated” immediately due to “changing priorities.”

Trump claimed in a chat with reporters aboard Air Force One that replacing IGs is a normal thing to do, but that’s not the case.

This may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t. By law, the president can only remove Senate-confirmed IGs after providing Congress with notice 30 days in advance of firing and advising them of the reasons for it. Trump ignored the law. The question now is, will anything be done about it? Over the weekend, there was a strong suggestion that at least some of the IGs would show up to work on Monday. Mike Ware, the chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), wrote to the White House to say so.

We’ll pay close attention to the face-off between Trump and the IGs this week, because ultimately, this is about more than the IG positions themselves. It’s about whether Trump will get away with open and early defiance of the law. Congress should act immediately to back up the IGs. There is a recently formed bipartisan Inspector General Caucus in the Senate. If they really intend to support the IG’s independence and, not coincidentally, the rule of law, the time is now.

Firing the IGs was in Project 2025. But it could have been done lawfully, with notice. Instead, Trump is testing how far he can go without drawing an objection. After all, he was able to get Pete Hegseth confirmed to lead the Department of Defense. From his perspective, why not keep pushing? This is a week to pay attention to efforts to errode democracy.

North Carolina

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument Monday in the case we discussed here involving who won a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. The Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who lost the race, challenges the Democratic incumbent, Justice Allison Riggs, who won. He claims, baselessly, that 60,000 ballots should be invalidated because of fraud. His arguments seek to breathe new life into the sorts of challenges we discussed ahead of the 2024 election involving overseas voters and voters whose registrations were contested.

Previously, Trump-appointed federal district court Judge Richard Myers kicked the case back to the state supreme court for a decision. The Fourth Circuit will hear an appeal from that decision; at stake is whether the election challenge will be decided in federal court or in state court.

The reason there is so much heat over the question of which court will decide the outcome of the election has to do with the politicized nature of North Carolina’s Supreme Court. Supreme Court justices run in partisan elections where they are designated R or D according to the party they belong to. The court currently has five Republicans and two Democrats on it, stoking Griffin’s belief that they will rule in his favor despite the weakness of his argument.

It’s hard to believe we’re only one week into this administration.

We’re in this together,

Joyce