WEDNESDAY 9/25/23

Trump Organization Committed Fraud -- New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled that Donald J. Trump and his Trump Organization committed fraud by inflating his net worth in business transactions, and has ordered cancellation of Trump business certificates, making the burden of proof much easier for the state's attorney general in a $250 million civil lawsuit (The Washington Post). The ruling also imposes sanctions on attorneys representing Trump, two of his adult children, two other company executives and the business for repeating failed arguments the judge called "borderline frivolous."

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Is Trump Winning the Shutdown Showdown?

Republican hard-liners almost certainly will shut down the federal government after midnight Friday because Donald J. Trump called for it on his Truth Social media network last week. Can Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) coalesce a sufficient number of moderate Republicans and Democrats to pass a continuing resolution kicking the can down to December before he loses his gavel to a motion to vacate?

That mouthful seems unlikely, with all the inter-party in-fighting going on. New York magazine’s Intelligencer chalks this up to Trump’s taste for chaos – political and otherwise – and his identifying with those five or 10 hardliners who remain upset by McCarthy’s debt-limit deal with President Biden earlier this year. But really, the impetus for the coming shutdown is far greater than Trump’s taste for chaos or “empathy” with his loyal hardliners. 

To justify his call for a shutdown, Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press a week ago; “We have $35 trillion in debt. We have to save our country.”

Trump was rounding up from $32.99 trillion, $7 trillion of which was added during his administration (according to these numbers, reported by Newsweek the Biden administration has contributed about $6- to $6.1 trillion of that, so far). 

This is the latest chapter in Trump’s ongoing coup attempt. Biden will blame the shutdown and the short-term chaos it causes when certain checks do not get mailed. But the longer the government remains closed the deeper the economic chaos goes into the 2024 presidential campaign, and as we all know, the current president ultimately owns the state of the U.S. economy.

According to Intelligencer the “vast majority” of House Republicans want deep budget cuts, “draconian” immigration rules and to cut off assistance to Ukraine, all “decisively unacceptable” to most Democratic senators and some Republican senators. Most Republican senators and at least a significant number of Republicans in the House also support continuing aid to Ukraine.

“I think all of you know I’m not a fan of government shutdowns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters last week (per USA Today). "I’ve seen a few of them over the years, they never have produced a policy change and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans, politically,” he told reporters.

But McConnell has never seen a government shutdown led by a four-times indicted former president. 

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Up on the Hill -- Monday is Yom Kippur. Both the House and Senate are scheduled to be in session Tuesday through Friday, but you can bet on them putting in long hours on Saturday.

--Todd Lassa