Corruption Watch: Trump Firing More Experts, SCOTUS Threatening Democracy, We the People Demanding No Kings, and More

“Big money interests are grifting their way to the top,” Tiffany Muller tells MeidasTouch.

Just chaos. The Trump administration fired roughly 1,300 Center for Disease Control employees last weekend. Then, when it became clear their expertise was urgently needed, about half of them were reinstated. Many of those fired and then not rehired were from an agency that works to prevent and mitigate pandemics. During Trump’s second term, there have also been firings at health and science agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, National Institute of Health, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. “It suggests that there’s managerial incompetence at play,” Dr. Nirav Shah, former principal deputy director of the CDC, told PBS of the recent firings. That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.

MAGA Mike Looks AWFUL as his ENTIRE WORLD is COLLAPSING, says MeidasTouch. Host Ben Meiselas interviewed Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, about how the root cause of the current federal government shutdown that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is overseeing is “all about rewarding their big corporate donors, their big megadonors, the billionaires in the largest tax break in American history.” Here you can listen to Meiselas and Muller discuss how “the big money interests are grifting their way to the top.”

Here comes the next Citizens United decision. For Rolling Stone, David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher describe how the Supreme Court is poised to obliterate campaign contribution limits–one of the last remaining campaign finance guardrails since its truly horrendous 2010 Citizens United decision. As the authors write, “On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Roberts Supreme Court, one point of consensus persists: Most Americans believe money corrupts the political process — and they want to overturn the Citizens United precedent that empowers oligarchs to buy elections. And yet, in two little-noticed cases — including one spearheaded by Vice President J.D. Vance — the high court could soon do the opposite, eliminating the last restrictions on campaign donations and obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to halt bribery.” Much more on this case to come from Democracy News.

But SCOTUS won’t stop there. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case over gerrymandering in Louisiana that hinges on whether lawmakers can use race as a factor when drawing district maps. For decades, since The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed minority representation, race has been a crucial factor in whether electoral maps are approved and upheld. Court observers, such as Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog, noted that the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority seemed prepared to weaken The Voting Rights Act by limiting how lawmakers can consider race when drawing districts. It’s difficult to overstate the potential consequences, for white supremacy’s re-entrenchment in the U.S. most critically, and also for Democrats in upcoming elections.

About that white supremacy. The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is considering remaking the refugee system to prefer white people. There is nothing subtle about this.

Meanwhile, there’s no cop on the beat. In The Guardian, Ellen Weintraub, former chair of the Federal Election Commission (since Trump fired her days after taking office) and current fellow at End Citizen United, writes about how the watchdog agency being without a quorum fits into a larger pattern of attacks on our electoral system. Weintraub explains, “American democracy may be under attack, but billionaire mega-donors are fully engaged in protecting their own interests. And as we head into what will undoubtedly be another multibillion-dollar election year, the agency charged with regulating money in politics is missing in action.”

Speaking of experts that Trump fired. Alavro Bedoya, former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), describes in The New Republic how his time at the FTC changed his thinking about money in politics: “I used to think that the defining fight for our country was between the left and the right. Now, I am much more worried about the money at the top crushing everyone underneath. That sounds grim because it is. But I also think this perspective can unite our country in a way that feels almost impossible today.” If you’re wondering what we can do to fight the oligarchy, this one is worth the read.

Get out and be with your people. Across the country, 2,500 No Kings protests are scheduled for this Saturday, October 18th. Being together in real life is good for morale. Our neighbors will be marching for a pretty simple idea: “The president thinks his rule is absolute. But in America, we don’t have kings and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty… No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.”