Trump’s Second Week: A Turning Point in American Governance

 By Clarice Feldman

In his second week of his second term in office, President Trump has asserted the right of the Chief Executive to effectively manage the Executive Branch. He has blindsided -- even gelded -- his detractors in the media and Congress, and issued an astonishing array of executive orders which reveal how tax funds have been flowing out of the Treasury to the benefit of the Deep State and its friends without regard (and often even being inimical) to the national interest. So much has happened that I cannot cover it all, but I will try to hit briefly and in no particular order some of the most significant developments this week.

Gaza

Trump has proposed that Gazans be relocated to Jordan and Egypt so that Gaza can be rebuilt and Hamas’s presence removed. Jordan and Egypt have balked at that notion but the President, who notes how financially dependent on us they are, insists it will happen. Amjad Taha of the United Arab Emirates details how this project makes sense. It would allow Gaza to be rebuilt more quickly, it would allow Gazans exposure to “different educational systems, ones that don’t glorify death and antisemitism.” He details the cost of providing for them and the history of Palestinians fomenting wars in the area. Taha concludes:

The solution must be approached logically, not emotionally. It has nothing to do with Israel itself. If you examine the situation, Israel wouldn't take Gaza even for free under any condition; it just wants Gaza free of hostages and rocket launches targeting its schools and hospitals. The real question is whether all the corrupt Palestinian leaders genuinely want a state, or if they merely use the idea of statehood as a rhetorical tool to create obstacles, resist peace or normalization, and fill their pockets and bank accounts.

And per Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia are closer than ever to normalizing relations.

Bulldozers and heavy bombs which Israel had ordered and paid for and on which Biden held up delivery have been delivered at last.

California

The President tweeted that the U.S. military “turned on water flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest… The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER.” The claim was disputed, but it was true.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. 

Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning.

The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on social media that the U.S. military had “entered” California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” Trump also vowed during a visit to Los Angeles last week to “open up the valves and pumps” in California to deliver more water. 

According to federal data, the flow from Terminus Dam into the Kaweah River near Visalia increased from 57 cubic feet per second to more than 1,500 on Friday morning. The flow from Lake Success near Porterville into the Tule River increased from 105 cubic feet per second to 990.

The Army Corps of Engineers is “conducting controlled water releases” from the two dams, said Tyler Stalker, a spokesperson for the Corps in Sacramento. “The action is being coordinated with local officials. The releases are within the capacity of the downstream waterways.”

Responding to questions about the reasons for the sudden increase in water flow, Gene Pawlik, a spokesperson at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington, said in an email that the action was “consistent with the direction” in Trump’s recent executive order to enact “emergency measures to provide water resources” in California.

The feckless governor Gavin Newsom finally got around to directing state agencies to maximize storage of water from rivers to recharge groundwater and boost reservoirs.

As the President showed up Newsom in California, he also showed up the Biden FEMA operation in western North Carolina which had been stalled for months. Flood victims were quickly moved from hotel rooms and tents to furnished apartments, and Trump ordered all the roads and bridges, including private bridges, quickly restored.

The Military

8,950 active-duty servicemen and 5,727 reserve troops who were transgendered have been removed from service and in their stead 8,000 military personnel who had been removed because they refused the vaccine mandate have been welcomed to return with back pay.

Foreign Students

Much of the chaos, disruption, and antisemitic activities on college campuses which the prior administration ignored involved foreign students here on temporary visas. The administration has begun identifying them, revoking their visas, and repatriating them home.

Freeze on Spending

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is taking a scalpel to outlandish and often anti-American foreign-aid grants.     

[OMB] ordered a massive freeze on all federal aid programs outside of Social Security, Medicare and other assistance that goes directly to individuals. (Ed: $3 trillion worth of federal grants.) The freeze  is because the agencies were just churning them out without review.

The two-page memo, which is set to take effect on Tuesday night, could impact lower-income households that rely on Medicaid, school breakfast and lunch programs; Section 8 rental assistance, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, according to Roll Call.

The memo also noted that the OMB can grant exceptions to the order on a case-by-case basis. 

"The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve," the office wrote in the memo.

“Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities,” the memo continued. "This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements.”

The federal programs impacted will each be assigned a "senior political appointee to ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to Administrative priorities.” Reports from those individuals will be due Feb. 10.

The most outlandish grants now frozen were the billions of dollars spent on non-government agencies like Catholic Charities to bring in people from the Third World to swamp our communities, drive down employment and housing opportunities for poorer Americans, increase our tax burden, and jeopardize our safety. 

Scrutinizing the grants of the Biden regime, the new administration has come up with numerous other equally preposterous outflows, so absurd they can only be considered payoffs to friends and money laundering, Here are just a few:

In 2021, the Biden administration gave $540,000 to "Transgender Equity Consulting, Inc." This firm is comprised of "six black and Latinx transgender and nonbinary individuals" -- one of whom is apparently the "first BBW trans porn star." 

The Biden admin issued $850,000 in federal grants to a left-wing organization's "LGBTQI+ family support program," which some have characterized as promoting gender ideology for the children of military families.

The DOGE team has gained access to the U.S. Treasury's computerized payment records and will be able to conduct an audit of expenditures.

Foreign Aid

The funding of projects overseas is just as full of ridiculous, if not suspicious, grants. 
By way of example, when Biden approved $100 million to support “basic rights and freedoms” of Afghan women, $15 million was to be spent on distributing condoms there. I consider it unlikely that the money went anywhere else than into the pockets of the Taliban and leftist agencies, and the title of the grant was to hide the real recipients and purpose.

Coffeeandcovid Substack has a marvelous and lengthy review of some of this week’s actions, with an explanation of the reason and dynamics:

Chaos. Confusion. Epoch-making. What Trump has done was, until yesterday, unimaginable. When the Wall Street Journal called “the memo” “unexpected,” it was a masterpiece of understatement, kind of like describing the Hindenberg [sic] as an unscheduled travel delay.

It came in two parts (so far). Yesterday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unleashed a two-page memo upon the entire federal government. It was nothing less than a multi-trillion-dollar, whole-of-government spending freeze, excepting only a small handful of essential items like Medicare, emergency relief, payrolls, and Social Security. Like that, Trump shut down the government.

You can be sure that nothing like this has ever happened before. It has completely flipped the script. Instead of Trump trying vainly to wrestle control over a vast bureaucracy, now the bureaucrats must come to Trump for permission to do anything.

Overnight, Trump has managed to turn the vast, out-of-control federal bureaucracy into a command-and-control system.

After four years of a virtual meat puppet in the White House where unnamed assistants allowed the bureaucrats to run wild and toss around federal funds like confetti, this certainly must be a shock and awe moment.

Starting at 5pm today, all government financial assistance (excluding the aforementioned categories) must be temporarily frozen until further notice, after Trump Administration officials can “review” all government expenses to “determine the best uses of the funding.”

Until yesterday, nobody would have believed such a pause for review was even possible. It’s too big. Trump isn’t asking the bureaucracy to follow orders; he’s forcing them to come to him for permission to function at all. It is totally unprecedented, and it raises all kinds of questions about separation of powers between the President and Congress, but it also resonates on a common-sense level.

If the President is the nation’s chief executive, shouldn’t everything be centralized in his office? And if it got out of control, shouldn’t some President get it back under control?

This must be especially the case in the USAID, a hidden financier of the CIA that funds many things antithetical to our interests and which is likely on the Trump chopping block:

One of the biggest sources of funding for NGO’s -- especially foreign NGO’s -- is the State Department’s USAID, which many have long suspected was a CIA front for destabilization operations. According to the Kiev Post, USAID has distributed over $30 billion dollars to Ukrainian NGOs and contractors, a vast uncharted ocean of misspent money.

USAID is the deep state’s ATM.

Yesterday, the AP ran a story related to the financial freeze orders, headlined “US places dozens of senior aid officials on leave, citing possible resistance to Trump orders.”

According to the AP, 56 senior USAID personnel and “hundreds of contractors” were placed on immediate administrative leave yesterday, pending review, which is the closest thing to getting fired career bureaucrats get.

The dramatic USAID purge seems related to malicious compliance inside the agency. Someone leaked an internal USAID memo sent late yesterday, which quoted new acting administrator Jason Gray, who said he had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”

Boom.

We can quibble over precise definitions, but nobody can argue that USAID isn’t a core component of the Deep State, however you want to define that term. It’s ironic that Chuck Schumer has become the Deep State’s poster boy, since Trump is attacking the Deep State “six ways from Sunday.” He’s cut off their money -- the Deep State’s lifeblood -- and now he’s ruthlessly making examples of employees who defy legal instructions. And not just a few employees, either.

This is the long-awaited deep state showdown -- but on a scale nobody imagined. It’s like what we hoped would happen during Trump’s first term, except that it has been working out during its four-year hiatus and now it has roid rage.

If Trump succeeds in these agency purges, and gathers the money strings back under White House control, in one transparent database, then the deep state as we knew it is finished.

FBI and DoJ 

Actions of personnel in these and other agencies are being scrutinized, and by firing, placing on leave pending investigation of their work, requiring them to report to work, attrition (refusing new hires) and reassignment, the federal work force is being streamlined and malicious compliance (like removing the story of the Tuskegee airmen from military education in an effort to tar the administration) are being forcefully and rapidly dealt with. The scrutiny and actions involving the corrupted FBI and DoJ are noteworthy for their thoroughness. Aides to Elon Musk have been ensconced in the Office of Personnel Management working round the clock (even bringing mattresses with them so they can sleep in the office). They have locked the door to the computer facility and are checking who’s on the payroll, where, what are their jobs, and when they were put on the civil service rolls. (Attorneys recently hired as probationers in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. who were engaged to work on the now dropped J6 cases, were around election time transferred by Biden to permanent status. They are now out the door, the effort to burrow them in and hamper the operation of the new U.S. Attorney is over.)

Foreign Policy Achievements

Special envoy Richard Grenell flew to Venezuela and promptly returned with six Americans that Nicolás Maduro had been holding and a promise to accept those illegal entrants from his country who are being repatriated at Venezuela's cost. Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro, who said he wouldn’t accept illegal aliens we are repatriating, turned on a dime. Not only will he accept them, but he sent his own plane to pick up the first batch. Respecting countries we cannot rely on to keep repatriated criminals, the President has announced he will send these people to Guantanamo.

The Media and the Dems

The 51 former intelligence officials who misled the public about Hunter Bidens’ laptop likely being Russian disinformation (often in the same media which earlier pimped the lie that Russia was interfering in the 2016 election to aid Trump), have had their security clearances revoked and may not enter a secure federal facility without an escort who is responsible to assure that they see no classified information. In practical terms they are as up on current intel as your Aunt Agnes, which means fewer media appearances and even less influence and board of directors offers. Some legacy media have had their offices in the Pentagon cleared out in favor of new media.

So much, in fact, is going on that the Washington Post reports that Democrats are now more unpopular than the party has been in nearly two decades. They are leaderless and, as usual, spouting untruths in a vain attempt to stop what is happening. This week they largely misrepresented facts and gave speeches instead of questioning cabinet nominees, often looking particularly stupid, as in the case of Senator Maggie Hassan when she yelled at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that settled science might be wrong but we can’t question it because to do so would halt progress.

Propagandists Jim Acosta at CNN and Chuck Todd at NBC are out.

I anticipate judicial challenges and efforts to delay, but most of these changes, if not all, will remain largely undisturbed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/trump_s_second_week_a_turning_point_in_american_governance.html

How Socialism Works in America: Remembering Obama’s GM Boondoggle

 By William Sullivan

In 2009, the Obama administration bailed out General Motors (GM) with American taxpayer dollars, prompting Venezuela's socialist dictator Hugo Chavez to quip, “Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors.  Comrade Obama! Fidel [Castro], careful or we are going to end up to his right.”

The mainstream media buried this unflattering story to the best of their ability. 

What they did report breathlessly, however, was Obama’s assurance that he had “no interest” in nationalizing or “running GM.”

This was an example of media gaslighting the public before we began calling it that.  Many Americans knew what we were witnessing back then as well as Hugo Chavez, and that it was thinly-veiled socialism in action.

Obama was unquestionably lying about his government not having an interest in the production and sales directives of GM, and more on this in a moment.  But he was certainly uninterested in any of the company’s previous shareholders’ financial interest in GM.  

Unfortunately for those shareholders who owned millions of outstanding shares of GM before this government takeov… er, “restructuring,” all the nearly-worthless common and preferred stock was made immediately and totally worthless, and new GM stock was issued and largely purchased by the government with taxpayer dollars.

It was known as the “New GM,” or as critics called it, “Government Motors.”  Washington would own roughly 60-percent of this new government-funded automobile startup, Canada would own another 11 percent, and, adding insult to injury for stockholders, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union would own nearly 20 percent of the new company.  

This would be the same UAW that was arguably the greatest driver of the conditions leading to GM’s bankruptcy, which, in conjunction with the corrupt Democrat party machine in Detroit and Washington, negotiated insanely impractical wage, benefit, and pension contracts that crushed GM’s ability to be competitive against its non-unionized competition. 

According to Elon Musk, who knows a thing or two about the auto industry, the UAW “drove GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and lost 200,000 jobs for people they were supposed to protect … UAW destroyed the once-great US auto industry & everyone knows it.” [sic]

One of the most notorious of the UAW’s requirements for employers like GM was the necessity of a “jobs bank,” where the company is required to pay laid-off workers nearly full wages to do nothing at all.

One would be hard pressed to find a better analogy to portray the relationship between the professed ideas of socialist central planners and the real-world outcomes of those ideas.  

The idea was that the government requiring a company to pay former workers nearly full pay for doing nothing at all would reduce the number of layoffs.  In reality, such price controls and government regulation reduced efficiency and created an unquestionable loss of integrity in a free-market-driven business model that necessitates – you guessed it – increased government intervention to “save” it.

That’s how then-Vice President Joe Biden often characterized what happened to GM in the 2012 presidential campaign, anyway.  Crediting his boss, he routinely said, “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”

But what did the government actually do with the GM bailout, besides make a multi-billion-dollar terrible investment on taxpayers’ behalf to get a political win and a campaign slogan for Democrats?

Obama may not have ever run Government Motors by crunching the numbers or helping to drive productivity.  But he did hire Brian Deese, an almost-grad from Yale Law who had “never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the auto industry,” says the New York Times.  

Most would recognize that putting an almost-lawyer in charge of a car manufacturing company is an idea so stupid that it could only be the result of government involvement.  I’m reminded of the scene in the HBO series Chernobyl, where a nuclear physicist investigating the cause of the reactor explosion reminds a skeptical Soviet apparatchik that before he was the Deputy Secretary of Belarus, his real-world experience lay in working at a shoe factory.

“To the workers of the world,” he mirthfully says as he raises a small glass of vodka, after reminding her that everything’s fine, and that he’s the one in charge.

But Obama also assured the American people that the federal government wouldn’t be asserting its majority shareholder rights over the “New GM,” except in “the most fundamental of corporate decisions.”  He certainly seemed to have interests about the types of products that GM would make in the future, though.

Just prior to nationaliz… I mean, “restructuring” GM, he told the press at the signing of a Presidential Memorandum on Fuel Efficiency Standards, that “over the next five years, we expect fuel efficiency standards in cars and light trucks to reach an average of 35.5 miles per gallon.”  He would use the government to “have a single standard in place,” which would create a “clear incentive to develop more efficient vehicles.”

Only 11 cars manufactured at that time met that standard, and yet on that day, he signed a memorandum directing the EPA’s Lisa Jackson to invent new fuel efficiency standards for medium- and heavy-duty trucks along with the previously-prescribed government standards for cars and light trucks.

That certainly doesn’t sound like someone who was only interested in the “most fundamental of corporate decisions” to make GM a profitable company.  It sounds very much like someone with a political agenda to force production and distribution of a very specific product that the American public didn’t want, and who was interested in using the power of the federal government as a cudgel to force a desired political outcome, absent the consent of either producers or consumers.

In the end, shareholders of an estimated 556 million outstanding shares of GM stock lost all their investment in an iconic American company that, in 2007, had a share price of above $40 and a market capitalization of over $22 billion.  Bad for shareholders of GM.

Then, after Democratic politicians at both the federal and local levels, in conjunction with corrupt union leadership, had thoroughly gutted the company by making it as inefficient and uncompetitive as possible via price controls and various other protectionist schemes, the United States Treasury swooped in and cancelled all shares held by previous investors, and swiftly invested roughly $50 billion in taxpayer money (previously allocated TARP money, along with substantial debt) to fundamentally transform the industry into what the Obama and his apparatchiks imagined the automobile company of the future should be.

The end result?  Officially, the Treasury reports that the investment was a $11.2 billion loss for American taxpayers. Bad for all of us, I guess.

But it worked out well for GM workers, right?  

Not exactly.  The number of GM factory workers was reduced from 90K to roughly 69K, and production facilities reduced from 47 to 31. In addition, the labor union signed new employment contracts, lowering management wages by nearly half, from $78 to $45 (those are hourly wages, 15 years ago, mind you), bringing these labor costs into alignment with other U.S. based, non-union auto manufacturing plants, like Toyota, Edwin Feulner at the Heritage Foundation writes.

This brings us to the most vital point of all.  Toyota exists as free-market competition to GM, and its priority is to be competitive in the marketplace.  Toyota manufactures and distributes much of its product in the United States, and it should be noted that it did not require a federal bailout of $50B in taxpayer capital to remain on life support as it downsized its workforce and production as GM did.  And taxpayers didn’t suffer an $11.2B loss as a result of Toyota’s business practices, either.  

In 1975, market capitalization for Toyota was $5.1 billion.  GM’s market capitalization was more than twice that amount.  

By 1985, Toyota had overtaken GM by roughly $3 billion, with nearly $15.5 billion in market capitalization.

On May 29, 2009, GM was trading at $0.75.  This was the final day of trading before declaring bankruptcy and being appropria… ahem, “restructured” by the federal government.  Toyota, on that same day, was trading at over $45 a share with a market capitalization of over $70 billion.

Today, Toyota directly employs 136K Americans.  It is in our country’s best interest that business-minded people at Toyota have more power in the auto industry than Barack Obama and the corrupt UAW.

To be clear, this is not about Toyota, and this is certainly not a criticism of GM’s current management or its current employees.  This is simply a matter of history and practical observation about appropriate incentives in a free market.  

We should be creating incentives to make it attractive for domestic and foreign investors companies to produce and sell products in America, and to employ Americans as our collective success is cultivated.  And while I’m not crazy about Trump’s insistence that tariffs are some sort of magical economic panacea, Donald Trump does, at least, seem to understand this instinctively and conveys the message well.  

“My message to every business in the world is very simple,” he says.  “Come make your product in America and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth.”  

That, at least, is a very welcome signal for America’s future when compared to his predecessor, Comrade Obama.   

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/how_socialism_works_in_america_remembering_obama_s_gm_boondoggle.html

Target is sued for defrauding shareholders about DEI

 Target has been sued for allegedly concealing the risks of its diversity and social initiatives, leading to a backlash that caused customers to flee and the stock price of the Minneapolis-based retailer to plummet.

In a proposed class action on Friday, shareholders led by the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund in Florida said Target defrauded them into paying inflated prices for its stock and unknowingly supporting management's "misuse of investor funds to serve political and social goals."

The lawsuit said the retailer, CEO Brian Cornell and other officials failed to disclose the risk of consumer boycotts stemming from Target's Environmental, Social and Governance and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

It also said Target concealed backlash from its May 2023 Pride Month campaign, which led the retailer to remove some LGBTQ-themed merchandise after in-store confrontations led some employees to fear for their safety.

Target's share price fell 22% on Nov. 20, 2024, wiping out about $15.7 billion of market value, after it forecast disappointing profit and holiday sales.

Shareholders said Target's underperformance stood "in stark contrast" to results at rival Walmart, and reflected "continued backlash from its campaigns."

Target did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for comment.

The lawsuit in the Fort Myers, Florida federal court seeks damages for Target shareholders from Aug. 26, 2022 to Nov. 19, 2024.

It was filed after Target said on Jan. 24 it would end DEI initiatives this year, including a program to support Black-owned businesses that it adopted following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Target joined Walmart, Amazon.com and some other prominent companies to scale back such initiatives, which have been attacked by many conservatives including U.S. President Donald Trump.

The case is City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund v Target Corp et al, U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida, No. 25-00085.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/target-sued-defrauding-shareholders-dei-224901537.html

Rep. Mike Lawler calls for RICO probe as NY Dems plan election switch to thwart Trump agenda

 GOP Rep. Mike Lawler vowed Monday to request a federal racketeering probe against New York over Albany Democrats’ plot to keep an Empire State congressional seat open – and hobble the Republican majority.

Lawler joined a growing chorus of high-profile Republicans who condemned Dems for considering changing state election laws to keep the deep-red upstate District 21 seat held by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) open well after her expected resignation.

“I am going to be requesting that the Department of Justice open up a RICO investigation into New York State, because this is as corrupt a state as we have seen,” Lawler said.

3

Mild-mannered House Speaker Mike Johnson ripped Albany Democrats’ special election plans.AP

“Gov. Hochul and other top Democrats are willing accomplices in this delay scheme because they know the seat will be filled by another Republican. We will continue to hold these politicians accountable and challenge their corrupt plan so that hardworking families across Upstate New York and the North Country get the representation they deserve, and House Republicans can deliver on our America-First mandate.”

The rage is unusual from the usually mild-mannered Johnson, who holds a precarious position as a speaker with a razor-thin (218-215) and fractious House majority.

“It’s time for New Yorkers to fight back, to push back against the insanity and no matter how much the Democrats try to corrupt the system, no matter how much these folks who tell us that they want to protect and preserve democracy, in fact want to undermine it at every turn so they can keep power.”

Albany Dems met last week to mull changing the state’s election law to delay special elections — including potential pending races such as Stefanik’s — until the June primaries, or even November’s general election.

Stefanik is likely to become President Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and could resign within days.

3

Rep. Elise Stefanik is expected to step down to become Trump’s UN ambassador.ZUMAPRESS.com

A delay in filling her seat would leave Republicans with an even slimmer majority and more opportunities for rambunctious representatives to play havoc with Trump’s nascent agenda.

Stefanik’s conservative upstate district is all but certain to elect another Republican in a special election if and when she steps down.

The current law calls for Gov. Kathy Hochul to declare a special election within 10 days of Stefanik’s resignation.

The special election itself must take place 80 to 90 days after that declaration.

Democrats themselves recently benefited from the short election timetable after lying GOP Rep. George Santos was expelled from his Long Island and Queens seat.

Veteran pol Tom Suozzi, who previously held the seat, prevailed over Republican Mazi Pilip in a special election last February, flipping the district back to the Dems.

The Dems’ talks of changing the election law enraged Republicans beyond Lawler.

The usually mild-mannered House Speaker Mike Johnson, who presides with a razor-thin (218-215) and fractious House majority, pledged to “challenge” the plot in a blistering statement exclusively obtained by The Post.

“Instead of working to address high costs, taxes, or fees, the illegal immigration crisis, crime, antisemitism on college campuses, or other priorities — New York Democrats are instead working feverishly to silence the voices and needs of more than 750,000 citizens in New York’s 21st Congressional District,” Johnson seethed. “In an open display of political corruption, they are aiming to change the election rules to add a long delay in filling the NY-21 seat.

“Gov. Hochul and other top Democrats are willing accomplices in this delay scheme because they know the seat will be filled by another Republican. We will continue to hold these politicians accountable and challenge their corrupt plan so that hardworking families across Upstate New York and the North Country get the representation they deserve, and House Republicans can deliver on our America-First mandate.”

3

Gov. Kathy Hochul contended that changing special election rules in New York would increase voter turnout.Andrew Schwartz / SplashNews.com

Hochul, when quizzed Monday by reporters on her fellow Democrats’ plans, said she’ll look at what Albany Dems hatch.

She noted that she was elected to Congress in a 2011 special election, and argued that more needed to be done to increase voter turnout in such contests.

“You can always count on one thing, and that is Republicans will scream loudly if there’s ever an effort to bring voter access to more people,” she said. “They just don’t like it.”

Hochul said some states keep congressional seats open for 669 days. She said the Empire State’s compact timeline “doesn’t make sense either.”

“What a very short timeframe does is it favors people who are already elected officials versus a citizen who wants to run, because there’s a lot involved in this,” she said.

While a special election to fill the expected vacancy of Stefanik from her north country seat is the more high-profile race in the mix, Democrats are also eyeing an expected vacancy for state Senator Simcha Felder’s (D-Brooklyn) district.

Felder is the last serving member of the now-defunct Independent Democratic Conference, a group of Dems who caucused with Republicans until 2018.

The seat presents a pickup opportunity for Republicans, but it would be harder for the GOP to win if the special election coincides with a citywide Democratic primary.

Lawler called on Albany Democrats to buck any bill that might arise.

“The 150 members of the Assembly, 63 members of the Senate, my Democratic colleagues that are in the majority need to grow a spine and push back against the absurdity of their leadership trying to seize control from the people,” he said. “Let the voters decide who they want to represent them.”

https://nypost.com/2025/02/03/us-news/speaker-mike-johnson-issues-warning-to-ny-dems-plotting-to-keep-house-seat-vacant-and-slow-trump-agenda-corrupt-plan/