1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

Please read this Talking Points Memo by David Kurtz. If an outside group is taking over the power if Congress, that’s a coup. Full stop. Republucans must wake up NOW and defend the Constitution. “A Purge By Another Name Is Still A Purge As we come to the end of the third century week of the second Trump presidency, I want to highlight a failure of language that is subverting the coverage of the lawlessness. It’s so pervasive that you may not have noticed it, and it may already have creeped into the conceptual framework you’re building in your own mind to help explain what is happening in Trump II. It’s about the purges of civil service employees throughout the federal government. There is really no such thing as unilateral mass “firings” or “layoffs” in the federal government, and yet most of the coverage headlines Trump’s purges using exactly those words. Unilateral is the key there. Congress can pass laws to cut funding, to eliminate positions, to zero out programs, but it hasn’t. The president is doing this on his own in contravention of the laws Congress has already passed to fund these positions and to give them civil service protections. Calling them “firings” or “layoffs” when Congress hasn’t voted on them in any way shape or form isn’t just imprecise; it concedes way too much. It bestows a powerfulness and a decisiveness on Trump that he neither has nor deserves. It gives the purges a conclusory gloss of lawfulness when the lawlessness is the whole point.”-David Kurtz, TPM, Feb 7, 2025