Letters from an American - May 22, 2025

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

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May 22, 2025. Just before seven o'clock this morning, the House of Representatives passed the Republicans' mega bill by a vote of 215 to 214. All Democrats voted no. Two Republicans, Thomas Massey of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, joined the Democrats in voting no. Chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Andy Harris of Maryland, voted present. The measure now advances to the Senate.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the bill cuts at least $715 billion in health care spending, mostly from Medicaid, and $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, causing more than 2.7 million American households to lose benefits. Because the massive debt increase in the measure triggers a 2010 law requiring offsets, it will cut Medicare, as well, by an estimated $500 billion. Economist Robert Reich points out that Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 will lose about $700 a year. On average, Americans with incomes of less than $17,000 will lose more than $1,000 a year.

But if you're among the top 0.1% of earners, you're in luck. You'll gain nearly $390,000 a year. The measure roughly doubles the current annual budgets of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in what Erin Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes is the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States. It increases ICE's detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September

2029, a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis that would permit ICE to detain at least a hundred thousand people at a time. It increases ICE's budget for transportation and removal operations by 500% from the current 721 million dollars to 14.4 billion dollars. It also calls for 4646.5 billion for construction of barriers at the border, including completing 701 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and 629 miles of secondary barriers and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers. This bill highlights a truism. In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth

among the very richest people. By driving white fear of a darker skinned other, elite Southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement. In an extraordinary meeting with South African President Cecil Remaposa at the Oval Office yesterday, President Donald J. Trump echoed the language of enslavers

in 1859 almost explicitly when he insisted, falsely, that white South Africans are facing white genocide. As Tim Cox and Nellie Payton of Reuters explain, the conspiracy theory of white genocide in South Africa has circulated among fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It claims white deaths in a country with a high murder rate are deliberate ethnic cleansing, although data collected by white farmers themselves shows that since 1990, murders of white people make up only 1% of the total number of murders. But Trump sidekick Elon Musk has embraced the theory and Trump is pushing it, offering

a fast-track asylum to white South African refugees. Yesterday, with Musk in the Oval Office, Trump showed to the cameras a picture of people moving body bags and said, these are all white farmers that are being buried. In fact, it was a picture from Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo showing humanitarian workers burying bodies in a war zone. The administration's immigration policies exacerbate racism, using it to undermine the rule of law on which the Constitution rests. Notably, the administration has ignored the concept of due process guaranteed by the

Constitution, with rendition of migrants to prison in El Salvador based not on a review of their cases, but simply on the claim, without evidence, that individuals are gang members. Stories of immigrants arrested by ICE without any criminal history continue to surface, even as administration officials insist those individuals are dangerous criminals. Fewer than half of those swept up outside of Nashville last week had criminal records, although US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Trisha McLaughlin,

called them violent criminal illegal aliens and attacked Nashville's Democratic Mayor, Freddie O'Connell, as being pro-open borders. Yesterday, Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that the administration unquestionably violated a court order when it rendered eight men convicted of violent crimes to South Sudan. The court had ordered the administration to give the men due process before taking them to a country other than their own. McLaughlin called the judge's ruling deranged. Taking down the rule of

law would permit MAGA officials to persecute their political opponents, indicting congressional representatives, for example, as it has recently done to Representative LaMonica MacGyver, a Democrat of New Jersey. It would also permit the concentration of wealth and power without fear of breaking the law. There is the open corruption, as when the Trump administration officially accepted a 747 as a gift from the Qatari government yesterday, despite the constitutional prohibition against taking gifts from foreign

governments. Trump currently says he will not use it after he leaves office. But since Air Force officials say it will take years and up to a billion dollars in taxpayer money to secure it for use by a president, it seems unlikely that he accepted the plane simply to become an exhibit in an as yet unstarted Trump presidential library. And then there's the more hidden corruption.

Last week, David Yoffie Bellamy and Eric Lipton of the New York Times called attention to the announcement by a struggling technology company with ties to China that it had secured funding to buy $300 million of Trump's cryptocurrency, dollar sign Trump. It appears the company is hoping to curry favor with the president. Zach Everson of Forbes noted that the Trump family

controls about 60% of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform that produces the USD-1 stablecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency that fluctuates less than most cryptocurrencies because it's pegged to the dollar. World Liberty Financial's USD-1 stablecoin began trading yesterday on KuCoin, an exchange headquartered in the Seychelles and banned in the United States after it admitted to violating laws against money laundering and agreed to pay a $300 million fine. A spokesperson for KuCoin told Everson that it had reached out about carrying USD1 after

the coin demonstrated strong demand in certain regions. The racism and the corruption are coming together tonight as the top 220 holders of the dollar sign Trump coin join the president at a private dinner. A Bloomberg analysis of the top 25 wallets shows that 19 are owned by individuals from outside the United States, and many of the winners are companies looking for access to the president. Many of them dumped their dollar-signed Trump coins as soon as they made the cut for the dinner. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

reported today that 50 of the people attending Trump's dinner tonight hold crypto assets with names from the alt-right, including Pepe the Frog and Swastikas, or that have names that are racist or anti-Semitic, including the N-word and, F*** the Jews. Their language echoes that of the elite enslavers of the 1850s,

and for that matter, the Ku Klux Klan members of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s, and the segregationists of the years after World War II. And, just like the elite enslavers in the 1850s, MAGA leaders want to get rid of laws that make it harder for them to monopolize the nation's wealth and power, and are using racism to get voters to support them.

Also like their predecessors, MAGA leaders are getting a significant boost from the United States Supreme Court. In a decision made today on the so-called shadow docket, the emergency docket in which the court makes decisions without arguments or briefs, and which previously wasn't used for major rulings, the court made clear it is willing to abandon the idea of independent agencies. Since 1935, the court has upheld Congress's right

to appoint the heads of independent agencies and has said that the president cannot fire them without cause. Today, in an unsigned two-page order, the court paused orders by federal judges, allowing board members at two independent agencies to stay, even after Trump tried to fire them. This is an extraordinary step toward the idea

of the unitary executive, a theory Republicans began to embrace in the 1980s, that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional. Although in fact, presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight. It gives Trump control over the independent agencies that currently run much of the government. Agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board,

both part of this case, and also the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on. The six justices who handed down today's order tried to say that the Federal Reserve Board is different from the other agencies because it has a distinct historical tradition. So Trump can't just fire its head, Jerome Powell. Trump has made it clear he wants to fire Powell, but that removal would make financial markets even more precarious than they already are.

The dissent, written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Katanji Brown-Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, notes that the majority's order is nothing short of extraordinary and favors the president over our precedent. The court has abandoned 90 years of precedent under the emergency docket and misrepresents the case as one about the interests of two employees in keeping their job. In fact, the liberal justices say, the interest at stake is in maintaining Congress's idea of independent agencies, bodies of specialists balanced along partisan lines, which will make sound judgments precisely because not

fully controlled by the White House. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.