Focusing on the Trump presidency, while I support various of the administration’s stated priorities and actions, such as securing our borders and curbing the growth in federal spending, I do not support many other actions. These are just some:

• Attacking federal courts. The administration is trying to remove any opposition to its initiatives, whether it be inside the administration (removal of independent thinkers as well as inspectors general and whistleblower offices), Congress, state and local governments, universities, law firms, and on. The only effective check and balance on its many unconstitutional and illegal actions is our federal courts, where around 150 lawsuits have been filed to date, federal judges have ordered the administration to stop in around 40, and decisions are pending in others. (Here is a litigation tracker.) The administration’s response has been to skirt if not violate those orders and to attack the courts and judges. This undermines the very foundation of our system of checks and balances and cannot be accepted.

• Crippling federal government. The Musk DOGE effort is trying to cripple if not outright destroy whole swaths of the federal government, especially in core non-defense programs which are critical to our overall efforts in the world or on which hundreds of millions of citizens depend for life essentials. Just some examples are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, natural resource protection, veterans benefits and foreign assistance. These are explained away as attacks on waste, fraud and abuse, and I’m all in on attacking waste, fraud and abuse and reviewing the overall size and cost of our federal government. But there’s a big difference between improving our federal government and destroying it, and this is the latter. 

• Worsening everyday American concerns. Lost in all of this confusion and chaos are the day-to-day concerns Americans care most about: the economy, jobs, cost of living, health care, housing, crime, financial security, retirement. The administration is not addressing those issues; in fact its actions, such as tariffs and trade wars with the rest of the world, disruption of our own financial markets and supply chains, and slashing the Social Security Administration, are leading us back to inflation and rising costs, undermining our personal foundations and worsening our lives.  

• Deserting our friends and allies. The administration is not only walking away from our engagement with the world, which has lifted billions out of poverty, led to economic prosperity and kept the peace over three generations; it is actively deserting our friends and allies and emboldening our adversaries. Nowhere is this more dangerous than Ukraine, which the administration is trying to pummel into a destructive “peace” with Russia which would make the world far less safe. But the administration is inexplicably alienating other friends and allies such as Europe, Canada and Japan. As I said in a recent speech to the full House here, the happiest person in the world at this radical turn in our foreign policy is not the President of Russia (he’s the second happiest) but the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. 

• Accelerating our federal budget crisis. The administration is pretending to care about the dangerous deterioration in our nation’s budget and finances, where our overall national debt, debt as a percentage of our national economy and annual interest payments on our debt are at or heading to their highest levels ever. Yet the tax package the administration and the current Congressional majority is pursuing, aside from giving a huge tax break to those who are benefiting the most from our society at the expense of most Americans, would actually worsen our federal budget by trillions of dollars over the next years.