For two weeks now, the majority leadership in the new Congress and the incoming Trump administration have been conducting a war on ethics. This has ranged from the effort to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics to the Senate’s rush to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees before their financial conflicts disclosures were complete to Trump’s own inadequate plan to address his ethical problems.
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How does the Trump plan fall short? The president-elect asserted that the conflicts laws don’t apply to him but ignored the most fundamental one of all: the constitutional rule that presidents may not accept cash and other benefits — “emoluments” — from foreign governments.
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For speaking up about the shortcomings of this plan, Shaub found himself in the Republican crosshairs. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that has jurisdiction over the White House, demanded Shaub appear for a Star Chamber-style recorded inquisition and implicitly threatened to shut down the Office of Government Ethics if Shaub did not submit. Chaffetz ought to have been doing the exact opposite, supporting OGE and demanding documents from Trump about any financial ties to Russia or other foreign governments.

Then, just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. The incoming White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, went on national television to threaten Shaub. In a scene like something out of a gangster B-movie, Priebus warned the director that “he ought to be careful ” and gave his blessing to Chaffetz’s interrogation. Priebus’s glare of menace was unmistakable. The only thing he left out was cracking his knuckles.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/just-when-you-thought-the-trump-ethics-disaster-couldnt-get-worse-it-did/2017/01/16/001db550-dc04-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.53851b03db1c&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

On Election Day, the most-searched issue on Google was abortion. According to the Washington Post, searches for “Trump on abortion” rose by more than 4,000 percent in the late afternoon of November 8. Perhaps these searchers were unclear on the position of the candidate who in his pre-political life had supported Planned Parenthood but during the campaign suggested that women should be punished for having illegal abortions and in the final debate talked about abortion providers who “rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.” Or perhaps the frantic last-minute searching was a manifestation of collective anxiety about what would become an early flash point in the Trump administration—and a first test of whether much of the social progress of the past 40 years can be undone over the next four.

Any wishful thinking that President-elect Donald Trump might have just been pandering to Evangelical voters with his anti-choice rhetoric during the campaign seems downright fanciful at this point. He has since surrounded himself with—and appointed to power — ferocious opponents of both abortion rights and contraceptive access, starting with his vice-president, Mike Pence, who passed some of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws as governor of Indiana and, in Congress, co-sponsored so-called personhood legislation that defines life as beginning at conception and would thus make several forms of birth control illegal. Tom Price, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has supported a nationwide ban on abortion after 20 weeks and is a proponent of so-called conscience clauses that would permit doctors and insurance companies to refuse to provide health-care services they don’t personally believe in. Trump’s attorney-general pick, Jeff Sessions, has voted to ban Health and Human Services grants to organizations that perform abortions and against a bill to reduce teen pregnancy through sex education and contraceptive access. Katy Talento, recently chosen by Trump as a health-care policy adviser, has written (falsely) that hormonal contraception causes miscarriage, cancer, and infertility, and called the idea of making birth control available over the counter tantamount to putting “dangerous, carcinogenic chemicals in the candy aisle at CVS.”


In September, Trump himself wrote a letter to supporters promising that if elected, he would sign a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks, defund Planned Parenthood, make permanent the Hyde Amendment — the legislative rider that prevents Americans from using federal insurance programs like Medicaid to pay for abortions — and nominate “pro-life justices” to the Supreme Court. With one Supreme Court seat maddeningly open and three sitting justices over the age of 78, this last promise could have a long-lasting impact: It would take only two appointments to get to a Court that would likely overturn Roe v. Wade.

It’s difficult for many on the left to even wrap their heads around this possibility, which is at such sharp odds with how the country regards the rights of women to control their own reproductive systems. Poll after poll confirms that the vast majority of Americans continue to support legal abortion. A Pew study released the first week in January showed support for Roe at a rec­ord high of 69 percent, while a Quinnipiac survey conducted after the election put the percentage of respondents who believe abortion should be available in all circumstances at more than double the number who think it should not be legal in any circumstance. When it comes to contraception, the numbers are even more firmly on the side of reproductive freedom: Gallup found last year that 89 percent of Americans believe that birth control is “morally acceptable,” a higher percentage than believe the same about divorce, premarital sex, or gambling. And Planned Parenthood, one of the country’s largest providers of women’s health care, remains a pretty beloved organization; this summer, an NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll found its popularity to be 19 points higher than Donald Trump’s and 20 points higher than the Republican Party’s.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/reproductive-rights-abortion-access-in-america.html

On Election Day, the most-searched issue on Google was abortion. According to the Washington Post, searches for “Trump on abortion” rose by more than 4,000 percent in the late afternoon of November 8. Perhaps these searchers were unclear on the position of the candidate who in his pre-political life had supported Planned Parenthood but during the campaign suggested that women should be punished for having illegal abortions and in the final debate talked about abortion providers who “rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.” Or perhaps the frantic last-minute searching was a manifestation of collective anxiety about what would become an early flash point in the Trump administration—and a first test of whether much of the social progress of the past 40 years can be undone over the next four.

Any wishful thinking that President-elect Donald Trump might have just been pandering to Evangelical voters with his anti-choice rhetoric during the campaign seems downright fanciful at this point. He has since surrounded himself with—and appointed to power — ferocious opponents of both abortion rights and contraceptive access, starting with his vice-president, Mike Pence, who passed some of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws as governor of Indiana and, in Congress, co-sponsored so-called personhood legislation that defines life as beginning at conception and would thus make several forms of birth control illegal. Tom Price, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has supported a nationwide ban on abortion after 20 weeks and is a proponent of so-called conscience clauses that would permit doctors and insurance companies to refuse to provide health-care services they don’t personally believe in. Trump’s attorney-general pick, Jeff Sessions, has voted to ban Health and Human Services grants to organizations that perform abortions and against a bill to reduce teen pregnancy through sex education and contraceptive access. Katy Talento, recently chosen by Trump as a health-care policy adviser, has written (falsely) that hormonal contraception causes miscarriage, cancer, and infertility, and called the idea of making birth control available over the counter tantamount to putting “dangerous, carcinogenic chemicals in the candy aisle at CVS.”


In September, Trump himself wrote a letter to supporters promising that if elected, he would sign a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks, defund Planned Parenthood, make permanent the Hyde Amendment — the legislative rider that prevents Americans from using federal insurance programs like Medicaid to pay for abortions — and nominate “pro-life justices” to the Supreme Court. With one Supreme Court seat maddeningly open and three sitting justices over the age of 78, this last promise could have a long-lasting impact: It would take only two appointments to get to a Court that would likely overturn Roe v. Wade.

It’s difficult for many on the left to even wrap their heads around this possibility, which is at such sharp odds with how the country regards the rights of women to control their own reproductive systems. Poll after poll confirms that the vast majority of Americans continue to support legal abortion. A Pew study released the first week in January showed support for Roe at a rec­ord high of 69 percent, while a Quinnipiac survey conducted after the election put the percentage of respondents who believe abortion should be available in all circumstances at more than double the number who think it should not be legal in any circumstance. When it comes to contraception, the numbers are even more firmly on the side of reproductive freedom: Gallup found last year that 89 percent of Americans believe that birth control is “morally acceptable,” a higher percentage than believe the same about divorce, premarital sex, or gambling. And Planned Parenthood, one of the country’s largest providers of women’s health care, remains a pretty beloved organization; this summer, an NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll found its popularity to be 19 points higher than Donald Trump’s and 20 points higher than the Republican Party’s.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/reproductive-rights-abortion-access-in-america.html

WASHINGTON — Human Rights Watch on Thursday released its annual report on threats to human rights around the world, and for the first time in the 27 years it has done these surveys, the United States is one of the biggest. The reason: the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Eight days before Mr. Trump is to be sworn in as president, the human-rights advocacy group declared that his path to power, in a campaign marked by “misogynistic, xenophobic and racist rhetoric,” could “cause tremendous harm to vulnerable communities, contravene the United States’ core human rights obligations, or both.”

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But Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview: “This is a more fundamental threat to human rights than George Bush after 9/11. I see Trump treating human rights as a constraint on the will of the majority in a way that Bush never did.”

Mr. Roth cited a familiar list of policies Mr. Trump embraced during the campaign: mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants, a ban on Muslims’ entering the United States, and an openness to reintroducing techniques like waterboarding. Mr. Trump has since expressed second thoughts about torture, after a meeting with Gen. James N. Mattis, his nominee for defense secretary, who told him it was ineffective.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/human-rights-watch-trump.html?smid=tw-share

The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Thursday issued a stern letter, including a veiled threat of an investigation, to the federal government’s top ethics monitor, who this week had questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump’s commitment to confront his potential conflicts of interest.

In an unusual action against the independent Office of Government Ethics, Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah accused the office’s director, Walter M. Shaub Jr., of “blurring the line between public relations and official ethics guidance.”

He cited a bizarre series of Twitter posts that the office made in late November congratulating Mr. Trump for divesting from his business — even though Mr. Trump had made no such commitment. Mr. Chaffetz also said that the office had failed to adequately investigate Hillary Clinton, based on allegations that she had not properly disclosed fees paid for speeches she gave after leaving her post as secretary of state.

Mr. Chaffetz’s letter made no mention of Mr. Shaub’s airing of doubts a day earlier about Mr. Trump’s ethics plan, which includes retaining his own stake in his business empire and putting it in a trust managed by his two adult sons. Mr. Shaub, during an unusual news conference at the Brookings Institution, a policy research center in Washington, said that Mr. Trump had not gone far enough and would leave himself susceptible to “suspicions of corruption.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/us/politics/rep-jason-chaffetz-ethics-monitor-investigation-threat.html?action=click&contentCollection=us&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article&version=newsevent&rref=collection%2Fnews-event%2Fdonald-trump-white-house

1h
Donald J. Trump? @realDonaldTrump
What are Hillary Clinton's people complaining about with respect to the F.B.I. Based on the information they had she should never.....

1h
Donald J. Trump? @realDonaldTrump
have been allowed to run - guilty as hell. They were VERY nice to her. She lost because she campaigned in the wrong states - no enthusiasm!

As honeymoons go, Donald Trump’s wasn’t much to write home about. He was voted in as the most unpopular president-elect in modern history and got slightly less unpopular in the weeks that followed, as the goodwill flowed. Even then, though, he clearly remained the most unpopular president-elect in modern history. Again, that was the honeymoon.

And now it’s over.

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Quinnipiac is the first high-quality pollster to poll on Trump twice since the election. And while its poll in late November showed his favorable rating rising from 34 percent to 44 percent, that number has dropped back to 37 percent, which is about where it stood for much of the campaign. That’s tied for Trump’s worst favorable rating in a poll since his election. And a majority — 51 percent — now have an unfavorable view of him.

Likewise, the Quinnipiac poll shows a drop in confidence in Trump across the board. Although 59 percent were optimistic about the next four years under Trump in November, today that number is 52 percent. While 41 percent thought he would be a better leader than President Obama, it’s now 34 percent. While 52 percent thought he would help the nation's economy, it’s now 47 percent. While 40 percent thought his policies would help their personal financial situation, it’s now 27 percent. While 53 percent thought he’d take the country in the right direction, it’s now 45 percent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/10/this-new-poll-has-all-kinds-of-bad-news-for-donald-trump/?tid=sm_tw_pp&utm_term=.8c5561ac0f7d&wprss=rss_the-fix