The Daily Parker

As many of the founders feared, the OAFPOTUS's worst offenses against the rule of law have come from his abuse of the pardon power. David French takes us through the history of how it got into our Constitution:

As our newsroom reported this week, at least eight people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime.

In addition, “Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also run into trouble with the law.”

But the pardons just keep coming. On Sunday, Trump granted sweeping pardons to 77 people who helped him attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Last week, Trump pardoned Glen Casada, the Republican former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Casada’s former chief of staff, Cade Cothren. Both men had been convicted of charges including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. If there was one element of the American Constitution that set off the most urgent alarm during the founding era, it was the pardon power — Article II’s grant of absolute, unchecked power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

Here’s one suggestion: Amend Article II so that it states that the president “shall have Power, with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

The pardon power should exist as a matter of last resort, deployed only when the American legal system has truly failed to deliver justice, or when the national interest in a pardon is overwhelming.

I'm in favor of that. I think the wording needs to be changed. And I still support a change to the structure of the US government that makes the Attorney General answer to voters and not the president, as I outlined during the OAFPOTUS's first term.

Speaking of abuses, today is the 65th anniversary of Ruby Bridges breaking the color barrier in New Orleans schools. Remember when Federal power was used to protect people?

"Enjoy:"

• Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does.
• In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims.
• Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of voters who have come around to the unavoidable conclusion that the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are horrible, incompetent, corrupt people.
• Kyla Scanlon toured 30 states and two other countries to answer the question, "where did American prosperity go?"
• Will Gotsegen warns that, even though the Republican-caused, longest government shutdown in history ended yesterday, cleaning up from it will take a while.
• Historian Zachary Karabell explains that the OAFPOTUS's eye-watering corruption is (a) nothing new in US politics and (b) not the end of the Republic. (He agrees its awful, at least.)
• The US Mint in Philadelphia stamped out the last pennies ever yesterday. The first ones, minted in 1793, had the purchasing power equivalent of 33c today.

Finally, Chicago's Alinea has lost its third Michelin star, fundamentally changing the fine-dining scene in the city. When the 2026 Guide comes out officially next week, Chicago will have only one 3-star restaurant. Quel horreur !

A coronal mass ejection late last week caused Kp7-level aurorae last night that people could see as far south as Alabama. Unfortunately, I missed them, though some of my friends did not. Fortunately, NOAA predicts that another mass of charged particles will hit around 6pm tonight, causing even more pronounced aurorae for most of the night. This time, I plan to get to a dark corner of the suburbs to look for them.

Meanwhile:

• ProPublica has an extended report about how the OAFPOTUS uses pardons and clemency far more corruptly than Harding, Jackson, or Reagan could imagine. (Madison, Jefferson, and the rest of the founders could imagine it, however, and they did not like it one bit.)
• John Judis thinks "the 8 dissenters did Democrats a favor:" "I believe that as the shutdown dragged into Thanksgiving, and as more jobs were lost, social services suspended, and planes grounded, the public would have begun blaming the Democrats more because — let’s face it — they had initiated the shutdown. The polls also showed that far more Democrats than Republicans felt affected by the shutdown."
• Brian Beutler wonders whether the divergence between people's perception of the economy and reality has more to do with the fracturing media landscape than with people's ability to intuit reality the same way economists do: "Our collective, manic emphasis on the cost of things has both made people upset, and given people a peg to hang their political frustrations on—but people did not become upset over nominal prices in some organic way. Democrats shouldn’t convince themselves that if they manage to lower prices, they’ll be assured more victories, or that if Trump manages to get costs down (perhaps with the help of the Supreme Court) he’ll become politically invulnerable. They certainly shouldn’t convince themselves that all things unconnected to prices are politically inert."
• Amanda Nelson reminds us that in 2008, the wealthy people who got wealthier even as the housing market collapsed and impoverished millions weren't stupid; they just didn't care. And neither do the authors of Project 2025.
• The $1.5 billion Illinois just pledged to transit projects fundamentally changed the vision of passenger rail across the region, according to the High Speed Rail Alliance.
• Chicago has issued the first permits for construction of the new O'Hare Concourse D, the first new concourse built at the airport since Terminal 5 opened in 1993. Construction could complete as early as 2028.

Finally, the OAFPOTUS's latest demented assertion about crime on the "miracle mile shopping center" left people baffled and also led to city council member Brendan Reilly (D-42), whose ward includes the Magnificent Mile, clapping back: "My suggestion to President Trump: spend more time focusing on your struggling real estate investments, especially the 70,000 square feet of vacant retail space that has remained un-leased since the opening of Trump Tower, 16 years ago...."

Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this:

• Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court.
• David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants Democrats to hammer the Republicans on their unnecessary cruelty to Americans in need. Rubin says the word "moderate" lets people weasel out of being a "fighter" or a "defeatist."
• Adam Kinzinger is outraged that the OAFPOTUS has openly sold pardons, in contravention of literally everything the founders (and everyone since) stood for.
• Dan Williams lays out a strategy for confronting "highbrow misinformation."
• Calculated Risk, the blog that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown three years ahead of time, is starting to warn about the next financial meltdown from the inevitable cryptocurrency collapse.
• Matt Yglesias takes a break from the news to speculate about what would have happened had Italy joined the Central Powers in 1914.

And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.

Voters across the US told the OAFPOTUS to pound sand in the clearest electoral rebuke to a major political party since 1984, and the hardest slap to an incumbent president probably since 1868. Democrats won crushing victories in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and even Mississippi. Almost every county in Virginia shifted toward Democrats, and no amount of money could unseat three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania. Plus, Zohran Mamdani beat the OAFPOTUS-endorsed candidates to win the New York City mayoral election, which doubles as a bitch-slap to the establishment pundits who can't wait for him to fail.

The Republicans, in short, got spanked hard.

I don't have time to summarize all the reactions, so I'll just list a few:

• Brian Beutler: 25 thoughts on the 2025 elections.
• David Graham: The anti-MAGA majority re-emerges.
• Adam Kinzinger: More Mikie Sherrills, please. (Sherrill won the New Jersey gubernatorial race.)
• Paul Krugman: Which party is in trouble, again?
• Josh Marshall: DC conventional wisdom goes down to defeat in state after state.
• Jeff Maurer's hot take is that we probably didn't learn very much.
• Lauren Pope: Here's how [the Democrats] can win.
• Jennifer Rubin: Democrats in array.
• Michael Tomasky: America has big-time buyer's remorse about the OAFPOTUS.
• Matthew Yglesias: 13 takeaways from last night and now here comes the interesting part.
• Even John Scalzi had some thoughts.

While voters were handing the OAFPOTUS and his droogs their political asses during the longest government shutdown in history (second only to the one in their first term), armed thugs from the Dept of Homeland Security burst into a fucking day-care just a couple kilometers from my house to arrest a woman that the day care says is legally authorized to work for them. But little kids screaming in terror while one of their caregivers gets thrown to the floor and handcuffed is the point for these assholes, and is just one of the many malfeasances of this administration that led to yesterday's decisive losses for their party.

Yesterday showed that Americans learned the correct lessons from Venezuela and Hungary, and the Republicans didn't. Know hope.

With the unusually late colors we have this autumn against the much earlier sunsets that started yesterday (before 4:30 pm from November 15th to December 31st, ugh!), things have remained tolerable. It will snow eventually; we'll have a freeze eventually; but for now, I'll just enjoy it.

I didn't enjoy these things, though:

• Humans formed governments in the first place to feed people; the OAFPOTUS and his village of idiots have failed at that basic task.
• Architects who have looked at the paltry plans and Goebbels-inspired model of the White House Ballroom cannot fathom why it's the size of a convention center.
• It's not that Nick Fuentes is a Nazi sympathizer, racist, sexist, misogynist asshole—he's probably all of those things—but he's also a nihilist bullshit artist.
• My party really has to stop nominating old faux-centrist dickheads for public office and get behind the people who can actually win.
• Global warming may not make your city warmer on a specific January day, but it might make your city get 20 centimeters of rain in one day.

In one bit of good news, the Illinois legislature restored $1.5 billion to state transit agencies, which means the CTA and Metra will live to fight another day. Included in the legislation was an end to parking minimums within 800 meters of public transportation hubs or corridors. I hope this encourages developers to build density where it's needed.

Economist Paul Krugman shakes his head at the GOP's own goal, bringing misery to millions of Americans way ahead of their original schedule:

Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.

But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections.

Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.

Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.

So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)

But remember, the modern Republican Party has "a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need" which makes them unlikely to take the simple steps necessary to solve the problem they created. Like, for example, doing what their fearless leader has asked: end the filibuster and pass a clean resolution reopening the government. (Of course, that would be a gift for my party that could only be enhanced by candy and a stripper.)

Fortunately for the 42 million people who were about to starve next month, a Federal judge in Rhode Island has ordered the Dept of Agriculture to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to the people entitled to them "as soon as possible."

We'll see how this plays out over the weekend.

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:

• The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
• Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
• Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
• Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
• Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.

Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.

As I mentioned yesterday, the OAFPOTUS has illegally destroyed the East Wing of the White House, including the portico and everything right up to the original east entrance. This is part of his plan to build a ridiculous and unnecessary ballroom, funded by big-tech billionaires. The Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, cannot hold back his revulsion:

The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor Constantine’s clumsy effort to eradicate memories of his predecessors by repurposing and rebranding their works as his own.

But there are subtle differences between the images of authoritarians and elected leaders, in body language and other details. Is the leader acting as a quality-control agent, asking questions, studying details? Or surveying his domain in miniature? Is he simply toying with the world?

Trump made speedy demolition his priority, and speedy construction of the new ballroom is essential to his symbolic purpose, to offer a stark contrast to the dysfunction of Congress and, by extension, the torpid rhythms of democratic self-governance. He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape. That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him. But to shred precedent is simply to set new precedents. And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings. Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.

Krugman posits that a lack of good taste is a feature, not a bug, of the OAFPOTUS's style:

Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?

[B]ecause tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.

So is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?

So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.

I now find myself frequently thinking of how the Roman Republic degenerated into a dictatorship. For, in essence, Roman emperors were dictators, regardless of the fancy trimmings.

What happened? Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws.

Meanwhile, a man is suing the administration for being unlawfully detained by members of the Ohio National Guard, who he followed and videoed while playing the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. It's funny, but it also underscores how the military simply do not know how to enforce domestic law, nor should they be used that way. Fun times, fun times.

The OAFPOTUS today destroyed the East Wing of the White House, which he does not own. This reminded long-time observers of the time in 1980 when he destroyed historic frescoes that he promised not to destroy with the grace and maturity of a toddler. He has changed quite a bit since then, but unfortunately only through age-related dementia and probably myriad other cognitive problems we'll find out about 20 years from now.

The constant firehose of awful things coming from him and his droogs also now includes his demand that the Department of Justice compensate him $230 million for the affront of being prosecuted for the awful things he did before. (Thanks, Merrick Garland.)

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to misinterpret why Democratic voters tell pollsters they don't like the Democratic party, since Republicans only understand blind fealty to their totem while we actually want to govern competently. Criticizing one's leaders, you see, helps get better leadership. It doesn't mean that Democrats will stay home next November, or that we'll vote for MAGA fanatics because we don't like that our nominee hedged on trans extremism. Oh, no. We will not.

At least the Sun-Times had something good to say about life today. Apparently there's a stretch of Grand Avenue west of Halsted that has some of the best pizza in the world. The tavern-style pie from Pizz'Amici they showed at the top of the article made me want to leave my office and head over there. Maybe this weekend...