In Kentucky, for instance, the Republican Secretary of State Mike Adams encouraged voters to vote by mail for its June 23 primary. This is not a Democratic plot to steal the election as Trump would have us believe. And in spite of the president’s protests, states are moving towards easing up restrictions on absentee ballots and more and more states plan to send out applications for absentee ballots to all voters. But like education, the president has very little to say about voting methods. Trump has also been waging a campaign against mail-in ballots, contending without evidence that elections held by mail are at risk for corruption. So much for Trump’s influence over schools. Even the private school his son Barron attends has announced that it will either open up online only or in some sort of hybrid fashion. School districts around the country are wrestling with the health concerns around opening but they are pretty much ignoring the president. Most school funding is from state and local sources. Even if Trump could cut off funds, federal funding is a miniscule portion of funding for schools: 8.3% to be exact. But the little secret here is that presidents have very little to do with school policy. He forced the CDC to go back to the drawing board because he didn’t like their initial guidelines about school reopening. On another front, throughout this summer Trump has been insisting that schools open in the fall and he has been threatening withhold federal funding if they don’t. Senate Republicans proposed this funding and the lack of White House support was reported to have “infuriated” them. The White House has since dropped the idea.Įven more bizarre was Trump’s opposition to $25 billion in funding for federal health agencies and for coronavirus testing. Even as it became apparent that Senate Republicans were lukewarm at best, the White House kept on. That tax funds Social Security payments, and a cut is sometimes proposed but it is rarely taken seriously. His first idea was to lower the payroll tax. Trump’s lame duck status also showed up in the debate over what kind of stimulus bill should be passed. Days later, the Senate approved a similar bill (with the military base-name change provision included) by a lopsided vote of 86-14, a second veto-proof vote-with only four Republicans voting no. It passed 295 to 125, including enough Republicans to make it veto-proof. Then, last week, the House voted on the bill in spite of the fact that Trump had threatened to veto it just hours before. Senate Republicans were the first to balk, signaling very clearly that they opposed vetoing the bill over that provision. This bill was moving along in its typical bipartisan fashion until it acquired a provision that would remove the names of Confederate military leaders from American military bases. The first was passage of the behemoth NDAA (National Defense Appropriations Act) which funds our military. Signs of a lame duck presidency arose around Congress’s summer to-do list. There’s an awful lot of that going on in Trumpworld lately. The most important characteristic of lame duck-ness is that even your friends and supporters stop paying attention to your wishes and defy you in acts if not just in words. Nonetheless, President Trump’s tenure seems to be slipping into a premature lame duck period. But rarely does “lame duck” refer to a sitting president about to go into a re-election campaign.
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