Susan Davis
speaker
210 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I never could have imagined that I'd be taking on the richest man in the world.
As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I'd be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won!
Elon Musk started spending that money within days of Tesla filing a lawsuit in Wisconsin. He was trying to buy access and influence.
And one of the early actions that I would point to is when Trump decided that he was going to fire independent inspectors general across 18 different federal agencies. And these were jobs that were created in response to the Watergate scandal under President Nixon. They were designed to create more accountability in the executive branch.
But there's long been a view on the right that these jobs never should have been created in the first place. One of the people who agrees with that is John Yoo. He's a conservative legal scholar and a former Justice Department official.
Within the executive branch, yes. I mean, people like you would argue that these agencies should absolutely exist, but they should be more directly accountable to the White House.
And you can see Trump testing these boundaries by his administration's effort to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, as well as the stop work orders, the firings or attempted firings at independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Election Commission.
I also spoke with Tara Malloy. She's a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, another election watchdog group. And she noted the February 18th executive order calling for the president to have, quote, supervision and control of the entire executive branch. She called that point blank a power grab. Her focus was on the attempt to control the FEC, which oversees campaign finance laws.
And look, she made this point that it can't both be a neutral arbiter of campaign laws. and report directly to the president, one of the candidates on the ballot.
Look, there's a lot of political contradictions here. I would note that Trump campaigned very loudly on this idea that the president should exert more power over the government. And he won fair and square. So these actions shouldn't really come as a surprise to the country. But you're right. There isn't a ton of evidence that the country is clamoring to have this all-powerful executive.
Taken to its extreme, it would usher in an era of little or no independent checks on the president with fewer or no watchdogs and more politicized agencies. Now, proponents of this would say, look, accountability would still exist. It would exist in the court of public opinion.
Presidents are still held accountable in elections by voters and also in the constitutional checks on power afforded Congress. Congress has the authority to pass laws to rein in the presidency or the ultimate power of impeachment to remove a president. But But Elsa, as we're also living this in real time, public opinion doesn't matter as much in a second term.
And Congress, particularly when controlled by the same party, demonstrates little interest in checking their president.
You know, for Republicans, that would have been like choosing the path of most resistance. Passing all 12 of those bills usually requires an incredible amount of party unity and would also have likely required bipartisan negotiations with Democrats. Republicans aren't all that interested in that path right now.
They really don't want to burn all of this political capital on spending bills because the party is way more focused on passing a separate budget bill to extend President Trump's tax cuts. That is the priority focus right for the Republican Party over the next several months because they expire at the end of the year. But even the stopgap path is going to test party unity.
Speaker Johnson has never been able to pass these spending bills or stopgaps without some Democratic support. And it's unclear if he's going to be able to do it this week either.
Well, the top House Democratic leaders over the weekend came out and said they're going to oppose it. This is unlike past deals where minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has helped deliver the votes to avoid these shutdowns. If House Democrats remain unified against it, the speaker is essentially going to need unanimous support from within his own party. And that's going to be tough.
Yeah, I mean, President Trump is certainly trying to keep pressure on the Republican rank and file. In a social media post over the weekend, he was asking for, quote, no dissent on this. And there's a sign he might get it. One of those traditional hardline conservatives who likes to vote against these types of spending bills, that's Texas Congressman Chip Roy.
He's also a member of the Freedom Caucus. He's indicated that he will support it, which is a good sign for the speaker.
You know, I think it's going to be pretty clear early in the week. The House is expected to vote on Tuesday. And if they can't pass a bill, the shutdown becomes exponentially more likely by Friday. If they can pass that hurdle, a handful of Democrats are still going to be necessary to get it through the Senate.
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