| HN Mirror

I am quite sure. Moves like https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/whitehouse/epa-scien... to provide political review and censorship of scientific work is something that hasn't happened in this country since McCarthy was taken down.

Or take the reinstatement of the Holman rule. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/house.... This rule allows politicians to target individual civil servants. This is again not business as normal. This rule was removed under Ronald Reagan in 1983. No administration since has sought its reinstatement. This again fits into the theme of creating "chilling effects" from partisan oversight of what is supposed to be a politically neutral organization.

For a third example, see http://www.salon.com/2017/01/10/please-dont-tell-us-the-trut.... The CBO is widely viewed as neutral, and has been kept that way for many years. It routinely provides estimates for every bill of what that bill's impacts are likely to be, including the estimates of the impact on our deficit. However House Republicans want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and do not wish to be embarrassed by estimates of how much removing some of its inflation limiting provisions will impact our federal deficit. So they are banning the CBO from calculating this number.

I can cite plenty of precedents for all of these actions. They are all before my birth, or in other countries. They are emphatically NOT business as usual in the modern USA.