Veterans Affairs Secretary Is Latest to Go as Trump Shakes Up Cabinet
March 29, 2018 by admin
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In the midst of that turmoil, Dr. Jackson, 50, who was named to his current position by President Barack Obama in 2013, has grown close with Mr. Trump, a commander in chief who enjoys familiar faces in his orbit and often rewards them with new roles.
Dr. Jackson had a rare turn in the spotlight in January, when he announced the results of Mr. Trump’s physical, his first while in office, and addressed speculation over the president’s physical and mental health. The president was very pleased with the performance.
“I’ve found no reason whatsoever to think the president has any issues whatsoever with his thought processes,” Dr. Jackson said.
His policy views are all but unknown, though, especially on Capitol Hill, where the Senate will decide whether he is up to leading the department. Senators, including Johnny Isakson of Georgia, the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, issued cautious statements on Wednesday praising Dr. Shulkin and indicating that they would need to get to know the nominee.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
That tone was echoed by mainstream veterans groups like Disabled American Veterans and the American Legion, who hold considerable sway in Washington, and who warned of a potential leadership vacuum at the department.
Privately, several White House aides acknowledged that Dr. Jackson’s lack of managerial experience could be problematic and said that once again the president’s interest in his personal bond with someone was more significant than their curriculum vitae.
In a Twitter post on Wednesday announcing the changes, Mr. Trump called Dr. Jackson “highly respected” and thanked Dr. Shulkin for “service to our country and to our great veterans.”
I am pleased to announce that I intend to nominate highly respected Admiral Ronny L. Jackson, MD, as the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs….
—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
March 28, 2018
Mr. Trump said that Robert Wilkie, the under secretary for defense personnel and readiness at the Defense Department, would serve as acting secretary in the meantime, bypassing the department’s deputy secretary, Thomas G. Bowman.
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The White House did not respond to a request asking who would replace Dr. Jackson.
Dr. Shulkin, who served as under secretary of veterans affairs in the Obama administration, had begun to make headway on some of the department’s most persistent problems. Those included an expansion of the G.I. Bill for post-9/11 veterans, legislation that makes it easier for the department to remove bad employees and a law that streamlines the appeals process for veterans seeking disability benefits.
Those successes and his easy grasp of complicated policy issues won Dr. Shulkin deep support on Capitol Hill and among veterans groups. And Mr. Trump, who made veterans issues and overhauling the scandal-ridden department a focal point of his campaign, showered Dr. Shulkin with praise. At a bill-signing ceremony in June, the president teased that the secretary need never worry about hearing his “Apprentice”-era catchphrase, “You’re fired.”
“We’ll never have to use those words on our David,” Mr. Trump said. “We will never use those words on you, that’s for sure.”
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But in recent months, a group of conservative Trump administration appointees at the White House and the department began to break with the secretary and plot his ouster. At issue was how far and how fast to privatize health care for veterans, a long-sought goal for conservatives like the Koch brothers.
The officials — who included Dr. Shulkin’s press secretary and assistant secretary for communications, along with a top White House domestic policy aide — came to consider Dr. Shulkin and his top deputy as obstacles.
The secretary’s troubles only grew when what had been an internal power struggle burst into the open in February, after the department’s inspector general issued a scathing report on a trip Dr. Shulkin took last year to Britain and Denmark. The report, describing what it called “serious derelictions,” found the secretary had spent much of the trip sightseeing and had improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets as a gift.
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Turnover at a Constant Clip: The Trump Administration’s Major Departures
Since President Trump’s inauguration, staffers of the White House and federal agencies have left in firings and resignations, one after the other.
Critics of the secretary seized on the report to try to hasten his removal. Dr. Shulkin, fearing a coup, went public with a warning about officials “trying to undermine the department from within” and cut off those he saw as disloyal. The efforts backfired. At the White House, senior officials came to believe that Dr. Shulkin had misled them about the contents of the report. And the secretary’s public declarations only further aggravated top officials, who felt Dr. Shulkin had gone too far in commenting on internal politics with news outlets and had opened the administration to sharp criticism over his trip to Europe, which the report said cost more than $122,000.
But as recently as early March, after meetings with John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, Dr. Shulkin publicly claimed victory, signaling that he had the White House’s support to remove officials opposing him.
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The victory was short-lived. Before long, Dr. Shulkin sharply curtailed his public profile, cutting off communications with reporters and isolating himself from top deputies he viewed as disloyal. People who have spoken with the secretary in recent days said he was determined to keep his post, even as it became increasingly clear his time was up. He was set to meet with leaders from the nation’s largest veterans groups on Thursday.
Despite his problems with the White House, Dr. Shulkin remained overwhelmingly popular on Capitol Hill, where the Senate unanimously confirmed him last year, and among the veterans groups that have traditionally held outsize influence in Washington. In recent weeks, leaders from both parties publicly and privately signaled their support, even as rumors of his replacement appeared in news reports.
But Mr. Trump had had enough. He began to discuss successors in recent weeks, even considering Energy Secretary Rick Perry as a possibility. He told friends last weekend that he would fire Dr. Shulkin, it was just a question of when.
Dr. Shulkin had made a preliminary inquiry about having Dr. Jackson for an under secretary role last year, and the president spoke with him briefly about it then, one senior administration official said. But it went nowhere at the time.
By Monday, Mr. Trump had started animatedly talking with a handful of people about the idea of Dr. Jackson’s replacing Dr. Shulkin, people familiar with the discussions said. Still, he did not tell many advisers of his plan until soon before it was announced.
A Navy doctor since 1995, Dr. Jackson deployed as an emergency medicine physician to Taqaddum, Iraq, during the Iraq war. He has served as a member of the White House medical unit since 2006 and as its lead physician since 2013, overseeing Mr. Obama’s physicals.
Dr. Jackson had told several people that he planned to retire from Washington after Mr. Obama left office. But Mr. Trump, whose previous personal physician made headlines with a series of unauthorized news interviews about his patient, asked Dr. Jackson to stay on. Mr. Trump, who goes to great lengths to hide details of his personal life, quickly came to trust Dr. Jackson, referring to him warmly as “Doc” around the White House.
Democrats, moderate Republicans and mainline veterans groups have all feared that Dr. Shulkin’s departure could clear the way for a more aggressive push for government-subsidized private care at the department.
“Every major veterans’ organization in this country vigorously opposes the privatization of the V.A.,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “I stand with them. Our job is to strengthen the V.A. in order to provide high-quality care to our veterans, not dismember it.”
Correction: March 28, 2018
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the rank of Dr. Ronny L. Jackson. He is a rear admiral, not an admiral.
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Justice Stevens Wants to Repeal the Second Amendment. Here’s Why That’s So Hard
March 28, 2018 by admin
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Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens drew attention Tuesday when he argued for the repeal of the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms. But many gun control supporters say they don’t want to go anywhere near the idea.
From a technical standpoint, the already-difficult path to pass a constitutional amendment is complicated by the current Republican domination of state legislatures. And from a strategic standpoint, they fear that the push for an amendment would only rile up gun supporters, making it more difficult to get legislation passed.
Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, explained that the founding fathers specifically designed the constitutional amendment process to be extremely difficult. The proposed amendment would have to either be approved by two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and then ratified by two-thirds of the states, or two-thirds of the states would have to independently call for a constitutional convention.
“That’s a very difficult challenge in the best of times; it’s even more difficult in the current times,” Turley said, noting that there is still a high level of support for Second Amendment rights across the country. “The chances of securing two thirds of both houses [of Congress] is rather remote, and the chances of securing ratification of 38 states is virtually nonexistent.”
Republicans, who typically run on a platform of supporting gun rights, currently control 32 state legislatures, per data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Even assuming that the 18 states that have either divided or Democratic control backed an amendment, they would still need 20 GOP-controlled states to support the proposal in order to pass.
And even if state legislatures and Congress had the votes to repeal the Second Amendment, there is a very real political risk to actually doing it, especially for those advocating for gun control reform. Gun control advocates frequently stay away from the notion of repealing the Second Amendment; there’s never been a major push for it from Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Chris Murphy, both of whom have led the charge in pushing Congress to implement stronger gun control laws, or from advocacy groups like the Brady Campaign or Everytown for Gun Safety.
“The courts have overwhelmingly ruled that there is no inconsistency between 2nd Amendment rights and reasonable, common sense gun safety laws, and states are already stepping up to protect people from gun violence,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. A spokesman for the Brady Campaign reaffirmed that, “the Supreme Court was in agreement that the Second Amendment allows for the common-sense gun reforms that the Brady Campaign and most Americans support.”
The Second Amendment is a sticking point because, for most gun owners, the debate is not necessarily about guns but about the right to own a gun that is explicitly enshrined in the Constitution. This dynamic is precisely why membership and donations to gun rights groups often spike after a mass shooting, when calls for gun control grow louder. A movement to repeal the Second Amendment would only compound these sentiments.
“Without the provision of the Second Amendment, without the fact that the colonists had a right to keep arms, we would be singing Hail Victoria and saluting the British flag,” Richard Shackleton, an attorney and NRA member from New Jersey, told TIME last October after the shooting at a Las Vegas music festival killed over 50 people and wounded nearly 500. “The fact is that armed people are a free people,” he said.
Shackleton’s fears are reflected in the statement issued by Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, who said that Stevens’ article shows the real motive of gun control advocates is to take away weapons.
“Emboldened by the mainstream media, the gun-control lobby is no longer distancing themselves from the radical idea of repealing the Second Amendment and banning all firearms. The protestors in last week’s march told us with their words and placards that the current debate is not about fake terms like “commonsense” gun regulation. It’s about banning all guns,” said Cox.