The Homefront Report: The Government Has Left in a Catering Truck

Trump tries to rewrite election law, bulldozers arrive in Big Bend, Oregon homeowners fight for their own money, and the president slips away while the press and his staff remains aboard the decoy.

Donald Trump would very much like to control who gets a ballot, where it goes, and whether the United States Postal Service is permitted to deliver it. There is, unfortunately for him, a Constitution.

A federal judge has once again blocked Trump’s attempt to impose national election rules through executive order, ruling that the president does not have the authority to create a federal list of eligible voters and direct the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to the people whose names appear on it.

“The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections,” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote.

This is one of those sentences that ought to be so obvious it would never need to appear in a federal ruling. The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections. The president can’t seize a power merely because Congress refused to give it to him and Donald Trump isn’t the national supervisor of envelopes.

Still, his administration has been pressing the courts to let it change election procedures ahead of the November midterms. The order came after legislation supported by Trump stalled in Congress, which apparently caused the administration to mistake legislative failure for presidential permission.

When Congress doesn’t pass a bill, that means the bill didn’t pass. It doesn’t mean the president gets to crawl into the machinery of government through a side door and declare himself Congress. Perhaps he misunderstood the procedure. He has recently demonstrated a fondness for unconventional exits.

Last month, after attending the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump publicly boarded Air Force One while reporters watched. Then, following intelligence about a credible Iranian plot to fire a missile at his aircraft, he reportedly slipped off the plane inside an airport catering truck and boarded a different government jet.

Members of the press and much of his staff remained aboard Air Force One, believing the president was still traveling with them. The threat was serious, protecting the president was necessary, and the decision to conceal his movements was understandable. It is nevertheless difficult to ignore the image of the president of the United States disappearing inside a catering truck while everyone else continues flying aboard the decoy.

It may be the perfect symbol for this administration. The country is told to remain seated, keep the window shades closed, and trust that the person in charge is still aboard. Meanwhile, he has quietly escaped with the snacks.

Here on the Homefront, today is a new day. The water is fixed, and I won’t have to think about plumbing again for the foreseeable future. Fingers crossed, anyway. I am reluctant to say this too confidently because pipes can hear arrogance, and I’ve learned that plumbing waits for optimism before revealing the next wet surprise. For now, though, I can get back to tending plants and building beautiful things.

My husband is overjoyed to return to tractoring. He has mountains of dirt to drive back and forth, a task he approaches with the quiet spiritual devotion of a man who has been reunited with his true calling. Some people meditate, others journal, my husband climbs onto a tractor, moves dirt from one location to another, studies the result, and decides the dirt should perhaps be moved again.

Then there’s Ezra, my sweetest Ezra, he’s enjoying life on the Homefront. He’s learning, exploring, and getting to know all his people. Odin is his favorite. I would like to say I accept this with dignity, but I do provide food, comfort, transportation, medical advocacy, and nearly every service available through the domestic branch of government, while Odin mainly exists nearby looking interesting. Still, Ezra has chosen, and democracy requires us to respect the will of the baby.

My daughter is bored because her older brother is away on a trip, leaving her without her preferred playmate. This is both heartbreaking and frustrating because she now expects me to fill the vacancy while I work, care for a baby, manage the house, and attempt to preserve a few scraps of time for projects of my own. She has apparently appointed me acting older brother without holding a confirmation hearing.

Still, things on the Homefront are happy. We are building a life with what we have, changing what needs to be changed, and learning every day. That last part isn’t something I can say about the current president. In a functioning household, discovering that something is broken creates an obligation to repair it. You don’t solve a plumbing problem by claiming authority over the water, firing the sink, and ordering the mail carrier to certify that the leak never happened.

In Trump’s government, every obstacle becomes evidence that he needs more power. Congress won’t pass the election law he wants, so he tries to impose it himself. Environmental protections stand between contractors and a national park, so the protections are waived. State laws require large financial institutions to return interest earned on homeowners’ money, so federal regulators declare that the state laws should no longer apply. The law is treated not as a boundary, but as an administrative inconvenience.

In Big Bend National Park, heavy equipment has arrived for preliminary work connected to a $1.72 billion border infrastructure project. The plan includes 17 miles of vehicle barriers and work involving as many as 205 miles of patrol roads or detection technology across one of the most extraordinary landscapes in the country.

Big Bend is not an empty patch of dirt waiting for the government to discover a use for it. It is more than 1,250 square miles of desert, mountains, river corridors, wildlife habitat, archaeological history, and irreplaceable public land along the Rio Grande.

To accelerate the project, the Department of Homeland Security waived environmental and procurement protections, including requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the law governing the National Park Service itself.

The administration has discovered a very efficient method of complying with the law: announce that the law no longer applies. This is roughly equivalent to handling a home renovation by waiving gravity, electrical codes, structural engineering, and the concept of load-bearing walls. It would certainly make the project move faster. For a little while.

Contractors say the machinery currently operating in the park is conducting soil assessments ahead of full construction. Customs and Border Protection says it intends to preserve access and coordinate with the National Park Service. Conservationists, residents, and local businesses are warning that the roads and barriers could cause permanent damage to the park’s landscape and ecosystems.

The government would like the public to trust that everything will be handled carefully after it has deliberately removed the laws requiring careful handling. That isn’t oversight, it’s more like a catering truck parked beside the plane.

While contractors prepare to cut through Big Bend, the Trump administration is also attempting to override state laws that protect homeowners from having their own money used for free. Most homeowners with mortgages pay a little extra each month into escrow accounts. That money is held by the lender until property taxes and insurance bills come due. While it sits there, it earns interest.

Oregon and several other states require lenders to return that interest to homeowners because the money belongs to the homeowners. This is generally how ownership works. The federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued new rules exempting national banks and federal savings associations from those state requirements. Oregon, California, New York, and seven other states have now sued, arguing that the agency exceeded its authority and violated limits imposed by Congress under the Dodd-Frank Act.

Oregon officials estimate that the state’s law returns an average of $200 to $300 per year to mortgage holders who receive the interest. That may not sound significant to the people redesigning the White House, but it’s groceries, electricity, school clothes, prescription copays, or part of an emergency repair for a family already trying to keep up with the cost of owning a home.

There are approximately 703,000 mortgage holders in Oregon. Not all would necessarily be affected because the federal rules apply to certain federally regulated institutions, but many homeowners could lose money they currently receive under state law. The money wouldn’t disappear, it would simply remain with the banks.

This is the quiet machinery of power, the part that rarely receives the attention given to executive orders, troop deployments, or whatever unusual vehicle the president is hiding inside this week. A federal agency changes a rule, a few hundred dollars stops appearing in a homeowner’s account, and a national bank keeps the interest earned on money it didn’t own.

Multiply that by thousands of households, and a small administrative change becomes a significant transfer of wealth. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield suggested the administration may have assumed homeowners wouldn’t notice because most people barely examine their monthly mortgage statements.

He may be right, ordinary Americans are busy. We are repairing plumbing, raising children, tending gardens, caring for babies, working, paying bills, moving mountains of dirt, and trying to build something beautiful before another institution finds a creative way to charge us for the privilege. We don’t have an army of attorneys reviewing every federal regulation that might reach into our homes. That’s why laws and checks and balances exist. That’s why public agencies are supposed to serve the public instead of searching for overlooked pockets from which money can be extracted.

Oregon’s lawsuit is now the state’s 74th legal challenge against the Trump administration. Seventy-four lawsuits should be an extraordinary number. Under this administration, it has become another measure of how often states must go to court to remind the federal government that power has limits.

And with that, the pattern connecting all these stories emerges. Trump tried to change election rules without Congress, and a judge stopped him. Homeland Security waived legal protections to push a massive construction project through a national park. Federal banking regulators attempted to override state consumer protections so large financial institutions could keep interest earned on homeowners’ money. In each case, the people in power encountered a law protecting something they wanted to control and in each case, their response was to search for a way around it.

The administration isn’t governing as though elections, public lands, and household finances belong to the people. It’s governing as though they’re simply obstacles to be cleared, waived, preempted, or quietly removed from the passenger list.

There’s a reason the image of Trump disappearing into a catering truck feels so fitting. He was protected while reporters and staff continued aboard the plane they believed carried the president. The people outside the truck were expected to keep moving, remain calm, and accept that someone else had information they didn’t.

That’s the arrangement this administration seems to want for the entire country. Keep your shades closed, don’t ask who is aboard, don’t inspect the voter list too carefully, don’t worry about the bulldozers, and don’t look for the interest on your own money. Everything is under control, the president has simply stepped away for refreshments.

Back on the Homefront, we will keep doing what ordinary people have always done. We will repair what breaks, tend what grows, protect what belongs to the next generation, and build with care because we intend to live inside what we create.

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