So Trump is getting pushback from some Republican senators over booting the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn't like the jobs report. What the hell does that mean? They're trying to talk sense to him? Are they going to frown and send stern letters? Via NBC News:
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., called the firing “kind of impetuous.”
“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” Lummis said. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”
What do you mean, "if," Cynthia? Are you really that stupid?
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., blasted Trump’s decision to fire McEntarfer as well.
“If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up,” Tillis said.
Since Tillis is not running for reelection, this is just meaningless. Next?
Rand Paul says, “We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized."
He says he's "going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting." Thanks for that public service announcement, Rand!
Brave, Brave Lisa Murkowski said she cannot trust the job numbers — and "that's the problem. And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less." ALSO educational! Thanks for the tip, Lisa! Will you now look askance at the president?
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called the move “the sign of an authoritarian type” and added, “what that means is, I think the American people are going to find it hard to believe the information that comes out of the government, because Trump will always want it to be great news, and when that happens, it’s hard for us to deal with the problems, because we don’t know what is going on.”
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, went a step further, calling McEntarfer’s dismissal “the stuff of fascist dictatorships.”
A statement by “The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” co-signed by William Beach, who was a BLS commissioner under Trump, affirmed the accuracy of the bureau’s work and of McEntarfer specifically.
“The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information,” the statement read.
“BLS operates as a federal statistical agency and is afforded autonomy to ensure the data it releases are as accurate as possible,” it added.
