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On August 09 2020 11:15 LegalLord wrote:
I'm mostly waiting to see who ends up filing the lawsuit on this one. This looks like one of those things that get quickly shut down in court, given that this largely seems to be the kinds of actions that are directly in Congress's jurisdiction.
I've got no clue what the courts will rule. They were chill with rewriting immigration law and creating entirely new classes of individuals out of whole cloth. That was the major (wrong) step beyond the Congress telling the executive what the laws were to enforce.
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On August 09 2020 13:11 Erasme wrote:
Are you allowed to a hold campaign rally under the pretence of a white house news conference ?
For reference i'm looking at his news conference when he unveiled his eo, and it basically stops at 4min out of 30+, then it's a rally.
It's the Trump administration. Whether there is a rule for it or not, nobody will enforce it anyway and they'll badmouth anyone who speaks up about it.
However, Trump and his people's tendencies to try to turn press conferences into campaign-ish events has been backfiring a lot lately. Apparently on Friday even Fox News cut away from his first press conference at his golf course and most of the major news networks smartened up quickly when he tried to bring back his daily coronavirus task force briefings since, like the ones in the past, they started to become quite obviously not actually about coronavirus and instead were outlets for Trump to feed his ego, mislead people about the state of the country, and attempt to campaign.
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Maybe he needs the moral support to walk out when called out.
But seriously, wouldn't it means that trump is using government time/employees/funds to hold a political rally, which sounds fairly illegal.
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On August 09 2020 14:08 Erasme wrote:
Maybe he needs the moral support to walk out when called out.
But seriously, wouldn't it means that trump is using government time/employees/funds to hold a political rally, which sounds fairly illegal. And who is going to stop him when Congress (or more specifically Republicans) have given up any and all tools to hold a President accountable?
But the first hurdle would probably be 'when does a press conference stop being a press conference and become a political rally?'.
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On August 09 2020 14:08 Erasme wrote:
Maybe he needs the moral support to walk out when called out.
But seriously, wouldn't it means that trump is using government time/employees/funds to hold a political rally, which sounds fairly illegal.
It's absolutely illegal under the Hatch Act, Trump's justification is the last dying gasp of the unitary executive theory, a theory of US government separation of powers that SCOTUS basically tore down when it ruled that Trump's tax returns were not shielded by executive privilege. The DC Circuit just reheard and decided by 7-2 that Congress can legally seek to compel individuals like White House counsel McGahn to testify, further chipping away at that dumb legal theory.
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On August 09 2020 22:08 JimmiC wrote:
I posted the article a little when ago but even republican senators were saying it was illegal. I think we will start to see more mit Romneys where they start to openly distance themselves from Trump to try to save their own seat.
McConnell already has basically tacitly given any senator under threat this year permission to distance their campaign from Trump if they think it will allow them to hold onto their seat. His comments seemed to be targeted at the Cory Gardner and Susan Collins-type senators who are in more moderate states where Trump's approval is plummeting. Gardner seems to be targeting split-ticket voters and seems to be hoping to convince some voters likely to vote for Biden to vote for himself rather than Hickenlooper for senate. I wouldn't be shocked if we see more of this happening over the next few months. Trump's brand is becoming increasingly toxic as time goes on and it seems like a lot of Republicans are starting to acknowledge that tying themselves to him could be the end of their political career if things don't go well for the Republicans in November.
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I wonder how Mitch feels about Trump, honestly. He may feel like someone more calculated and subtle could have helped undermine norms without so many people noticing.
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There's a little bit of news on the Trump-Russia investigation (Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Crossfire Hurricane, etc). One of Stefan Halper's contacts, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge, has audio records of Halper with knowledge that Flynn was about to go down. Halper, you may or may not recall, met with Carter Page and relayed information about it to the FBI. Halper and Papadopoulos's conversations with Carter Page were the reason he came into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Now, the Flynn investigation was conducted within the FBI, and Stefan Halper was just an old, fired FBI spy, so the question is how he would have advance knowledge of classified information that would take Flynn out of the incoming Trump administration. Excerpts:
Despite Halper’s article, a few weeks later these efforts were dead. A memo to terminate the Flynn investigation was on its way to FBI director on January 4, finding “no derogatory evidence.” Flynn would soon lead the NSC, where he would be empowered to expose the Cambridge Four and could bring them to their own career guillotines. They would likely be joined by Director Comey, McCabe, and FBI officials whom Democrats had widely derided earlier for botching the Hillary Clinton email investigation before they staked what remained of their credibility to Steele’s falsehoods. Then everything changed.
A General, a Walrus, and a “Kill Shot”
McCabe’s FBI subordinate Peter Strzok — who earlier texted that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was like an “insurance policy” in case of Trump’s election which “[w]e’ll stop” and he could “SMELL the Trump support” at a Walmart — intervened on January 4 to pull the memo terminating Flynn’s investigation.
The next day, January 5, Strzok attended an Oval Office Meeting with President Obama, National Security Adviser Rice, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director Comey. Among the topics were intercepted calls between Flynn and Russia’s Ambassador discussing sanctions. Strzok’s notes indicate Vice President Biden suggested that Flynn somehow violated a 216-year-old, possibly unconstitutional, and never successfully prosecuted, law called the Logan Act.
All of this — White House discussions, the taping of Flynn, Flynn-Russia conversations — were highly classified. They were never supposed to go public. If no one commits a felony by leaking them, this whole situation likely disappears. It is hard to believe anyone in Trump’s White House, or even in the last days of Obama’s presidency, would try to prosecute Flynn for a “Logan Act” violation of a possibly unconstitutional law he probably didn’t even violate, and that hasn’t been successfully prosecuted in its over two centuries of existence.
If this law — created to stop private citizens from intervening in foreign affairs — applied to incoming presidential teams, likely Joe Biden, Susan Rice, and most of the incoming international teams of Presidents Obama, Bush, Reagan, and Clinton would be guilty. Under our Constitution, it is the job of presidential campaigns to announce how they will change policy. So, unless someone commits the leak against Flynn, this all would be resolved internally. It is never transformed into a public Russia-Trump conspiracy tearing our country apart. But as we all now know, and history recorded, that is not what happened.
Steven P. Schrage, PhD via Matt Taibbi substack (author, journalist)
It's probably not enough to convince the typical "The FBI investigation/wiretaps into the Trump administration had mistakes, but nothing big" of the errors. And it is pretty long. But maybe it's worth it to people that can imagine the Trump campaign abusing the FBI to put the incoming Biden administration under a cloud of suspicion and wiretapping Biden advisors. The case already has multiple FBI officials lying to subordinates, and at least one FBI official falsifying documents submitted to obtain the FISA surveillance. Basically, lying to a judge to help the judge conclude that secretly wiretapping Americans was justified.
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What a nice man, with such a bleeding conscience, that the next article that will reveal everything is under a paywall. Advertising ?
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At least some of the token republican senators are complaining about Trump's EO .
Sasse:
The pen-and-phone theory of executive lawmaking is unconstitutional slop. President Obama did not have the power to unilaterally rewrite immigration law with DACA, and President Trump does not have the power to unilaterally rewrite the payroll tax law. Under the Constitution, that power belongs to the American people acting through their members of Congress.
https://www.sasse.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=7E22ECEA-CE33-4E4E-B109-6C0ED418170F
Trump's response:
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I can't get used to the POTUS writing like a 7 years old. I try but I don't manage.
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Dems should be celebrating for Trump attacking members of his own party making a principled point. He has good reason to say Obama can’t write immigration law, nor can Trump write payroll tax law. And Republicans should oppose this move, since we won’t be in control of the presidency in perpetuity, and it will someday be a Democratic president further emboldened to not enforce laws he/she doesn’t like.
House Democrats are on vacation now until September 14th, so there will be no legislative action on Coronavirus bills until then.
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On August 11 2020 03:35 Danglars wrote:
Dems should be celebrating for Trump attacking members of his own party making a principled point. He has good reason to say Obama can’t write immigration law, nor can Trump write payroll tax law. And Republicans should oppose this move, since we won’t be in control of the presidency in perpetuity, and it will someday be a Democratic president further emboldened to not enforce laws he/she doesn’t like.
House Democrats are on vacation now until September 14th, so there will be no legislative action on Coronavirus bills until then.
Good point. Do you want an eventual democrat president able to increase federal taxes via executive order? National carbon tax, the list goes on and on. Taxation can basically create hard policy single-handedly.
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The Dems might not want to sue Trump over the EO, because it would be bad optics when the media gets a hold of the headlines. But surely someone somewhere is going to take the WH to court over trying to change taxes via EO.
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On August 11 2020 03:35 Danglars wrote:
Dems should be celebrating for Trump attacking members of his own party making a principled point. He has good reason to say Obama can’t write immigration law, nor can Trump write payroll tax law. And Republicans should oppose this move, since we won’t be in control of the presidency in perpetuity, and it will someday be a Democratic president further emboldened to not enforce laws he/she doesn’t like.
House Democrats are on vacation now until September 14th, so there will be no legislative action on Coronavirus bills until then.
I mean that's pretty much what happened with Obama inheriting Bush's Patriot Act FBI and using Mueller and Comey. Same as Trump inheriting Obama's renewal, the several countries Obama was bombing, and all the immunity. Hard to argue the bombing and such is unacceptable for Trump since Democrats had so little opposition to the things Obama was doing that they wouldn't trust Trump to do.
Pretty sure both parties are on basically a "on-call" recess. Pathetic, but not particularly partisan imo.
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On August 11 2020 03:50 Gorsameth wrote:
The Dems might not want to sue Trump over the EO, because it would be bad optics when the media gets a hold of the headlines. But surely someone somewhere is going to take the WH to court over trying to change taxes via EO.
Some state or other could sue over their budget being appropriated in a very strange way as well. I don't know who will file the suit but I can't imagine it not happening.
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EPT
