Yes, if they have the information, they can read it, while the senate is in session. the other senators can form cloture to stop the senator from doing so, and the house would have similar mechanisms to deny the floor to a congressperson who wanted to disseminate classified info this way. Of course, they can be prosecuted for their method of obtaining the information, should it not have come through proper channels.
So, we have several steps that prevent that. Are there any that would stop the president? He has access to all intel, and he can choose to disseminate it at any time to anyone, and there is no one that can stop him.
I’m not quite sure the point of this contention that you seem to be insisting that there is no discernible difference between the way that a congressperson has to handle classified info compared to a president.
I am not sure how your labeling of a hypothetical situation as hyperbolic actually advances your argument, it actually doesn’t even make sense. But, anyway.
So, what percentage of the population would you have to see denied the right to have a voice in government before it became a concern? 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%? Does it make any difference to you if the disenfranchisement is politically lopsided, in that one party definitely benefits from it at the expense of others?
If there were only a small percentage disenfranchised, say less than 1%, but that included yourself, would you feel any differently?
No. Cloture may be invoked to end debate, but this would not stop a senator from reading the names on the floor. For one thing, a cloture petition must be signed by 16 senators, read by the clerk, and is then inoperative for one full day of the Senate being in session. Only on the second legislative day after the presentation of the petition, and after the Senate has been sitting for one hour, may be the petition be acted upon (following a mandatory quorum call).
And I’d be very interested to hear your idea of how to stop the House version from being read. Can you be specific about just how that would be done?
No, as I have shown above, we don’t.
Point one: I don’t concede to you the right to define when someone’s voice is “denied,” any more than I concede you have any insight into what “disenfranchisement,” means. So right now, for example, I’m unaware of any non-felon United States citizen who has been “denied the right to have a voice.”
But 1% would make a difference to me. I squeal at 1%.
I’d say it would depend entirely on the reasons. I’m not a liberal, and so I focus on the process, the rules, not whether I don’t care for a given application’s results.
How do they normally shut people up? McConnell shut up Warren. Ryan refuses to allow debate on things that he doesn’t want debate on. Do I know the specifics of how it is done? Nah. But I see it happening, and what exact arcane justifications that they use is less important than the fact that they use them.
Okay, what is your definition of when someone’s voice is denied? We can go with that. My definition is when the government prevents you from voting. Now, I would have hoped that you would agree with that definition, but maybe yours has more caveats as to when it is acceptable for the government to prevent you from voting. We are not in the pit thread on voter ID here, and you are making assumptions as to what I consider to be disenfranchisement with no basis whatsoever. I presented a hypothetical, in which the govt had explicitly denied the right to vote, and you came back calling it hyperbole and disagreeing that I had a right to talk about it.
Far more than 1% of the citizens of the united states cannot vote due to felony convictions, yet I see no squealing from you. This is one of the groups that doesn’t concern you.
Nice little slam on liberals there, as if you really believe that your fellow conservatives are focused on the process and rules, while accusing liberals of ignoring them. As has been explained many, many times, it is a desire to use the democratic process to change the process and rules so that our social contract is beneficial to all, rather than a suicide pact.
If you see that the process and the rules lead to catastrophic results, would you not seek to change that process and rules, rather than follow them blindly to our doom?
If it was because the very evil liberals had democratically taken control of the government, and passed a law that said that anyone who ever registered as a republican can no longer vote, would you respect those rules, or seek to change them?
Turn that around, and say that your enlightened and noble conservatives take on enough clout to do deny the right to vote to anyone who had ever registered to vote as a democrat, would you work just as hard and diligently to change those rules?
Aren’t people being disenfranchised, even if the government is doing so in a legal manner? Disenfranchisement just means somebody loses the right to vote. So if a law is enacted that requires people to have a picture ID to vote, then people who were previously able to vote but do not have a picture ID are disenfranchised.
No you don’t. When McConnell decided Obama wasn’t entitled to nominate a Supreme Court Justice and so refused to hold hearings, you were fine with it on the grounds that you saw no substantial difference between turning down a nominee after a hearing and refusing to allow a nominee a hearing in the first place.
It does still boggle that the idea that there are those with the perception that there could be elections swung by voter fraud that could be implemented by requiring picture ID, even though all empirical studies have shown that that is simply not the case, and so laws can be made to assuage such irrational fears. But, when people are actually effected by those laws, and at the very least have to bear an inconvenience that they did not have to bear before, the very suggestion that that could be perceived as disenfranchisement is considered to be hyperbole.
No, hyperbole is claiming that voter ID laws have any effect on making elections secure.
I understand why he is not likely to be prosecuted as such, and I understand the legal thresholds as they are presently written and under current legal interpretations (what few there are) is unlikely to be prosecuted.
I absolutely believe in the rule of law – but laws must change to keep up with societal norms. Ours have not.
If our laws are so hopelessly outdated that there are legal loopholes permitting adversarial nations to control our elections and pick our top government officials, then there is something seriously wrong. I’ve stated in other threads that I believe much will be codified in the aftermath of Trump that was never codified before. It never had to be. Things have changed.
I disagree with Bricker on this issue. There should be a higher standard applied than “this isn’t technically illegal.” Look at our abysmal history of Jim Crow laws; those were validly enacted by legislatures and upheld by courts. But is anyone today defending those laws? So why should we defend their new successors?
Let’s face reality; legislators and judges can work together to deny people their legal rights. It happened for over a hundred years in this country. The courts simply ignored the 15th Amendment.
So Bricker’s argument that voter ID laws are okay because a court ruled in their favor doesn’t have the closure that he’d like to claim it has. You can argue that a court made a bad decision just like you can argue that a legislature enacted a bad law. And people should work on reversing a bad decision just as they should work on repealing a bad law.
Hell, conservatives themselves have been doing exactly this for over over forty years now with their opposition to Roe. They certainly don’t agree that the Supreme Court had the final word on that subject.
Many things can be done short of an amendment, but I’m not following you off topic.
You can educate yourself about all the various ways new law can come into being short of Constitutional amendments. Here are a couple of hints: Case law as interpreted by the courts and statutory law as it is written by the legislative branch.
But I’m quite content to let the Supreme Court and the editors of the Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries fight it out over exactly what “treason” means. I think the more relevant question is the one addressed in this thread, which is, basically, whether has Trump consorted with an enemy of the United States in a way and at a level that is unprecedented in US history. To which the answer is quite persuasively “yes”.
To which the Austrian writer and satirist Karl Krauss replied: “A fresh heap of dung will do just fine as well” (original in German: “Ein frischer Mist tut’s auch”). I concur. So we either have a traitor or a fresh heap of dung in the White House. Or both.
So, when congress exempted itself from insider trading laws they were not placing themselves “above the law” because the law said they could trade stock on insider information (and yes I know about the STOCK Act and I also know congress still trades on insider information without consequence).
Neat trick.
I do not see how writing a law that protects someone from legal consequences everyone else must abide by should be considered as not placing that someone above the law.
Because then we would need a different term to describe someone to whom the actual law does not apply. Your definition, for example, makes cops “above the law” because they can disregard the speed limit or for the simple matter that they can arrest someone. It’s not a workable definition.
And there is a further distinction from your bad analogy about insider trading. No one has to be able to trade on insider information. But someone (or some group) has to make the determination of what is classified.
There is no country on earth where you can say, according to your definition, that “no one is above the law”. So when you use your definition, and exclaim: OMG, he’s above the law, the response will be “shrug-- happens all the time, and for good reason”. If that’s the response you are looking for, then keep using that definition.
Let me add that this whole hijack started because you said “I would like to believe no one is above the law”. If you are using that definition, why would you “like to believe” that, especially in the case of classifying documents? Did you think that process could be done by a computer?
Maybe you should educate yourself about the Constitution. Article III, section three states:
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” (bolding added)
How could the Court interpret that any differently than it’s plain language? And the legislative branch cannot make any law that contradicts the Constitution.
