Psychopaths and sociopaths do have emotions. They just do not give a fuck about anyone else.
Um… is this a constitutional crisis?
Here is a direct link to the 33-page opinion.
So now this goes to the Trump-packed SCOTUS?
At this point, Trumpo’s returns could show him profiting from dealing OxyContin to orphans and funding Satanist churches, and there would be NO REPERCUSSIONS. Hannity, Ingraham, McConnell, and Lindsey Graham would find a way to spin it.
Before Vlad helped them capture the White House, what were their prospects? Jared was deeply underwater with his disastrous 666-building investment. The best they could have hoped for was that some miracle would turn around the prospects of the (then) money-hemorrhaging Trump golf clubs.
Now, they’re raking it in. Largely at the expense of US taxpayers: a lot of the cash flowing into the family coffers comes from their charging the taxpayer through the nose for Secret Service housing and such. Other revenue streams come from international entities getting deals they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten–deals that are likely to be less good for the United States than they would otherwise have been–due to their putting money in Trump-family pockets, through stays at Trump properties, purchases at inflated prices of other Trump properties, etc.
And Trump’s fans think it’s all wonderful; they’re utterly unable to see that they themselves are being ripped off. (Of course Trump’s Congressional enablers are much better positioned to see that US taxpayers are being ripped off to enrich Jared and Ivanka and Donald and the others. Their choice to shrug about all this is truly disgusting.)
No repercussions from his base. But I think many people are growing increasingly upset with Trump’s disregard for the law. And people like Hannity, Ingraham, McConnell, and Graham have no more loyalty than Trump has; they’ll all turn on him as soon as they see it’s in their interest to not be associated with him.
Not a lawyer, but doesn’t it go to a judge in some relevant district first?
Probably, but that could take a while. The Executive Branch is in full-on authoritarian mode now, completely rejecting congressional oversight of any kind, daring the opposition to stop the president.
First there were POTUS, SCOTUS, AND FLOTUS, and now - WANOTUS, of which I’m one.
(Wary, Astonished Neighbour of the United States.)
Almost hit “submit reply” when I saw the typo “Untied”. (maybe should’ve just left it like that)
Fights over executive privilege are fairly common. Granted, this isn’t an executive privilege fight but it fits a similar territory. It’s neither novel nor authoritarian.
I only skimmed, but the legal argument in it seems fair. To summarize:
*The clear purpose of the law under which the request was ordered is to ensure the privacy of the general populace. So, while it does grant access to materials under certain conditions, it should still stand that the privacy of the general populace is the key and fundamental purpose of the law and any of those conditions would still be obligated to fulfill the privacy aim. So if the person asking for the materials has made it clear that they intend to release the information publicly then, couched as as valid 6103(f) exception or not, it’s really a request to break 6103(a).
To take a similar example, it may be the Commander in Chief’s clear executive authority to order a soldier to shoot a foreign person to death. However, there is a greater obligation to not shoot an unarmed, non-hostile citizen and particularly not if there’s great reason to think that the CiC wants her dead because she turned him down the previous night after he tried groping her.
The authority be as it may, if the intended purpose is clearly criminal then it don’t count.*
Of course, this also gives the Committee a fairly easy way to force them to release the tax returns, since there’s a loophole in the argument and now that the argument has been made, it’s hard to escape.
The argument relies on the fact that person X and person Y have said that they intend to make Trump’s taxes public. Given that one of those persons is Speaker of the House, it’s probably reasonable to say that any Democratic politician is reasonably suspect.
So, find a 3rd party that everyone would agree has no motive to publicize the documents and give that person a clear set of information to glean, which answers would directly serve an oversight aim.
I am daily reminded of the Witches’ Creed: “Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law.”
Random option: Evan McMullin looks qualified. He’s former CIA, so it would be hard to make the argument that he couldn’t be expected to keep a secret. Ask him if he’s willing to work for the cost of an economy flight and a cheap hotel, so there’s no question on money. And, clearly, he’s not going to break the law for his love of Nancy Pelosi.
I keep making that same mistake. Surely, this latest gaffe will make a difference, if only a point. The last time I checked 538, it went up a point in the last week! But in a good economy, it is almost impossible for a President’s approval rating to go much lower than Trumps’. To summarize the link, 4 Presidents have had comparable ratings in a good economy - Truman, with the Korean war, Johnson, with Vietnam, Nixon, with Watergate, and Dubya, in the last years of the Iraq war.
I don’t think we have an example of a President with a good economy without a major scandal. And that means that all of those things you cite are affecting his rating. They are a scandal. If he weren’t an idiot, liar, and con man, his approval rating would be much higher.
Any President is always going to have strong support from those in his party. Even in the final days of Watergate, 50% of Republicans still supported Nixon. And I’ll bet at least half of them knew he was a crook but didn’t care, because he was their crook.
Right now I think he still has over 80% approval among Republicans. He is their idiot, liar and con man.
Ultimately, we don’t need his approval rating to go much lower. We only need it to go down a couple of percentage points in a couple of states. Some of those will vote for the Democratic candidate, some will stay home.
And I’ll keep saying it, ole optimistic me, it ain’t getting any better for him. He can only go further down
https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/politics/trump-party-base-republicans/index.html
Declaring executive privilege isn’t extraordinary per se, but it is extraordinary when a president declares executive privilege for the sole purpose of violating the law and to weaken the legislative branch. It’s just like the president’s pardon power: by itself, not extraordinary, but an extraordinarily gross abuse of power when you suggest using it to undermine a criminal investigation involving people in his political circle. Presidents assert power, yes, but he is trying to assert powers that are incompatible with the constitution and with democratic republican rule.
Um, no, because that rationale you’ve laid out is legally irrelevant and invalid. Determining the motives of a congressional committee is nowhere to be found in the law that compels the president to turn over his tax returns. The law that the Congress is using to invoke its privilege of oversight was passed in the mid 1920s to empower Congress to obtain the taxes of any person it wants as part of its Constitutional oversight of the president. Prior to 1924, the Treasury Sec couldn’t turn over individual tax returns without violating the laws of privacy. They still can’t in most cases - except for when the appropriate Congressional authority asks for it. There are no exceptions. The House wants Trump’s tax returns, and the law says that the Secretary must turn them over. Period.
So if the President orders you to shoot an unarmed non-combatant for corrupt purposes, you have to do it?
Idiotic post that doesn’t warrant a response.
The Bible of impeachment, as I understand it, is a work called Impeachment: A Handbook, by Charles Black, Jr.
In that work, it points out that if the President were to shoot and kill a person in broad daylight, in plain view of many witnesses, there would be no real question of the right for a police officer to arrest and prosecute the President. Immunity from prosecution be as it may, there are clearly cases where that disappears. The question isn’t whether the right to indict the President exists, it’s where the line is.
The hypothetical serves to demonstrate that point. While it may be laughable and silly to think that the President might murder someone in broad view of the general public, it’s still a useful topic to discuss, because it is clearly a true statement. Presidential immunity would go away, no argument.
There are unstated limits to the law. There are good arguments that a Presidential pardon, given for corrupt purposes, is invalid and could be ignored by the court if it made a determination that corrupt intent was involved. Murder can be justified if you’re shooting a person who is in the act of shooting a bunch of people. If the law would require that you have to drive off a cliff, to your death, in some certain scenario, and you refuse to kill yourself in the name of the law the law is wrong and a court will rule in your favor. Law is not a suicide pact. It exists for purposes of improving the world and there are times where the courts will decide that the greater purpose trumps the clear word of the law.
It may well be that the grand majority of such arguments are specious, and further that the grand majority are ruled against in the simple basis that it’s not viewed as being worth ruling against the law for that one case and flooding the courts with people trying to use that as a way to carve out a larger body of precedence to ignore that law.
But it is still, and granted I am not a lawyer but so far as I understand it, a legal theory that can and sometimes does win.
As law, it seems not horrible. On the merits, I don’t expect it to win. But, before even getting to the merits, it’s faster to use the loophole. You will want to send a legal opinion that contests the merits of the DOJ argument, so that no precedent is left, but you still are better to avoid court in the interest of time.
As I did say, I don’t believe that the DOJ argument will win.
- Trump said that he would release his tax returns. He has, in essence, waived his privacy.
- The President is not a regular citizen. The normal standards don’t apply. As a comparison, see the precedent concerning loss of privacy for famous people and the rights of newspapers to spy on them.
- Impeachment is a political process. Saying that the Democrats want access to the documents for political reasons isn’t a counter to a request that is in line with investigation towards possible impeachment. Drumming up political support among the populace is clearly a component of the process. Witness testimony by any number of politicians and political science would attest that this is a core component of political, rather than judicial, systems.
- Whether the Congressional Committee has suggested use of an independent 3rd party or not, they have almost certainly made many reasonable statements of willingness to abide by strict rules of access and note taking in order to get the sort of information needed for oversight.
- The history of the statute makes it clear that it was written with an eye towards the investigation of a President’s finances. So not only is the President not just an every day citizen with the same expectations of privacy, the key and fundamental purpose of 6103(f) is to explicitly carve out an exception and negate the general purpose of an expectation of privacy in the case of the President. It exists to deny the President such privacy and to allow Congress to investigate the President for the political process of impeachment.
Actually on that last point, I might recommend that Congress does take it to court (if they think they could win).
Under the principle that the Executive needs to be able to effectively execute, without being second guessed, there is a deference given to the President, by the Supreme Court, around whether certain actions were or were not necessary. This sort of deference, for example, was the basis of the ability for the Travel Ban to get the okay.
There is no reason that the Supreme Court should not defer to Congress on the question of general politicking. Doing things in the names of politics is necessary and should be protected as its own innate power that serves as its own defensible justification for certain activities. It’s not something that you need to skulk around and pretend that you’re not doing, it’s the job that they’re being paid to do - making political arguments, publicizing the materials that back that argument, and building political support for it both in Congress and with the public.
Having that deference could prove a useful tool in the toolkit in the future.