trump – Page 165 – Lone Candle

The Supreme Court just dealt a huge blow to Congress’s power to investigate Trump

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Lone Candle

“Trump v. Vance, largely maintains the status quo. As Chief Justice John Roberts states in the first line of that opinion, “in our judicial system, ‘the public has a right to every man’s evidence,’” and “since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.” Trump does not enjoy absolute immunity from a state prosecutor’s criminal investigation.”

…

“The upshot of Trump v. Mazars is that House investigators almost certainly will not see potentially damning records concerning Trump’s finances until after the November election. Mazars was also written by Roberts.
Though Mazars does not preclude the House from seeing those records eventually, by the time those records become available Trump will almost certainly either be an ex-president, or he will be firmly entrenched in his second term.

On the surface, it is easy to see Mazars as a defeat for Trump. The decision was 7-2, with all four of the Court’s liberals joining the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both wrote dissents, where they complain that the majority didn’t do enough to protect Trump from investigation.

But make no mistake, Mazars is a victory for Trump because it holds that the president enjoys special immunity from congressional investigation enjoyed by no other citizen — and because it likely shields Trump’s records from the public eye until after the election.”

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“Eastland held that Congress is entitled to gather information — and to use compulsory subpoenas to gather such information — whenever that subpoena is “intended to gather information about a subject on which legislation may be had.” So long as the congressional subpoenas sought information on a topic that could plausibly be subject to an act of Congress, those subpoenas were lawful.
The new rule announced in Mazars, however, can be boiled down into four words: “the president is special.”

According to Roberts, “congressional subpoenas for the President’s information unavoidably pit the political branches against one another.” He adds that “without limits on its subpoena powers, Congress could ‘exert an imperious controul’ [sic] over the Executive Branch and aggrandize itself at the President’s expense, just as the Framers feared.”

So Mazars invents new limits on congressional subpoenas targeting the president, and sends the case back down to a lower court to apply this new rule.”

Trump’s racist references to the coronavirus are his latest effort to stoke xenophobia

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Lone Candle

“In a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this past weekend, President Donald Trump used the term “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus, one of several racist statements he made during a wide-ranging speech that touched on his administration’s handling of the pandemic.

“By the way, it’s a disease, without question, [that] has more names than any disease in history,” Trump said at the time. “I can name kung flu, I can name 19 different versions of names.”

Since then, Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has gone on to defend his use of the term. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been noncommittal: When asked how he and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, felt about Trump’s remarks, McConnell declined to say whether he was comfortable with the president’s rhetoric, instead suggesting that the question should be directed to Chao, who immigrated from Taiwan to the US as a child.

McEnany’s defense of Trump is the same flimsy one he’s been using ever since he began calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus:” She argued that such names simply associate the illness with its “place of origin,” an effort that even if conducted in good faith goes against World Health Organization guidelines that warn against promoting labels that could stigmatize an entire region.

“The president does not believe it’s offensive to note that the virus came from China,” McEnany said during a briefing on Monday.”

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“Trump’s decision to lean into racist rhetoric — including terminology his own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has condemned in the past — comes as Asian Americans continue to report hate incidents such as verbal abuse, physical assault, and property damage during the pandemic. As the coronavirus spread around the world, tropes that treat Asians as perpetual foreigners have also resurfaced, fueling racist and hostile anti-Asian sentiment.

Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that’s been tracking self-reported hostile anti-Asian incidents since late March, says it’s received more than 2,100 reports since the project began. Such incidents have included instances of employees getting shunned in the workplace, families being spat on at fast food restaurants, and children getting beaten up by their classmates. The group says it saw a surge in reports after Trump began using rhetoric like the “Chinese virus” and noted that many “anti-China” comments were frequently associated with verbal and physical assaults.

“A White male walked by me and said, ‘you f—king Chinese spread the Coronavirus to this country, you should all leave this country!’” one incident report read.

“A woman sitting at a bus stop was screaming at myself and other Asians that she saw walking,” read another. “She said that we were ‘dirty Chinese,’ that we were trying to take over the US.”

Researchers, too, emphasize that Trump’s rhetoric has mattered in the past: An NBC News report by Kimmy Yam points to a February study, which determined that Trump’s racist comments against Latino Americans “emboldened” others who held similar views to express them.

Trump’s continued use of racist statements about the coronavirus — ultimately trying to deflect blame by pointing out it is foreign-born — comes as he struggles to deal with the fallout of his own handling of the pandemic: Most recently he came under fire for saying he intends to slow down coronavirus testing because doing so would reveal the presence of fewer cases.

“President Trump continues to utilize white supremacist and nationalist views as a means of scapegoating his failures for political gain,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, in a statement. “Unless we hold him accountable, the discrimination and harassment against Asian Americans will become deeply entrenched, cause unimaginable harm and suffering, and take decades to unwind.””

Trump is rescuing Maine lobstermen from himself, and blaming Obama

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Lone Candle

“The Maine lobster industry, which has been battered for years as a result of the Trump administration’s trade war with China, got some good news Wednesday. The president unexpectedly announced that the lobster industry will be eligible for bailout funds that had previously only been given to farmers and ranchers.

Trump being Trump, he portrayed this not as what it is — a course correction aimed to belatedly limit the collateral damage of his own policy ideas — but rather as an effort to rescue coastal Maine from the depredations of the Obama administration which he claimed “destroyed the lobster and fishing industry in Maine.””

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“Maine fishing actually prospered a great deal during the Obama years. It was a generally rough period for the Maine economy, especially inland, due to both the overall weakness in the American labor market and a specific structural decline in demand for paper. But the lobster industry did very well thanks to a combination of what seems to be an increase in lobster catches induced by climate change and strong demand from Asia.”

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“The origins of this week’s lobster policy announcement lie in taxes that Trump initially imposed years ago on goods imported from China. Those higher taxes did not generate the policy concessions Trump was looking for, so they led to higher and more wide-ranging taxes on Chinese imports over the years.

China retaliated against these moves by reducing imports of a range of American-made products, largely agricultural, which created a political problem for Trump because rural voters are one of his important constituents. The tariffs also raised consumer prices in the United States by something like $57 billion per year, according to the conservative American Action Forum. But Trump never expressed much concern about the impact on consumer prices, insisting (falsely) that the economic cost of the taxes fell entirely on Chinese producers.”

Pompeo says U.S. ready to team up on China, but E.U. eyes a post-Trump world

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Lone Candle

“At the start of Trump’s presidency, EU leaders harbored hopes that the combative president would team up with them to address an array of issues with China, particularly related to trade disputes, on which Beijing had long refused to give any ground. Instead, Trump lumped the EU, and especially Germany, together with China as trade rivals who had taken advantage of the U.S., and even slapped punitive tariffs on EU steel and aluminum products that prompted swift retaliation from Brussels.

And even as Pompeo said he was excited about the new dialogue over China, he reiterated some areas of sharp disagreement between Washington and European allies, including over Trump’s surprise decision to reduce the U.S. military presence in Germany, which Trump has linked to his political disagreements with Berlin, including Germany’s slow increases in military spending and its continued support of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.

Pompeo in his speech tried to insist that Trump’s decision was based on a careful “strategic review” of military deployment levels and needs — a point that has been flatly refuted by current and former U.S. military officials.

Given the deep lack of trust, it seems unlikely that much progress will be made discussing China or anything else between now and the November election in the U.S. EU leaders at the moment are intensely focused on debating their new long-term budget and a European Commission proposal for an ambitious economic recovery fund.”

Why Alabamians Turned on Jeff Sessions

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Lone Candle

“Trump has spent years pillorying Sessions, the first U.S. senator to endorse his presidential run, for Sessions’ 2017 decision as attorney general to recuse himself from overseeing the FBI probe into potential connections between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. In angry barrages before and after Sessions resigned in November 2018, the president has called him “scared stiff,” “slime,” “a disaster” and “not mentally qualified” to be the country’s top prosecutor. (Sessions’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article, nor did Tuberville’s.) Choosing Sessions as attorney general, Trump said in a 2019 interview, was the “biggest mistake” of his presidency—a decision many Republicans, including in Alabama, believe built up momentum not only for the Mueller investigation but also for Trump’s impeachment.

“Recusing himself from his duties and helping the Democrats—that was enough,” says Jasper resident Johnny Burnette, who supported Sessions in prior campaigns but says he now plans to vote for Tuberville. “I like Jeff, but he messed up.”

Flowers, who switched from a Democrat to Republican in the early 1990s, told me he attended a Rotary Club meeting soon after Trump first started attacking Sessions. “People were vitriolic,” he recalls. “It was ugly, mean-spirited.”

“This constant drubbing from the president … painted a picture of [Sessions] being untrustworthy and weak,” adds Robert Blanton, chair of the department of political science and public administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “He has been unable to emerge from the shadow of Trump’s criticisms.”

Sessions’ old school politics of gentility and his staunch conservative track record—which worked for him here for decades—may not be able to withstand that onslaught.”