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Jon Stewart on Why Trump Wants Biden Back So Badly He’s Reusing His Old Attacks | The Daily Show

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Lone Candle

Jon Stewart on Why Trump Wants Biden Back So Badly He’s Reusing His Old Attacks | The Daily Show

https://youtu.be/-VW6tHIcGfc?si=UtC6bwoKv3W5ozk-

Supreme Court’s Presidential Immunity Ruling Could Shield Outrageous Abuses of Power

Posted on August 4, 2024August 4, 2024 by Lone Candle

“When Trump urged the Justice Department to investigate his baseless allegations of election fraud, Roberts says, he was exercising his “conclusive and preclusive” authority. The executive branch has “‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute,” he writes, “including with respect to allegations of election crime.”
The indictment also alleges that Trump “attempted to enlist” Vice President Mike Pence to “use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results.” Trump wanted Pence to reject electoral votes for Joe Biden from several battleground states and send them back to state legislatures to consider whether he actually won them. When the president and the vice president “discuss their official responsibilities,” Roberts says, “they engage in official conduct.” The government therefore has to overcome a presumption of immunity, which means the district court must consider whether prosecuting Trump based on these conversations would impermissibly intrude on executive authority.

Other allegations involve Trump’s interactions with state officials and private parties. Trump tried to persuade state officials that the election results had been tainted by systematic fraud, and his campaign enlisted “alternate” electors whom he wanted state legislators to recognize instead of the Biden slates.

Those actions, Trump maintained, were “official” because he was trying to ensure the integrity of a federal election. To the contrary, Special Counsel Jack Smith argued, Trump was trying to undermine the integrity of the election, and he did so in service of his interests as a political candidate, not as part of his presidential duties. According to the Supreme Court, the district court therefore must determine, as an initial matter, “whether Trump’s conduct in this area qualifies as official or unofficial.”

Finally, the indictment cites Trump’s behavior on January 6, 2021, the day his supporters, inspired by his phony grievance, invaded the U.S. Capitol, interrupting the congressional tally of electoral votes. Trump’s conduct that day consisted mainly of his speech at the pre-riot “Stop the Steal” rally and various tweets. Roberts notes that the president has “extraordinary power to speak to his fellow citizens and on their behalf.” Generally speaking, his public communications therefore “are likely to fall comfortably within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.” Whether Trump’s communications counted as official acts, Roberts says, depends on the “content and context of each,” requiring “factbound analysis” by the district court.”

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“The majority says Trump cannot be prosecuted for urging the Justice Department to embrace his stolen-election fantasy because such conversations fell within his “conclusive and preclusive” authority to enforce federal law. But the president is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, which suggests that orders to the military, whether they involve assassination or a coup, likewise trigger absolute immunity. The president has plenary authority to issue pardons, which suggests impeachment might be the only remedy if he takes a bribe in exchange for granting one.

That remedy, as Roberts notes in rejecting Trump’s interpretation of the Impeachment Judgments Clause, could be foreclosed by timing or a lack of political will. If a president abuses his powers toward the end of his term (as happened in this case), resigns immediately afterward, or conceals his crimes well enough that they do not come to light until after he has left office, impeachment will not be a viable option, and his prosecution could be blocked by “absolute” or “presumptive” immunity, leaving no way to hold him accountable.

Roberts glides over such possibilities, focusing instead on the threat to presidential authority that allowing prosecution for “official acts” could pose. One of the charges against Trump, for example, alleges that he defrauded the United States, which is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison under 18 USC 371. Section 371, Roberts notes, “is a broadly worded criminal statute” that can cover “any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of Government.” Since “virtually every President is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law,” he says, “an enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous President violated that broad statute.”

Without immunity, such prosecutions of former presidents “could quickly become routine,” Roberts worries. “The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid. Ignoring those risks, the dissents are instead content to leave the preservation of our system of separated powers up to the good faith of prosecutors.””

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“Barrett disagrees with the majority’s holding that “the Constitution limits the introduction of protected conduct as evidence in a criminal prosecution of a President, beyond the limits afforded by executive privilege.” In a bribery case, for example, the official act that a president allegedly performed in exchange for money would be clearly relevant in establishing his guilt. “Excluding from trial any mention of the official act connected to the bribe would hamstring the prosecution,” Barrett writes. “To make sense of charges alleging a quid pro quo, the jury must be allowed to hear about both the quid and the quo, even if the quo, standing alone, could not be a basis for the President’s criminal liability.”

In response, Roberts says “the prosecutor may point to the public record to show the fact that the President performed the official act” and may submit “evidence of what the President allegedly demanded, received, accepted, or agreed to receive or accept in return for being influenced in the performance of the act.” But the prosecutor may not offer “testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself.””

https://reason.com/2024/07/01/supreme-courts-presidential-immunity-ruling-could-shield-outrageous-abuses-of-power/

Determined To Avoid Presidential Paralysis, SCOTUS Endorses Presidential Impunity

Posted on August 2, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Both sides in the case agreed that a former president can be prosecuted for “unofficial acts,” a point that Chief Justice John Roberts affirmed in his majority opinion. But Roberts added that a former president is “absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.”
It is not clear exactly which conduct falls into that “exclusive sphere,” although Roberts said conversations in which Trump urged the Justice Department to investigate his bogus claims of systematic election fraud clearly did. Adding to the uncertainty, the majority said even “official acts” outside “the core” of a president’s duties merit “at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution,” which the government can overcome only if it “can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.'”

The strictness of that test, combined with the lack of clarity about which acts are “official,” suggests that the distinction between “absolute” and “presumptive” immunity is apt to dissolve in practice. And even if it proves meaningful, the Court said absolute immunity might ultimately be required for all conduct “within the outer perimeter” of a president’s “official responsibility.”

Under the majority’s reasoning, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a president “will be insulated from criminal prosecution” when he “uses his official powers in any way.” That shield, Sotomayor said, would extend to a president who “orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” who “organizes a military coup to hold onto power,” who “takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon,” or who insists that the Justice Department use fabricated evidence in a criminal case.

Instead of explaining why immunity would not apply in such situations, Roberts faulted Sotomayor for “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” He dismissed the threat posed by lawless presidents because he was focused on the supposed need to protect “an energetic executive” from the threat of criminal liability.

As Sotomayor noted, however, presidents have been operating under that threat for a long time. “Every sitting President,” she wrote, “has so far believed himself under the threat of criminal liability after his term in office and nevertheless boldly fulfilled the duties of his office.”

Former President Richard Nixon, who did not suffer from a notable lack of executive energy, evidently shared that long-standing assumption. After he resigned amid the Watergate scandal, Nixon accepted a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford, that covered any federal offenses he may have committed as president.

According to the proposed articles of impeachment, those offenses included many acts that would count as “official” in Roberts’ book, such as “false or misleading public statements,” misuse of the CIA and the IRS, and interference with an FBI investigation. If Nixon was immune from prosecution for those acts, his pardon is a bit of a puzzle.

As that episode illustrates, we need not conjure “extreme hypotheticals” to understand the danger of a president who feels unbound by the law. In the real world, the risk of presidential paralysis pales beside the risk of presidential impunity.”

https://reason.com/2024/07/10/determined-to-avoid-presidential-paralysis-scotus-endorses-presidential-impunity/

Why does Kamala Harris want to be president?

Posted on July 31, 2024July 31, 2024 by Lone Candle

“What Harris’s career has made clear is that she’s more likely to pursue incremental progress than big, ambitious ideas. That’s why if elected, it’s likely that her administration would simply be an extension of the current one rather than a disruption.
On the campaign trail this week, several priorities have come into focus, with the economy and affordability still at the top of the list. Harris continues to talk about prioritizing the middle class, just as Biden did: “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said at her first major campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

To support that swath of Americans, improving the care economy — those services that focus on children and the elderly — could be one of the major policy areas she may come to prioritize.

She would zero in on a straightforward policy agenda, said Carmel Martin, who served as the vice president’s domestic policy adviser from 2022 to 2023: a focus on “economic progress while bringing down inflation, expanding access to services that people need — health care being at the front of the line — and protecting reproductive rights.”

Harris has already shown signs of this focus, saying in a campaign address on Monday that she believes “in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every person can buy a home, start a family, and build wealth; and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” All of these stances are essentially what Biden has pitched before.

The fact that Harris has shown she’s not a hardened ideologue means that she can be swayed by political headwinds, giving social movements an opportunity to push various agendas.

Some of the country’s most transformational legislation, for example, didn’t come directly from presidents who were ideological hardliners, but rather from presidents who were willing to listen to social movements and public sentiment — as was the case during the Civil Rights Era.”

https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/362619/kamala-harris-president-vision-political-ideology-2024-election

Project 2025 Is Everywhere. Here’s What It Means.

Posted on July 29, 2024July 29, 2024 by Lone Candle

Project 2025 Is Everywhere. Here’s What It Means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vl73pL0t4M

What J.D. Vance really believes

Posted on July 16, 2024July 16, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.”

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“This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law.
“You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares.

The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case, Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears.

For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration.

J.D. Vance is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps, are justified in response. He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”

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“J.D. Vance wasn’t always like this.

He grew up poor in Middletown, Ohio — escaping a difficult childhood to make it to Yale Law and, subsequently, to the lucrative world of venture capital. This narrative served as the backbone of his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, that turned into a mega-bestseller: a book that seemed to explain Trump’s appeal to America’s downtrodden. It put Vance on the national map.

The Vance of Hillbilly Elegy was very different politically. Back then, he took a conventional conservative line on poverty, describing the working class as beset by a cultural pathology encouraged by federal handouts and the welfare state.

2016 Vance was also an ardent Trump foe. He wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation’s Highest Office,” and wrote a text to his law school roommate warning that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

Eight years later, Vance has metamorphosed into something else entirely. Today, he pitches himself as an economic populist and cosponsors legislation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren curtailing pay for failed bankers. In an even more extreme shift, he has morphed into one of Trump’s leading champions in the Senate — backing the former president to the hilt and even, at times, outpacing him in anti-democratic fervor.”

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““The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger,” McLaurin told me. “The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger” — specifically, contempt directed at Vance’s political enemies.

McLaurin’s comments suggest that Vance’s conversion to Trumpism is genuine. I’m inclined to agree, though the timing of his MAGA conversion surely is convenient: He converted to right-wing populism just in time to run for a vacant seat in Trumpy Ohio.

Ultimately, whether Vance truly believes what he’s saying is secondary to the public persona he’s chosen to adopt. Politicians are not defined by their inner lives, but the decisions that they make in public — the ones that actually affect law and policy. Those choices are deeply shaped by the constituencies they depend on and the allies they court.

And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war.

Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington, describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.

Vance is also an open admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing politician who has systematically torn his country’s democracy apart. Vance praised Orbán’s approach to higher education in particular, saying he “made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” The policies in question involve using national dollars to impose state controls over universities, turning them into vehicles for disseminating the government line.

In a profile of Vance, Politico reporter Ian Ward quotes multiple leading Republican figures — specifically, the leaders of the faction trying to turn these postliberal ideas into practice — saying that they see Vance as a leading advocate for their cause.

Top Trump advisor (and current federal inmate) Steve Bannon told Ward that Vance is “at the nerve center of this movement.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the driving force behind Project 2025, told Ward that “he is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.””

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“There is little doubt that Vance will continue in this role if elected vice president. He would enable all of Trump’s worst instincts, and put a brake on none — deploying his considerable intellectual and intrapersonal gifts toward bending the government to Trump’s will.

In Trump’s first term, he faced considerable opposition from inside his own administration. People like Defense Secretary James Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence served as brakes on Trump’s most radical impulses, challenging or even refusing to implement his (illegal) directives.

Vance’s ascendance represents the death of this “adults in the room” model. Backed by people drawn from the lists of loyal staffers being prepared by places like Heritage, Vance would not only support Trump’s radical impulses but seems likely to spearhead efforts to implement them.

He would be a direct conduit from the shadowy world of far-right influencers, where Curtis Yarvin is a respected voice and Viktor Orbán a role model, straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean described himself as hailing from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” If the GOP under Trump has indeed evolved into an authoritarian party, then Vance hails from its authoritarian wing.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/360283/jd-vance-trump-vp-vice-president-authoritarian

Black Voters in This City Could Determine 2024. And It’s Not Looking Good for Biden.

Posted on July 14, 2024July 14, 2024 by Lone Candle

“Black voters in Milwaukee. An influential bloc that can determine if the state remains blue or flips this fall, these voters have serious and lingering doubts about Biden and whether he’s delivered on his promises to them. There’s no danger that Donald Trump will carry this historically Democratic city in November. But there is a considerable risk that an anemic showing in Milwaukee could cost Biden this critical swing state — and possibly the election.
Biden’s Milwaukee problem is a distillation of the challenges facing his reelection campaign nationally: In traditionally Democratic redoubts, polls suggest alarmingly low levels of support among Black and Latino voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s underperformance in Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Detroit’s Wayne County — the urban centers that power Democratic fortunes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — enabled Trump’s surprise Rust Belt victories. This year, signs of a lack of enthusiasm for Biden in those places among Black voters is giving rise to fears of a repeat.

In Wisconsin, there isn’t much margin of error: The last two presidential elections here have been decided by less than 25,000 votes each. A low turnout among Black voters in Milwaukee — or a diminished winning margin for Biden — would deal a significant blow to his chances of carrying the state and its 10 electoral votes.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/21/biden-black-voters-enthusiasm-gap-milwaukee-00163496