By making it extremely hard to gain standing, the Supreme Court has ruled that a president can blatantly act illegally and steal Congress’s power. The Court has deeply damaged a basic tenet of the Constitution by allowing a president to use governmental power in cases where he clearly has no such power. If the president wants to do something outside his core powers, he must have Congress authorize that power and spending. The Constitution is black and white on this, but most “Conservatives” on the Supreme Court don’t care.
Taking the Fifth is a basic Constitutional right and not evidence of guilt. Republicans have made clear that they would like Fauci to be prosecuted. His pardon doesn’t protect him from state prosecutions or federal prosecutions for anything that happened after the date of the pardon. When you have an administration and a party that abuses justice with lawfare, it makes more sense for people to plead the fifth.
I’d be nice for Fauci to answer questions in case we could learn anything, or be reminded of something, useful or interesting about what happened during Covid. But, the Republican Senators weren’t there to learn, they were there to grandstand, humiliate, and accuse.
Taking the Fifth is basic defense attorney advice that any would give Fauci in that situation.
Parties can now coordinate with candidates by using money in ways that they were previously banned from doing.
Attempts to prevent corruption with campaign finance laws has failed. We may need to rethink it. Money has found a way to affect politics even with campaign finance laws. If anything, the restrictions have made the super wealthy more powerful!
Making campaign finance more complicated with more regulation makes it harder for the smaller players to legally take part. The super wealthy have the means to figure out ways around regulation.
At the nation’s founding, the Bible was not the most quoted text. This claim comes from a study that includes a lot of sermons reprinted on pamphlets, so, every time a religious sermon was printed on a pamphlet, which happened a lot back then, that counted as quoting the Bible. Additionally, these weren’t founding fathers quoting the Bible, but preachers preaching.
The most cited authors at the time of the founding were: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.
The period when the US Constitution was drafted has the lowest church attendance in US history.
The Federalists did not cite the Bible at all around the founding. The Anti-Federalists cited the Bible as nine percent of their citations. The Federalists, those who wrote the Constitution, did not cite the Bible when arguing for the Constitution. They believed in separation of church and state.
Christianity is a deep part of American culture and history, but people falsely exaggerate its direct role in the founding of the country.
Many state governments violated the principles of separation of state and church, but when the founders, who were sent by the states, came together to make a Constitution, they left such violations out of the new federal government and forbade acts that would create an established religion.
Obama was interested in military force in Syria after Syria crossed Obama’s redline, but Obama wanted authorization from Congress. Congress didn’t want to be on the record one way or the other, and told Obama to act if he wanted to act.
Then for Libya, some of the Congressmen who said they didn’t want to be on the record and they wanted Obama to act if he wanted to, complained that Obama didn’t get authorization for Libya.
Not only were Congress people derelict of their duty to discuss and vote on military action, but they dishonestly portrayed their true feelings to the public.
Former US Colonel Peter Mansoor says Trump thought Iran would surrender just from air attacks and didn’t have a plan for if they didn’t. He also said the war is unconstitutional, and that while a part of him is happy to see Iran get pain after killing hundreds of Americans in the Iraq war, most of him worries that Trump doesn’t have a plan and has opened a can of worms.
The US military is awesome, but I’m skeptical it will achieve substantial war aims. Killing a lot of people and destroying a lot of equipment is a means to an end. It means very little if we don’t have a long-term major success. I’m skeptical the US and Israel will get there, but I hope they do.