The Trump Presidency 13: The (James) Baker's Dozen

[Lurch]

Actually there is something fundamentally wrong with the USA approach, and that is that you decide on who to place on your supreme court by their political afilliation.

Darned tootin'! This baffles the hell outta me. When the highest court of the land is a battleground of partisanship, it can *only* exacerbate a yawning chasm between "us and them." Just goddamned insane to permit this.

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

Actually there is something fundamentally wrong with the USA approach, and that is that you decide on who to place on your supreme court by their political afilliation.

It wasn't like that until very recently. A 60-vote majority was required, rather than a simple majority, so every candidate had to be acceptable to members of both parties. Only Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were elected by simple majority. Of course, I wait with bated breath for when a president with a D tries to suggest a candidate, and suddenly a 60-vote majority must be accomplished again...

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Actually there is something fundamentally wrong with the USA approach, and that is that you decide on who to place on your supreme court by their political afilliation.

That is pretty much unavoidable in most systems.
But there should be a high bar for qualification.

 

[Aridas]

Wow.

So what is the reasoning that might be used when asking the courts for a new primary if a new election is required? I mean I know why they want it, but what reasons will they give for why they should get it?

Well, the update there is that a new election is required. Harris went up on stage, got through the ascertaining the facts bit with lots of "I KNOW NOTHING," then bowed out with a "I think there should be a new election, but my health isn't good enough to continue this hearing" to avoid being torn to shreds in the cross examination. Then there was a unanimous vote to have a new election. Sorry, but I don't know what the GOP's excuse will be to redo the primaries, exactly, especially given that I don't know the specific rules in play there.

With that said, there are a couple more things to add that might be rather important.

Day 4 dawned this morning with equally stunning revelations — that Harris’s attorneys had failed to produce that email in response to the State Board’s December 2018 subpoena for all evidence related to Harris’s involvement with Dowless. Instead, they produced it only moments before Harris Jr. took the stand of his own accord yesterday to testify against his father. Democratic attorney Marc Elias, representing Harris’s opponent, Dan McCready, then elicited the further shocker that Harris’s attorneys had also failed to produce evidence from Harris campaign staffers’ email accounts, offering as their excuse that everyone on the Harris campaign, from the campaign manager on down, were all subcontractors employed by the campaign’s consultant, Red Dome Group, and not by the Harris campaign, and thus were judged by Harris’s attorneys to not fall within the scope of the subpoena the campaign had received.

And... We've got evidence that Harris' wife was communicating directly with Dowless about the election matters.

So... yeah. If this quietly ends here for Harris, we can relatively safely conclude that there's very serious problems with the legal system.

That his boy might have a little extra help getting elected?

Interesting theory, if that’s what you’re getting at.

I guess I thought it was just obstructing for obstructing’s sake, but who knows?

That's what I'm getting at, yes. It's a wild theory, of course. He could've just blocked Obama for the sake of doing that, hoping that the next President would be from his clan, but it's not impossible that he was very confident that this would happen.

I would dare say "Not so wild" given what looks like the sudden spike in donations to (mostly) McConnell and (to a lesser extent) the Republican Party from Russian Americans who were, unsurprisingly, quite connected with the Russian oligarchs around that time period and McConnell's later threats to the President in response to announcements about Russian interference that got the eventual announcement watered down significantly. A bit tangentially, there's also been mention before about how Russia was rather successful far beyond its expectations in some of its attempts to gain blackmail on DC politicians.

That he was obstructing as a political strategy is a given. Whether he was also in Russia's pocket is... uncertain and can't be ruled out easily.

Trump Tweets

THE WALL IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW!

Quote Tweet
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
We have just built this powerful Wall in New Mexico. Completed on January 30, 2019 – 47 days ahead of schedule! Many miles more now under construction! #FinishTheWall

Yup, reconstruction. Reconstruction that had nothing to do with the recent compromise budget.

You can't push against air, many people have tried, it just doesn't work. But you can push against A WALL because WALLS WORK. WE NEED TO BUILD A WALL IN SPACE TO GET TO MARS!

WHAT? NO! WE NEED TO BUILD A WALL IN SPACE TO KEEP THOSE ILLEGAL MARTIAN ALIENS OUT!

Actually there is something fundamentally wrong with the USA approach, and that is that you decide on who to place on your supreme court by their political afilliation.

That is wrong, yes. Even the old 60 vote threshold was only a limiting factor on the partisanship, not at all an elimination of it. The norms addressed that, though, to a fair extent. Until the Republicans decided to ignore them, which led to the reduction to the simple majority threshold.

 

[WilliamSeger]

There’s yet another Trump administration scandal brewing. And it’s a doozy

Spoiler alert: It's the scheme Flynn was involved in to build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia. Which reminds me, we still don't know what Mueller got from Flynn for that sweet plea deal.

We begin with a company called IP3 International, described as “a private company that has assembled a consortium of U.S. companies to build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia.” IP3, which has an all-star team of former generals and federal officials on its staff and board, was pushing hard on the Trump administration to approve its plan to build these reactors despite the lengthy process required to transfer nuclear technology abroad. And according to the Oversight Committee’s report, they had help:

A key proponent of this nuclear effort was General Michael Flynn, who described himself in filings as an “advisor” to a subsidiary of IP3, IronBridge Group Inc., from June 2016 to December 2016 — at the same time he was serving as Donald Trump’s national security advisor during the presidential campaign and the presidential transition. According to the whistleblowers, General Flynn continued to advocate for the adoption of the IP3 plan not only during the transition, but even after he joined the White House as President Trump’s National Security Advisor.

So Flynn is working with this company while he’s also working for the Trump campaign and transition. He then gets into the White House and has the chance to push the company’s plan to build dozens of nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia.

...
Career staff warned that any transfer of nuclear technology must comply with the Atomic Energy Act, that the United States and Saudi Arabia would need to reach a 123 Agreement, and that these legal requirements could not be circumvented. Mr. Harvey reportedly ignored these warnings and insisted that the decision to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia had already been made.

 

[BobTheCoward]

It wasn't like that until very recently. A 60-vote majority was required, rather than a simple majority, so every candidate had to be acceptable to members of both parties. Only Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were elected by simple majority. Of course, I wait with bated breath for when a president with a D tries to suggest a candidate, and suddenly a 60-vote majority must be accomplished again...

Do you know when the 60 vote requirement was put in place?

 

[Fast Eddie B]

Hundreds of thousands would show up to see him publicly flogged and hanged on Fifth Avenue.

Enough with the Mussolini comparisons!

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Actually there is something fundamentally wrong with the USA approach, and that is that you decide on who to place on your supreme court by their political afilliation.

The weird thing is how well it's worked up until now. No one seems to have realized we were on the honor system until one party stopped being honorable.

 

[BobTheCoward]

The weird thing is how well it's worked up until now. No one seems to have realized we were on the honor system until one party stopped being honorable.

What makes you think the judges were less contentious before?

 

[newyorkguy]

Supreme Court nominations have reflected the ongoing battle between 'business as usual' conservatives and 'new era' progressives. It didn't start with Kavanaugh. There was Clement Haynsworth, a Nixon nominee in 1969.

Labor and civil rights groups, citing what they denounced as unfavorable rulings, fought the Haynsworth nomination while the Nixon Administration waged a strenuous campaign of cajoling and arm-twisting to win the Senate's approval. The battle pitted the Nixon Administration and conservative Republicans who favored Judge Haynsworth against the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an alliance of 125 religious, labor, welfare and civil rights groups. In the end, the nomination was rejected 55 to 45, with 17 Republican senators voting no. It was the 10th time in the nation's history that a Supreme Court nominee had been rejected.

Months later the Senate rejected a second Nixon nominee, G. Harrold Carswell, also a staunch Southern conservative. Link

There was a huge battle over Robert Bork in 1987, a Reagan nominee.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan got the chance to appoint the third Supreme Court justice of his presidency. But while the first two justices had sailed through the confirmation process, the third appointment turn out to be much, much more difficult. The outcome would have far-reaching consequences for the Court and the country. A die-hard fan of constitutional “originalism,” Bork rejected what he saw as the Court’s liberal judicial activism, including key precedents like the “one person, one vote” principle of legislative representation, civil rights legislation and cases involving privacy rights. In Bork’s view, the U.S. Constitution included no right to privacy...Democrats controlled Congress at the time, and the Senate ended up voting against Bork’s confirmation by a vote of 58-42, the biggest margin of any failed Supreme Court nominee in history. Link

Robert Bork especially became a rallying point for many conservatives, some of whom hotly resent to this day that Bork's appointment was turned away in the Senate.

 

[acbytesla]

Enough with the Mussolini comparisons!

No one said anything about hanging him upside down.

 

[BobTheCoward]

For those harping on the 60 vote majority as important....I'm not sure it was a 60 vote requirement in 1956....for some obvious reasons.

 

[acbytesla]

Robert Bork especially became a rallying point for many conservatives, some of whom hotly resent to this day that Bork's appointment was turned away in the Senate.

I never understood why they thought Bork would get through. He was thought of as a weasel with no ethics at all. He was the Solicitor General that fired the Watergate Special Prosecutor after AG Elliot Richardson and DAG Willam Ruckleshaus refused and resigned.

 

[newyorkguy]

What we're seeing in the U.S. is not unique. Adam Schiff has pointed out this is part of a worldwide trend, the rise of right-wing populism that largely rejects the norms of democracy. That Trump has certainly exacerbated and amplified it but you see the rise many other places. From Brazil to Great Britain to Germany and even in the Netherlands where the far-right party of candidate Geert Wilders "is now the second largest party." Link

I still remember hearing Newt Gingrich say, twenty-five years ago, that this is no longer politics as usual, this is war. A war for America's heart and soul. A war to determine what kind of a nation we want to be. Based on that belief, advocates can and do justify any type of tactics. It's the 'greater good' argument.

 

[Belz...]

What we're seeing in the U.S. is not unique. Adam Schiff has pointed out this is part of a worldwide trend, the rise of right-wing populism that largely rejects the norms of democracy.

It's eerily ironic, in a way, that populism is anti-democratic.

 

[newyorkguy]

We seem to be in for a rough ride. This was written by the German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk, published in The Guardian a year ago.

Citizens have long been disillusioned with politics; now, they have grown restless, angry, even disdainful. Party systems have long seemed frozen; now, authoritarian populists are on the rise around the world, from America to Europe, and from Asia to Australia. Voters have long disliked particular parties, politicians or governments; now, many of them have become fed up with liberal democracy itself.

Citizens are less committed to democracy than they once were; while more than two-thirds of older Americans say that it is essential to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than a third of younger Americans do. They are also more open to authoritarian alternatives; two decades ago, for example, 25% of Britons said that they liked the idea of “a strongman ruler who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”; today, 50% of them do. And these attitudes are increasingly reflected in our politics: from Great Britain to the US, and from Germany to Hungary, respect for democratic rules and norms has precipitously declined. No longer the only game in town, democracy is now deconsolidating.

That conclusion, I know, is hard to swallow. Link

 

[WilliamSeger]

It's eerily ironic, in a way, that populism is anti-democratic.

"Right-wing populism" isn't populism. Populism is "the people versus the elite" whereas the right-wing version is "people like me versus everyone else."

 

[Belz...]

"Right-wing populism" isn't populism. Populism is "the people versus the elite" whereas the right-wing version is "people like me versus everyone else."

The line between the two is often blurry.

 

[newyorkguy]

I don't like to use Wikipedia as a source but in this case I will. Mainly, because it provides a fairly clear definition of right-wing populism and because it has a reputation as a fairly neutral platform.

Right-wing populism is a political ideology which combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. The rhetoric often consists of anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment and speaking for the common people. Link

 

[WilliamSeger]

I don't like to use Wikipedia as a source but in this case I will. Mainly, because it provides a fairly clear definition of right-wing populism and because it has a reputation as a fairly neutral platform.

Right-wing populism is a political ideology which combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. The rhetoric often consists of anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment and speaking for the common people.

Unless those "common people" are a different race or ethnicity or nationality -- that's where the right-wing politics overcomes the populist rhetoric.