[hrothgar]

Excellent article here

https://www.nytimes....mmentsContainer

[Winstonm]

Chas_P, on 2019-May-14, 18:10, said:

Well said Winston. I agree.

Then why is it you seemingly continue to support the "outlaw" Republican party? It is not that the Democratic party is without some blame and responsibility, but in fairness the Democrats were responding to the hard right shift and total lack of cooperation that began with Newt Gingrich in 1994 and intensified with the creation and activation of the Tea Party faction in 2009.

I am not saying a conservative needs to join the Democratic party - not at all; however, a conservative who believes in American democracy and the American Republic should be repudiating the Republican party and lobbying to start a new, democratic conservative party that is willing to compromise and acknowledges the opposition party as valid and necessary.

[y66]

From The Supreme Court’s Worst Decision of My Tenure by John Paul Stevens, former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and former occasional player at the northern Virginia bridge club:

Quote

District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution, is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench.

The text of the Second Amendment unambiguously explains its purpose: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” When it was adopted, the country was concerned that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several states.

Throughout most of American history there was no federal objection to laws regulating the civilian use of firearms. When I joined the Supreme Court in 1975, both state and federal judges accepted the Court’s unanimous decision in United States v. Miller as having established that the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms was possessed only by members of the militia and applied only to weapons used by the militia. In that case, the Court upheld the indictment of a man who possessed a short-barreled shotgun, writing, “In the absence of any evidence that the possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.”

Colonial history contains many examples of firearm regulations in urban areas that imposed obstacles to their use for protection of the home. Boston, Philadelphia, and New York—the three largest cities in America at that time—all imposed restrictions on the firing of guns in the city limits. Boston enacted a law in 1746 prohibiting the “discharge” of any gun or pistol that was later revived in 1778; Philadelphia prohibited firing a gun or setting off fireworks without a governor’s special license; and New York banned the firing of guns for three days surrounding New Year’s Day. Those and other cities also regulated the storage of gunpowder. Boston’s gunpowder law imposed a 10-pound fine on any person who took any loaded firearm into any dwelling house or barn within the town. Most, if not all, of those regulations would violate the Second Amendment as it was construed in the 5–4 decision that Justice Antonin Scalia announced in Heller on June 26, 2008.

Until Heller, the invalidity of Second Amendment–based objections to firearms regulations had been uncontroversial. The first two federal laws directly restricting the civilian use and possession of firearms—the 1927 act prohibiting mail delivery of handguns and the 1934 act prohibiting the possession of sawed-off shotguns and machine guns—were enacted over minor Second Amendment objections that were dismissed by the vast majority of legislators participating in the debates. After reviewing many of the same sources that are discussed at greater length by Scalia in his majority opinion in Heller, the Miller Court unanimously concluded that the Second Amendment did not apply to the possession of a firearm that did not have “some relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” And in 1980, in a footnote to an opinion upholding a conviction for receipt of a firearm, the Court effectively affirmed Miller, writing: “[T]he Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm that does not have ‘some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.’”

So well settled was the issue that, speaking on the PBS NewsHour in 1991, the retired Chief Justice Warren Burger described the National Rifle Association’s lobbying in support of an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment in these terms: “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Even if the lobbyists who oppose gun-control regulation actually do endorse the dubious proposition that the Second Amendment was intended to limit the federal power to regulate the civilian use of handguns—that Burger incorrectly accused them of “fraud”—I find it incredible that policy makers in a democratic society have failed to impose more effective regulations on the ownership and use of firearms than they have.

And even if there were some merit to the legal arguments advanced in the Heller case, all could foresee the negative consequences of the decision, which should have provided my colleagues with the justification needed to apply stare decisis to Miller. At a minimum, it should have given them greater pause before announcing such a radical change in the law that would greatly tie the hands of state and national lawmakers endeavoring to find solutions to the gun problem in America. Their twin failure—first, the misreading of the intended meaning of the Second Amendment, and second, the failure to respect settled precedent—represents the worst self-inflicted wound in the Court’s history.

It also represents my greatest disappointment as a member of the Court. After the oral argument and despite the narrow vote at our conference about the case, I continued to think it possible to persuade either Justice Anthony Kennedy or Justice Clarence Thomas to change his vote. During the drafting process, I had frequent conversations with Kennedy, as well as occasional discussions with Thomas, about historical issues, because I thought each of them had an open mind about the case. In those discussions—particularly those with Kennedy—I now realize that I failed to emphasize sufficiently the human aspects of the issue as providing unanswerable support for the stare decisis argument for affirmance. After all, Kennedy had been one of the three decisive votes that had saved Roe v. Wade from being overruled in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Before the argument, I had decided that stare decisis provided a correct and sufficient basis for upholding the challenged gun regulation, but I nonetheless asked my especially competent law clerk, Kate Shaw, to make a thorough study of the merits of the argument that an independent review of the historical materials would lead to the same result. I wanted that specific study to help me decide which argument to feature in my dissent, which I planned to complete and circulate before Scalia completed his opinion for the majority. Shaw convinced me that Miller had been correctly decided; accordingly, I decided to feature both arguments in my dissent, which we were able to circulate on April 28, 2008, five weeks before Scalia circulated the majority opinion on June 2, 2008. In the cover memorandum for my probable dissent, I wrote:

The enclosed memorandum explains the basis for my firm belief that the Second Amendment does not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of the federal government to regulate the non-military use or possession of firearms. I have decided to take the unusual step of circulating the initial draft of a probable dissent before [Scalia] circulates his majority because I fear the members of the majority have not yet adequately considered the unusual importance of their decision.

While I think a fair reading of history provides overwhelming support for Warren Burger’s view of the merits, even if we assume that the present majority is correct, I submit that they have not given adequate consideration to the certain impact of their proposed decision on this Court’s role in preserving the rule of law. We have profound differences over our role in areas of the law such as the Eighth Amendment and substantive due process, but I believe we all agree that there are areas of policy-making in which judges have a special obligation to let the democratic process run the show …

What has happened that could possibly justify such a massive change in the law? The text of the amendment has not changed. The history leading up to the adoption of the amendment has not changed … There has been a change in the views of some law professors, but I assume there are also some professors out there who think Congress does not have the authority to authorize a national bank, or to regulate small firms engaged in the production of goods for sale in other states, or to enact a graduated income tax. In my judgment, none of the arguments advanced by respondents or their numerous amici justify judicial entry into a quintessential area of policy-making in which there is no special need or justification for judicial supervision.

This is not a case in which either side of the policy debate can be characterized as an “insular minority” in need of special protection from the judiciary. On the contrary, there is a special risk that the action of the judiciary will be perceived as the product of policy arguments advanced by an unusually powerful political force. Because there is still time to avoid a serious and totally unnecessary self-inflicted wound, I urge each of the members of the majority to give careful consideration to the impact of this decision on the future of this institution when weighing the strength of the arguments I have set forth in what I hope will not be a dissent.

In the end, of course, beating Scalia to the punch did not change the result, but I do think it forced him to significantly revise his opinion to respond to the points I raised in my dissent. And although I failed to persuade Kennedy to change his vote, I think our talks may have contributed to his insisting on some important changes before signing on to the Court’s opinion.

That’s cold comfort. I have written in other contexts that an amendment to the Constitution to overrule Heller is desperately needed to prevent tragedies such as the massacre of 20 grammar-school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, from ever happening again. But such tragedies have indeed happened again. In the course of writing the chapter of my memoir that discusses Heller, on October 1, 2017, a gunman fired from the 32nd floor of a hotel in Las Vegas, killing at least 58 people and injuring more than 500 more who were attending an outdoor concert. I had not yet finished the chapter when another mass shooting occurred, this one involving the death of 26 people—including three generations of a single family—at a church on November 5, 2017, in Sutherland Springs, Texas. More shootings have happened since.

We can't pin this on Trump or the fact that the courts are now even more stacked with judges whose actions are even more likely to be influenced by "policy arguments advanced by an unusually powerful political force". We get the government we vote for and vote to let others pay for.

[Winstonm]

A critical interview:

Quote

There is a lot more at stake here than oversight of the Russia investigation or even oversight of Donald Trump. If Donald Trump, through release obstructionist tactics, can thwart congressional oversight, it means that every president who follows him can do the same. And that will fundamentally alter the balance of power in a way that will make it far more difficult to ferret out corruption and malfeasance of any future president

.

That last line is crucial:" And that will fundamentally alter the balance of power in a way that will make it far more difficult to ferret out corruption and malfeasance of any future president"

Another way to say it: it will open the door for currupt oligarchs to run the government without a means to stop them.

[y66]

Winstonm, on 2019-May-15, 12:21, said:

A critical interview:

That last line is crucial:" And that will fundamentally alter the balance of power in a way that will make it far more difficult to ferret out corruption and malfeasance of any future president"

Another way to say it: it will open the door for currupt oligarchs to run the government without a means to stop them.

Susan Hennessey at Lawfare posed this question a few weeks ago: What would it mean, in the light of the compelling evidence Mueller has placed before Congress [and subsequent defiance of Congress by Trump], if Congress does not exercise their duty (which is discretionary) to pursue impeachment?

This morning, Nate Silver asked Would Democrats Really Face A Backlash If They Impeached Trump? and proceeded to "unpack the electoral politics of impeachment in more detail," concluding thusly:

Quote

To emphasize the obvious: The electoral impact of impeachment is really difficult to predict. It’s not clear that an impeachment push would hurt Democrats electorally (or help them).

So that leaves Democrats with an underlying question: How strongly do they believe in the case for impeaching Trump, electoral considerations aside? As long as Republicans remain behind Trump, impeachment would be a symbolic action to some extent. But it’s still a powerful and important symbolic act.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-May-15, 12:48, said:

Susan Hennessey at Lawfare posed this question a few weeks ago: What would it mean, in the light of the compelling evidence Mueller has placed before Congress [and subsequent defiance of Congress by Trump], if Congress does not exercise their duty (which is discretionary) to pursue impeachment?

This morning, Nate Silver asked Would Democrats Really Face A Backlash If They Impeached Trump? and proceeded to "unpack the electoral politics of impeachment in more detail," concluding thusly:

If one house of Congress is all the Democrats can manage to win, then there is no effective way to stop the onslaught of Individual-1. Even in the unlikely case where the current SCOTUS disagrees with him, it is just as likely the president would simply ignore the law and dare someone to stop him. He will push until someone pushes back harder. It looks like that responsibility is being left to the voters.

I believe it is imperative to understand the importance of AG Barr's belief in the unitary executive theory and how, when the head of Justice assumes the president is above the law, leaves a void that can only be filled by impeachment and removal or norms, norms being a joke to a demagogue.

Really, the only defense is overwhelming repudiation at the voting booth, over and over and over, from city dog catcher to US president.

[andrei]

cherdano, on 2019-May-14, 20:12, said:

Quote

Yes they are! And with cognitive abilities somewhat greater than AOC and Mazie Hirono combined.

Wow! Yay! What a cool reply - that will school the libs!!! You are such a genius!

Is his post any different than yours:

cherdano, on 2019-May-14, 11:23, said:

The problem of course is that this exposes the fraud that is Ben Shapiro. Since he is apparently good at winning debates with random college students, he thinks of himself as this intellectual philosophical giant, when in fact he cannot rigorously defend any of his views when questioned about them from a mildly surprising angle.

I guess you are both geniuses.

[hrothgar]

andrei, on 2019-May-15, 16:25, said:

I guess you are both geniuses.

Andrei, it probably just feels that way to you...

[johnu]

Quote

andrei, on 2019-May-05, 13:29, said:

LOL, I might be from Ukraine.

Were you angry or upset when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, or as Putin called it, self determination for Crimea (to join Russia)?

If Putin decides he wants all of Ukraine, I'm sure Dennison will have no objection to his puppet master helping to free the Ukrainian people. Then you can call yourself Russian

[barmar]

y66, on 2019-May-15, 09:13, said:

We can't pin this on Trump or the fact that the courts are now even more stacked with judges whose actions are even more likely to be influenced by "policy arguments advanced by an unusually powerful political force". We get the government we vote for and vote to let others pay for.

And "Citizens United" is another bad SCOTUS decision that paves the way for more such issues. We're no longer getting the government that "We, the people" want, we get the government that the 1% want.

[Winstonm]

barmar, on 2019-May-16, 09:27, said:

And "Citizens United" is another bad SCOTUS decision that paves the way for more such issues. We're no longer getting the government that "We, the people" want, we get the government that the 1% want.

Well, if you are a history buff (which I am not but have delved into as it feels like a necessity), you find that the good ol' USA was only a democratic Republic for about 48 years (1965-2013).

Prior to that small slice of time, the compromise of 1877 had led to virtual total disenfranchisement of black voters in the entire south, which meant that the minority population of whites and the white Democratic party exercised single party minority rule for almost a century. With the SCOTUS ruling in 2013 eliminating part of the Voting Rights Act, the country has been moved back in time toward that era of white domination.

The Republican party of today is trying to piecemeal a replacement of those conditions - as much as can be tolerated by today's mores.

One of the great "mistakes" of my generation - the baby boomers - is that we thought institutional structures and norms would alleviate our need to participate. The SCOTUS would protect us, we thought. With no understanding of the threat of demagoguery succeeding, we were lulled into a false sense of security. There was no need for oversight by the people as it was done for us. We tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.

But the history of the U.S. is rife with morally horrible SCOTUS decisions, presidential overreach, graft and corruption on grand scales, but always an overarching slant to the benefit of white Americans, and at times organized and validated discrimination against non-whites.

The U.S. has had its share of white nationalist demagogues who have come close to ultimate power - Henry Ford, George Wallace, and Huey Long are but a few. Individual-1 is simply one of a long line to tap into white resentment - and for him - at just the right time against just the right opponent. (and with the help of at least one foreign government).

We are now in the most dangerous moment in US history as we have an autocratic-minded demagogue president, a complicit Senate, a SCOTUS that is questionably loyal to U.S. democracy, and most dangerous of all, an Attorney General whose personal ideology places the president with virtual monarchy powers.

There is no one left to guard the house but us.

[Winstonm]

Direct quote from the Mueller report about the motivation for firing James Comey:

Quote

“the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns”.

[johnu]

What obstruction of justice???

FLYNN’S ALLEGED OBSTRUCTION VOICEMAIL WILL ‘BE A BIG DEAL’ WHEN RELEASED, SIMILAR TO TRUMP’S ‘ACCESS HOLLYWOOD’ TAPE, EX-PROSECUTOR SAYS

Quote

Newly unsealed court records on Thursday showed that Flynn told special counsel Robert Mueller that unnamed individuals “connected to” the Trump administration or Congress allegedly attempted to influence his cooperation with the Russia probe.

“The defendant informed the government of multiple instances, both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could’ve affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation,” the filing states.

You should expect obstruction of justice and other criminal activity from people in the White House so I don't think anybody is surprised with that revelation. What intriguing is the mention that somebody in Congress (member or staff?) decided to jump into criminal obstruction of justice, not just the normal Congressional double speak.

Devon Nunes??? Richard Burr??? The suspect list is a mile long. Just about every Republican senator and congressman, and who knows how many staff are all possibilities.

[Winstonm]

johnu, on 2019-May-16, 21:32, said:

What obstruction of justice???

FLYNN’S ALLEGED OBSTRUCTION VOICEMAIL WILL ‘BE A BIG DEAL’ WHEN RELEASED, SIMILAR TO TRUMP’S ‘ACCESS HOLLYWOOD’ TAPE, EX-PROSECUTOR SAYS


You should expect obstruction of justice and other criminal activity from people in the White House so I don't think anybody is surprised with that revelation. What intriguing is the mention that somebody in Congress (member or staff?) decided to jump into criminal obstruction of justice, not just the normal Congressional double speak.

Devon Nunes??? Richard Burr??? The suspect list is a mile long. Just about every Republican senator and congressman, and who knows how many staff are all possibilities.

Lodry, I'm glad there are tapes.

[Winstonm]

POS Individual-1 is now eating his young to try to stay out of trouble:

Quote

In any case, perhaps because Sullivan asked for files that may be very damning (especially if they include the contacts Flynn had with before the election, which aren’t discussed in the Mueller Report), Donald Trump now claims he didn’t know Flynn was under a counterintelligence investigation and would have replaced him had he known.

Of course he knew. Obama warned Trump against hiring Flynn on November 10, 2016. And it’s no longer just three former Obama officials who say that. According to the Mueller Report, both Hope Hicks and Steve Bannon not only corroborate that Obama warned Trump, but their FBI testimony makes it clear that Trump was really bugged about Obama’s warning.

[Winstonm]

Finally, a Republican in Congress showing he has a spine!

Justin Amash (R - Michigan)
✔

Quote

@justinamash
Here are my principal conclusions:
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Shout out to PassedOut, as well.

[y66]

This topic is also critically important for Dems: Building the workforce of the future. Happy to see Stephen Moret will be talking about Virginia's custom workforce program with our community college system. When I was recruiting for IT, some of the best prepared kids I ever talked too had been working on projects with local companies in their last two years of college.

[Winstonm]

What Individual-1 said:

Quote

“As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions—Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother.”

What a real president would have said:

Quote

As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly pro-law, and I support the constitutionally-protected rights of women.

[rmnka447]

johnu, on 2019-May-15, 20:47, said:

If Putin decides he wants all of Ukraine, I'm sure Dennison will have no objection to his puppet master helping to free the Ukrainian people. Then you can call yourself Russian

If the Prez is so much in Putin's pocket, then why did he decide to provide the Ukraine with weapons which counterbalance Russian military strength exerted through their proxies and provide other military support that makes it difficult for Russia to overrun the Ukraine.

Those moves were something that King Barack I didn't do for fear of the Russians when such moves might have thwarted the Crimean takeover. He might have bad mouthed the Russians, but couldn't find the cajones to stand up to them.

Beside the Ukraine, the Prez has also spent considerable effort to bolster other countries that bear the brunt of the Russian threat -- specifically the Baltic states -- by providing military aid, training, and joint exercises.

[hrothgar]

Quote

Anti-money laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.

https://www.nytimes....pgtype=Homepage