July 17, 2024

Wednesday, July 17, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

#Joe is always busy.

Touch to watch the President at the NAACP in Nevada.👇

---

#Two visions of the Supreme Court.

###President Biden.

Biden Considers Pushing for Major Changes to the Supreme Court

The proposals include term limits for the justices and an enforceable code of ethics. But they would need congressional approval, which is a long shot.

President Biden is seriously considering legislative proposals that would dramatically alter the Supreme Court, including imposing term limits and an enforceable code of ethics on the justices, according to a person familiar with the ongoing discussions.

Mr. Biden’s proposals to overhaul the court, which could be unveiled in the coming weeks, would need congressional approval, something that is likely to be a long shot given Republican control of the House and the slim Democratic majority in the Senate.

The president is also considering calling for a constitutional amendment that could limit the broad presidential immunity that the court’s conservative majority backed at the end of its term this year, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the president’s deliberations have not been made public.

Mr. Biden has called the court’s ruling a “dangerous precedent” that means “that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do.” But an amendment would face even greater challenges, requiring two-thirds votes in Congress or at a convention called for by two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

The president is unlikely, however, to embrace the most radical idea pushed by progressive activists: packing the court with more liberals by expanding the number of justices from the current nine who sit on the bench. In 2023, Mr. Biden rejected that idea.
(New York Times).

###Trump.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden’s rival, former President Donald J. Trump, lashed out at the president’s ideas on social media . . .,accusing Mr. Biden and Democrats of “desperately trying to ‘Play the Ref’ by calling for an illegal and unConstitutional attack on our SACRED United States Supreme Court.”

He added: “We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country. MAGA2024!” (New York Times)

---

#Aileen Cannon dropped a bomb.

#The Dismissal of the Trump Classified Documents Case Is Deeply Dangerous.

Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to throw out serious national-security criminal charges in the classified documents case against Donald Trump is legally unsupported, ignores decades of precedent and is deeply dangerous.

At a time when Americans need to trust their institutions, her decision to declare that the appointment of the special counsel overseeing the case, Jack Smith, “violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution” will undermine that trust and the legitimacy of high-level investigations in the eyes of many Americans.

Her decision is quite unlikely to survive the tests of time, or even the appeal Mr. Smith’s office said he intends to make. But it will further delay a case that has moved so slowly under her direction that it was already virtually certain it would never go to a jury before Election Day.

Judge Cannon asserts that no law of Congress authorizes the special counsel. That is palpably false. The special counsel regulations were drafted under specific congressional laws authorizing them.

Since 1966, Congress has had a specific law, Section 515, giving the attorney general the power to commission attorneys “specially retained under authority of the Department of Justice” as “special assistant[s] to the attorney general or special attorney[s].” Another provision in that law said that a lawyer appointed by the attorney general under the law may “conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal,” that other U.S. attorneys are “authorized by law to conduct.”

Yet another part of that law, Section 533, says the attorney general can appoint officials “to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States.” These sections were specifically cited when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Mr. Smith as a special counsel. If Congress doesn’t like these laws, it can repeal them. But until then, the law is the law.

I drafted the special counsel regulations for the Justice Department to replace the Independent Counsel Act in 1999 when I worked at the department. Janet Reno, the attorney general at the time, and I then went to Capitol Hill to brief Congress on the proposed rules over a period of weeks. We met with House and Senate leaders, along with their legal staffs, as well as the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. We walked them extensively through each provision. Not one person raised a legal concern in those meetings. Indeed, Ken Starr, who was then serving as an independent counsel, told Congress that the special counsel regulations were exactly the way to go.

Eight separate judges had already rejected the claim that Judge Cannon has now endorsed (including, by the way, the judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s criminal case). It is true that one Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, recently wrote a concurring opinion in the Trump immunity case questioning the legality of the position of special counsel. No other justice joined that opinion, and even Justice Thomas did not come to the conclusions that Judge Cannon did — he simply raised “essential questions” about the office. And his questions ignored a well-trod tradition in America as well as the statutory landscape. We’ve had special counsels and special prosecutors since at least the time of President Ulysses Grant after the Civil War. That is for a simple reason: We need a system to police high-level executive branch wrongdoing, and the system can’t be run by the president and his appointees alone.

Consider the real-world implication of what Judge Cannon is saying: Under her opinion, Attorney General Garland, not a nonpartisan prosecutor like Mr. Smith, would himself be required to investigate and prosecute the case against Mr. Trump. But Mr. Garland was appointed by President Biden, Mr. Trump’s political rival. Doing so would open himself up to all sorts of accusations.

The converse is even scarier: Imagine a future president suspected of serious wrongdoing. Do we really want his appointee to be the one investigating the wrongdoing? The potential for a coverup, or at least the perception of one, is immense, which would do enormous damage to the fabric of our law.

We had exactly that situation in Watergate. A special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, sought President Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes. Nixon claimed that the prosecutor could not force the release of the tapes because it was an “intra-branch dispute” where the president’s decision was “final.” The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, United States v. Nixon, pointedly rejected the claim, saying “Congress has vested in the attorney general” the power to conduct criminal investigations of the government and “vested in him the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties.” And what laws did the court cite? The very same statutes, Sections 515 and 533, that Mr. Garland cited when appointing Mr. Smith. “Acting pursuant to those statutes,” the Supreme Court continued, the attorney general “has delegated the authority to represent the United States in these particular matters to a special prosecutor with unique authority and tenure.”

Judge Cannon tried to dismiss those words as “dicta,” meaning that they were not part of the holding of the case, and thus did not constitute a precedent. In fact, they were critical to the court’s holding (and a lot more critical than Justice Thomas’s one-justice concurrence in the Trump immunity case, which she cited several times). Decades have elapsed since the Nixon decision and yet Congress never once altered these laws.

That was so, even though the Justice Department put Congress on clear notice some 25 years ago that it was reading these statutes to authorize the job of special counsel. Congress remained silent even after it saw presidents of both political parties rely on these statutes to do exactly that. And Congress’s silence remained even after court after court in the wake of the Nixon decision read these statutes to authorize the special counsel. None of those were dicta, or even close. That congressional ratification of what the Supreme Court and lower courts found is more than enough to dispose of Judge Cannon’s entire argument.

The Nixon case is not the only Supreme Court decision Judge Cannon blew past. This year, the Supreme Court examined a challenge to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, where the challengers said that the board had to be specifically authorized and funded by Congress. In a 7-to-2 originalist decision written by, yes, Justice Thomas, the court said that the Constitution requires no “more than a law that authorizes the disbursement of specified funds for identified purposes.” That’s exactly what we have here — a statute of Congress that authorizes the Justice Department to spend money on investigations as it deems necessary. Again, if Congress doesn’t like that statute, it can repeal it anytime. Or it can vote to defund Jack Smith’s office. That’s the way our constitutional structure works, not by having a federal judge repeal a statute through judicial fiat. She is a federal judge, not a legislator.

The Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which will hear the promised appeal by Mr. Smith, has already swiftly rebuked Judge Cannon on two different matters for her decisions in the Trump case that were well out of mainstream thinking about the law. This decision is on the way to a third rebuke for her.

Mr. Smith’s brief to the Court of Appeals will write itself. He will presumably cite the Nixon case, the several federal laws enacted by Congress, and point to the fact that Congress has never altered the statutes that the Supreme Court more than half a century ago said authorize special counsels. The fact that court after court has read them to authorize special counsels, and that Congress has never once questioned what the courts have done, will settle the legal question in Mr. Smith’s favor.

In his planned appeal, the only question left for him is whether to take the further step of saying a third rebuke means that Judge Cannon should be removed from the case, based on her highly erratic decisions. Her conclusion that the special counsel is illegal is, after all, not one that is a matter of interpretation. Rather, it’s one where there is a clear legal answer, given by the Supreme Court decades ago and ratified by Congress.(Neal Katyal, Op-Ed, New York Times,),

##Florida MAGA Congressman Matt Gaetz tweeted and erased this.👇

###No shame.

---

#Vance. Vance. Vance. OY.

From Vance’s Website.

Touch to watch Trump Jr., oh I mean Vance.👇

##One more thing.

Vance is a hypocrite.

Proof one.here is a video with a beardless Vance hurling appropriate insults at Trump.

Proof two. More of the same.

Proof three. Vance at his own Hindu wedding. Now he wants to deport immigrants.

#One more thing.

#J.D. Vance Wants to Take America to a ‘Dark Place’
Overweening ambition turned him from an outspoken Trump critic to his deputy charlatan.

J.D. VANCE, ONE OF MY FELLOW O.G. Never Trumpers, was officially named former President Donald Trump’s second vice presidential nominee. The news arrived via a social media post that focused heavily on Vance’s Yale pedigree and his appeal in the industrial Midwest.

The initial response from myself and many other still-riding Never Trumpers was some deserved mockery. Vance, after all, had fretted that Trump would be “America’s Hitler” and joshed with Chris Matthews on “Hardball” about how the guy who’s now his boss is a lying rapist.

This surface-level trolling is cathartic and deserved and premised in the knowledge that there is no reason to actually engage the merits of Vance’s Saul to Mar-a-Lago parable. The notion that this person had a genuine change of heart, that there is more to the story than a smart and ambitious striver saying whatever needs saying to advance, is absurd on its face. Vance’s entire career, his entire self-narrative, has been one of a talented, aspiring man determined to rise above his humble upbringings and touch every rung on the ladder of success all the way up to the presidency. No beard can hide that.

And to his credit, he may land one short step away from that pinnacle in astonishingly quick fashion.

But even if we all see who Vance is, there is one warning from his pre-MAGA days that is worth sitting with.

Vance’s appointment comes in the wake of shocking violence perpetrated upon people who come from the same cultural milieu as those he wrote about in his book. Analyzing the troubles of the white working class voters in communities like Butler, Pennsylvania has been his life’s work. And per Trump’s own post, it is these voters whose mantle Vance will now claim in service to their campaign.

In an August 2016 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, the radio home for the forgotten man, Vance made a comment about Trump’s impact on this group, almost as an aside. The implications of it echo today.

But I think that I'm going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.

A very dark place.

In Vance’s own telling, he believes that Trump was taking his people, the ones with whom he grew up, somewhere dark.

Gross doesn’t follow-up on that point, instead drilling in on Trump’s then-opponent, Hillary Clinton. So the ominous sentiment just washes over the public radio airwaves. The listeners, the host, and the guest were all able to float past it since, in their mind, there wasn’t much worry that such a thing would ever come to pass. No one, at that juncture, imagined Trump would win.

But an article Vance wrote the previous month prior for the Atlantic, Appalachia’s most popular periodical, provides a bit more insight into what he meant. Titled “Opioid of the Masses,” the article argues that Trump “feels good” but the “comedown will be harsh.”

After sharing some heartrending stories of Trump supporters living in rural America who have been left behind by their communities and leaders, Vance sums up his core argument.

The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.

I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.

In short, Vance argues that it’s the finger-pointing, the blame-shifting that is at the core of the Trumpian menace. That the opioid Trump offers MAGA Americans is exculpation from personal responsibility and the license to blame others for their ills: immigrants, the Deep State, Joe Biden. His view was that this type of politics will not only fix nothing, but lead to a hard and painful crash.

On this front, he was right. In the intervening years, while much has changed in Vance’s tone and in the country, the danger that he foresaw continues unabated.

The reality of Trump and the reality of rural communities that have been left behind by globalization haven’t changed much (unless they landed one of those new factories from the bipartisan CHIPs act that President Biden signed). There are still too many angry young men in these communities who have been let down by their leaders and are lashing out, sometimes by succumbing to drugs, sometimes violently. There are still too many obituaries of neighbors who died too soon.

But when Vance joins the Trump ticket this week, his message to these voters won’t be one that addresses the root problems of the communities he claims to champion. Instead he will offer them the same opiates that have alleviated the pain but done nothing to address the underlying suffering.

Vance will tell them that their hero was targeted in a plot by a president that looks down at them, knowing full well that is untrue. He will suggest that the dead and wounded in Pennsylvania were victims not of gun violence or the despair of a bullied young man, but of a plot orchestrated by shadowy forces that they should hate. He will tell them that they are suffering because an election was stolen from them. He will blame immigrants for social ills. And he will argue that they can only get vengeance for that suffering by turning their fate over to two men who are happy to feed them opiates to get the recognition and power that they have always craved.

That’s a very dark place indeed. (Tim Miller,The Bulwark).

---

#Your Daily Reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

---