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Recent Posts
- Election Night Preview — Part Five — The Local News and the West Coast (11:00 To 11:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Four — Prime Time Hour Three (10:00 to 10:59 P.M. Eastern)
- Election Night Preview — Part Three — Prime Time Hour Two (9:00 To 9:59 P.M. Eastern)
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Tag Archives: Impeachment
Impeachment vs. 14th Amendment vs. 25th Amendment
Up until his very last minute in office (and beyond it), Donald Trump is making history in ways that his descendants will not like. In fifty years, instead of saying that a person’s name is Mud(d), we might be saying that his name is Trump.
Right now, there are three possibilities being discussed in D.C. and on op-ed pages. Each have some legal questions associated with it.
The first option — which seems dead in the water as the Cabinet and Vice-Coward Mike Pence seem to be reluctant to take responsibility for suspending Trump’s presidency is the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Many constitutional amendments are simple establishing one basic rule. E.g. authorizing or repealing prohibition, giving women the right to vote). Others, like about half of the bill of rights, have multiple related but separate concepts (e.g. First Amendment covering freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly). The Twenty-fifth Amendment is one of those multi-part amendments addressing several aspects of presidential succession.
Posted in Donald Trump, Impeachment
Also tagged Donald Trump, Fourteenth Amendment, Insurrection, Mitch McConnell, Twenty-Fifth Amendment
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Georgia, Recall Elections, Impeachment, and Removal — a Legal Primer
In the aftermath of a weak of sedition and riots, I am seeing a lot of questions about issues related to the seating (or exclusion) of Senators and Representatives. I am also seeing questions about what can be done to bring a quicker end to the mistake that was the Trump presidency.
Let’s start with the Georgia elections. As we learned in November, it takes time to finalize the election results. In Georgia, there are three key deadlines. The first is the deadline for receipt of overseas ballots and for the curing of “rejected” absentee ballots and for determining the validity of provisional ballots. That deadline was the close of business today. So, at the present time, all of the counties should know if they have any votes left to count.
The second deadline is next Friday — January 15. By that date, all of the approximately 160 counties are supposed to have completed their county canvass and certified all votes to the Secretary of State. This deadline can be extended if the Secretary of State orders a pre-certification audit (as happened in the presidential race). (It is unclear how the audit will apply to the Senate races. The state law required one for the November election but is ambiguous as to the run-off election. The Secretary of State also opted for a complete hand recount of all votes in the presidential race — which technically is not an audit — but the statute only requires an audit of random counties and precincts. If a proper – in other words, limited — audit is conducted, the counties that have to do the audit may not need an extension.)
Posted in 2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Elections, Joe Biden, Senate
Also tagged exclusion of members of Congress, Georgia, Jon Ossoff, Josh Hawley, Raphael Warnock, recall elections, Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz
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October Term 2020 — Supreme Court Preview (Part Two)
As we saw in Part One, COVID-19 has caused a rather unique set-up for the first two argument sessions of the upcoming term. October are the cases that would have been argued last term but for COVID-19 requiring the postponement of arguments. As such, as the more politically significant cases were heard in May, October features very few “political” cases. On the other hand, highlighted by the on-going attempt of the Republicans to use the courts to undo the Affordable Care Act, November has several very significant cases.
There are two big cases on December’s docket. First, there is the on-going disputes related to President Trump’s legal troubles. In particular, Trump’s taxpayer-funded law firm (the Department of Justice) is trying to block the House Judiciary Committee from obtaining grand jury transcripts from the Mueller investigation that might be demonstrate that Trump committed impeachable offenses. The technical issue is whether the House Judiciary Committee when doing a preliminary investigation into impeachment fits within the limited group authorized by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to access grand jury testimony.
Second, there is a case-involving the Federal Housing Finance Agency (one of the agencies created after the Bush financial market crash of 2008) and whether it is legally-structured. We saw a similar case this past term involving the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. So, even if the Republicans do not manage to get another conservative judicial activist onto the Court before this argument, the odds of a ruling upholding the validity of the restrictions on removal are slim and none.
Posted in Impeachment, Judicial
Also tagged Abortion, Mueller Investigation. Robocalls, Second Amendment, Separation of Powers, Supreme Court
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Impeachment and the 2020 Primary
We are entering into an unprecedented situation in American history. Three times before, the House has given serious consideration to adopting articles of impeachment against a sitting president. The last two times — Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton — the House Judiciary Committee took up potential articles of impeachment during the mid-term election year of the president’s second term. While there would be lingering impacts of the impeachment process in the succeeding presidential election, the sitting president was not a prospective candidate and the process was over before the primary campaign really got started (with the Nixon process ending with his resignation in August of 1974 before the mid-term election and the Clinton process ending with the conclusion of the Senate trial in February 1999 as potential candidates for 2000 were just starting their run).
The impeachment of Andrew Johnson is the closest precedent to the current situation. While Johnson’s impeachment trial extended into May of 1868 (a presidential election year), there are some major differences that preclude that situation from being a true precedent. The biggest, of course, is that the nomination process was entirely different back then. There were no primaries and the state parties had strong control over their delegations which tended to follow the now-abolished block vote tactic. While Johnson had some support to get a chance to run in 1868, that support was almost entirely from the readmitted former rebel states and he never really had a path to the nomination. Additionally, in the days before radio and television, the primary coverage was through partisan newspapers. While partisan television and radio networks may try to slant coverage today, it is possible for voters to view the impeachment hearings and trials in their entirety (either live or by retrieving the video later).
Now, of course, candidates wanting to be President have to run in primary elections that run from February to June and the votes in those primaries bind (to various degrees) the delegates to the national convention. Also, because primaries are public elections, candidates have a deadline to file for running and have to campaign for votes.
Posted in Impeachment, Primary Elections
Also tagged Presidential Primary
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Running Government Like a Business
Conservatives often put out the mantra that we need to run government like a business. The problem with that concept is that there are many different business models. What it takes for a business to be successful depends to a large degree on the products that the business made and the structure of that business. For the past several years, we have seen what happens when the government is run like the Trump Organization, and it has not been pretty.
The business model of the Trump Organization had several major features. First, and most importantly, it is a privately held organization in which Donald Trump is the primary owner. In short, the Trump Organization was for over forty years the alter ego of Donald Trump. He had complete control and did not answer to anybody. Second, in the commercial real estate business, debt is not a bad thing. It is not unusual for the purchase of a building to be financed with large loans (i.e. mortgages) that are refinanced when they come due (with very little payments made toward the principal and the debt only fully paid off when the building is sold). Third, and pretty much unique to the Trump Organization, the far-flung nature of the holdings meant that the business rarely worked with other companies — beyond its bankers — on repeat occasions. This lack of an on-going relationship with local contractors meant that Trump was able to break deals with the companies that he hired to work on his properties without having to worry about the need to make future deals with the same contractors.
Over the past several months, we have seen Trump repeatedly return to his practices from his time as a high risk real estate developer. He has treated the U.S. government as if he were the sole owner making decisions for his personal benefit rather than the good of the country. In particular, he has used his power to make the U.S. government and foreign governments deal with the Trump Organization — rerouting government flights so that U.S. personnel have to stay at Trump properties while staying overseas and he has proposed holding international summits at Trump properties.
Posted in Donald Trump, GOP, Rant
Also tagged Climate Change, Deficits, Kurds, Trump Organization, Trump Self-dealing, Ukraine
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Reckless Incompetence
For the past two weeks, almost every day has produced a stunning revelation about the current Administration. By this point, it is crystal clear that the Liar-in-Chief is completely clueless about the many responsibilities of his job and simply does not care. He is going to proceed full speed ahead — hoping that determination and arrogance will make up for any deficiencies in his knowledge about policy issues or protocol.
Most democracies have some institutional procedures that keep individuals from rising to the top of the government without sufficient experience in politics and government to assure a basic knowledge of how things work. In a parliamentary system, the leaders of the major parties tend to have served several terms before becoming leader of their party. Additionally, the leaders tend to have served on the leadership teams of their parties (having responsibility for several different policy areas including at least one major area) before running for and winning their party’s top spots. In addition, there are procedures in place that allow a party to remove (albeit with some difficulty) a leader who is not doing a good job as prime minister.
Unfortunately for the U.S., our Constitution predates the modern era of parliamentary democracy. Our framers did have the same type of concerns that have animated modern parliamentary government, but the development of national politics have undermined the procedures created by the framers. The electoral college was supposed to assure a minimum level of competence in the presidency. The thought behind the original language in Article II (two votes per elector, no more than one of which could be from the elector’s state) was that each elector would cast one vote for one of the leading politicians in that state and one vote for a politician with a national reputation. Barring a clearly obvious national candidate, no candidate would get a national majority and the House would pick between the top candidates. This scheme depended upon the framers’ belief that politics would stay state-based and that the different state parties would not get together with similar groups from other states to from a national party that would be able to get electors in multiple states to support a national ticket. That has left the burden on the parties to devise systems of choosing leaders that ensures competence in their presidential candidates, and — as the current incumbent shows — the Republican Party rules have failed in that regards.
Posted in Donald Trump, Russia
Also tagged Incompetence, Israel, James Comey, Michael Flynn, Obstruction of Justice, Paul Manafort, Special Counsel, Turkey
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