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Donald Trump 2019

Francisco 2.0

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Doc Sam Beckett

Doc Sam Beckett 5781

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So, while we are talking about Donald's sharpie drawings and nonsensical ramblings, this shit is happening.... 

Is anyone going to stand up and stop this shit? Fuck 2020 and voicing our opinions at the ballot box. This is fucking unacceptable and one of these empty suits needs to fucking do something.... 

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/10/justice-departments-outlandish-arrogant-position-congressional-subpoenas/

 

 

 

The Justice Department has just taken the position that the executive branch may never be required to comply with a congressional subpoena.

If that view sounds outlandish and arrogant, that’s because it is.

The department’s assertion, which has escaped general notice since it was filed on Friday, came in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the House Ways and Means Committee to enforce its subpoena for President Trump’s tax returns. The motion contains several additional conventional arguments, but it leads with an absolutist assertion that the judiciary is powerless to address its noncompliance.

The committee’s lawsuit seeks to enforce the straightforward statutory command in federal law that “upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives . . . the Secretary [of the Treasury] shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request."

Notwithstanding the clarity of the law here, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rebuffed the request on the spurious ground that the committee lacked any valid legislative purpose, prompting Congress’s lawsuit.

And, now, the Justice Department has gone all in. Its centerpiece argument in the motion to dismiss is that nothing can be done to remedy its refusal to comply with Congress’s request.

The Justice Department is arguing that, when the executive refuses for any reason to comply — no matter how clear the legal command — it sets up “an interbranch political dispute.” And, further, Congress may not “conscript the judiciary” on its side of such a dispute.

Thus, according to the Justice Department, there is no constitutional or statutory basis for a congressional committee to try to enforce its subpoenas in the federal courts “where the Executive Branch has decided not to do so” (emphasis added).

This position, by the way, has nothing to do with the fact that the subject of the committee’s request is the president. Congress has sued the treasury secretary for failing to comply with a clear congressional command; the Justice Department’s assertion that the secretary can just blow off Congress would apply even if a private individual’s tax returns were being sought. Or, indeed, to any command to any executive branch official.

It also goes well beyond the already aggressive positions taken by the Justice Department during previous administrations. Previous departments (both Democrat and Republican) have argued, unsuccessfully, that the courts should not interfere in subpoena battles over assertions of executive privilege. Here, the government argues for a right to ignore the plain statutory command that it “shall” furnish the tax records to the committee.

Thus, the basic outlandishness and arrogance: The department‘s position serves to convert the most rank legal noncompliance into one side of an august-sounding “interbranch political dispute,” which it then declares beyond the reach of the judiciary to resolve. The unitary executive becomes the lawless executive.

If accepted, the Justice Department’s reasoning would gut Congress’s well-recognized constitutional oversight functions. The executive could simply respond to any congressional demand with a two-move checkmate: (1) refuse to comply, for good, bad, or no reason, and (2) declare an “interbranch political dispute” that the courts could not address.

In fact, the motion to require Mnuchin to turn over Trump’s tax records falls in the dead center of the traditional scope of Article III power. Look no further than perhaps the most famous and important decision in the Supreme Court’s history, Marbury v. Madison. 

 

Marbury, decided in 1803, held that the law provided no discretion for then-Secretary of State James Madison to withhold the judicial commission of William Marbury. Congress had passed a law, exactly like the statutory command at the center of the current dispute, that said the secretary “shall commission all the officers of the United States." Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion explained “it is the duty of the Secretary of State to conform to the law, and in this he is an officer of the United States, bound to obey the laws.”

Marshall relied on the fundamental distinction between discretionary powers of the executive, which are generally outside the power of the courts to examine, and nondiscretionary or ministerial responsibilities, which he evidently took as the province of the courts to enforce.

In determining that the judiciary clearly had power to remedy the executive branch’s breach of its nondiscretionary duty, Marshall stated, “the Government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right."  

The Justice Department’s motion to dismiss didn’t discuss or even cite Marbury. But both of the previous decisions rejecting the department’s position did. Look for this case to produce a stern rebuke to the department’s absolutist position.

 

 

Edited by Doc Sam Beckett
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GHOSTUSER
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I fucking love this President. My 2 faves during my lifetime are Trump and Nixon. They share a lot of similarities and were besieged by the same groups of assholes. No I’m not trolling. Y’all, the lef

Francisco 2.0
Francisco 2.0
Brisketexan
Brisketexan

This.....is magnificent. The "younger generation" is going to have to work double-time to fund YOUR Social Security, which YOUR generation of elected officials raided the fuck out of.  And which,

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32290

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Gee, imagine that.   

https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-wrestles-with-its-2020-qanon-problem?ref=home

 

Quote

In late August 2018, Lisa and John Welch weren’t feeling great about the future of QAnon, the ludicrous conspiracy theory that posits that Donald Trump is engaged in a secret battle with pedophilic elites in Hollywood, big banks, and the Democratic Party.

Lisa had bought into the theory first, then convinced her husband to sign on. But none of the mysterious Q’s predictions in anonymous internet forums had come to pass nearly a year after it started in October 2017, and QAnon believers were starting to lose faith. After yet another Q prediction failed to materialize in 2018, an armed, crazed QAnon fan allegedly shut down a bridge near the Hoover Dam with an improvised armored truck. 

 

Quote

The Welches decided they needed some way to show how many Trump supporters believed in the mega-conspiracy theory, which has pulled in Pizzagate and a wide range of other conspiracy theories. They printed up T-shirts and signs that said “We Are Q” and passed them out at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. 

“We took ’em to the rally and handed ’em out, and the rest is history,” Lisa Welch told a crowd of roughly 100 QAnon believers who gathered to rally across the street from the White House on Wednesday.

The Welches’ signs and T-shirts, along with other QAnon-related signs and “Q” cut-outs, were unavoidable in cable news coverage of the rally. Suddenly, people all over the country were asking what why a segment of Trump fans adored the letter Q, and QAnon believers were invigorated. 

 

 

Quote

“By the time the rally was over, they didn’t have any choice but to put us on [TV],” said John Welch.

The Tampa rally wasn’t the first time QAnon believers had appeared among Trump’s faithful, but it did show QAnon fans that showing up to the rallies with Q signs and clothes could have a real world effect. 

Now QAnon believers eager to appear at Trump rallies are posing a challenge to the president’s reelection. As Trump faces a tough campaign, some of his most visible supporters come from QAnon-world, where various factions include 9/11 Truthers, anti-Semites, and people who think John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive and will soon return to arrest Democrats.

 

Spoiler

But to QAnon supporters, Trump rallies are a great chance both to see the president and to get their message out without going through a media they claim is biased against them.

“It’s like Trump tweeting,” said Pennsylvania contractor Daniel Graham, who drove to Washington for Wednesday’s rally.

To Team Trump, though, QAnon diehards who adore Trump and garner media coverage and camera shots at his 2020 rallies have been a longtime nuisance. One current senior Trump campaign official told The Daily Beast that the standard operating procedure among most staff has been to generally just “ignore them” and not “make a big deal out of” them, both to deprive them of as much press attention as possible and to avoid “pissing off the crazy” people.

In a particularly weird bit of Trumpworld drama that unfolded earlier this year, QAnon believers turned on and began targeting former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka after he called their beliefs “GARBAGE.” Since the Tampa rally, Gorka and other Trump allies have struggled to stop QAnon’s spread, on the grounds that it’s an embarrassment to the larger Trump coalition.

And over the past year, more and more QAnon fans who also support Trump have alleged that their Q gear and shirts have been banned from the president’s rallies, and they have accused security personnel of instructing them to, for instance, turn their T-shirts inside out. The U.S. Secret Service, for its part, has publicly denied that it is involved in QAnon suppression at Trump rallies. If QAnon-related clothing and signs are banned, it’s possible that the ban has been imposed by additional, hired security guards, rather than the Secret Service.

The Welches began to appear at other Trump rallies with more QAnon merch, despite being harried by what John Welch described as Secret Service agents. After a security guard tried to stop him from handing out Q koozies, he claims he just threw them out to the crowd “like a rock star.”

When asked to comment on these matters, the Trump team hinted at its justifications, though typically while going out of its way not to mention the term “QAnon.”

“No non-Trump-related political messaging is permitted inside the venue. We do our best to ensure this rule is fully enforced,” Michael Glassner, chief operating officer of the 2020 Trump campaign, said in a brief statement.

Technically, QAnon is Trump-related political messaging, brought to a wacky, sometimes violent, and extremely online fringe. It’s Trump-related enough that some of the conspiracy theory’s top proponents have sought White House meetings with this president. Several have been successful.

Last year, a grinning Trump somehow ended up posing for an Oval Office photo op with YouTube conspiracy theorist Lionel Lebron, one of the leading promoters of the QAnon theory. In July, Trump invited several QAnon promoters to his White House Social Media Summit, where he praised the QAnon pushers and other “memesmiths” for their work on his behalf.

But while a White House visit serves as the ultimate sign of Trump’s approval for QAnon’s top echelon, the rallies are the only place where most Q believers get a chance to see the man they believe is about to topple a global cannibal conspiracy. 

Q believers have resorted to unorthodox craft methods to get around the apparent ban on QAnon gear at Trump rallies. Sometimes, they cover QAnon shirts with another shirt to get through security, then remove the decoy shirt once the rally starts. In August, a Trump campaign ad featured, apparently accidentally, multiple sanctioned campaign signs that had been doctored with tape and markers to show “Q’s.”

And sometimes, the QAnon message actually comes from a speaker at the rally. 

At an August event in Cincinnati, Brandon Straka, who’s become a personality on the right after founding the “#Walkaway” movement urging traditionally Democratic constituencies to leave the party, used his warm-up spot at the rally to tell the crowd “Where we go one, we go all.” That phrase is the most prominent QAnon slogan, and QAnon supporters cheered when Straka used it from the stage. Straka later insisted he didn’t mean to imply any QAnon connection.

The presence of Q believers at rallies also means Trump could accidentally endorse the theory, at least in the eyes of its believers. Nearly every Trump appearance produces footage that QAnon believers scrutinize in hopes of seeing Trump’s hand movements form what they believe to be a “Q.” 

But at a July rally in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump called a baby wearing a QAnon symbol on the back of its onesie “beautiful.” The onesie appeared to have been altered, with a marker line added to make the printed “O” design into a “Q.” 

QAnon believers were thrilled by what they saw as Trump’s confirmation, via the baby, that the theory was real. The child was soon dubbed “Q Baby,” and her parents—North Carolina Trump supporter Roman Riselvato and his girlfriend—made an Etsy page to sell clothing with a design similar to the onesie after requests from Q fans.

Riselvato told The Daily Beast that, should he get the opportunity to go to another Trump rally, he’d definitely bring more Q-related signs or clothing to get QAnon’s message out to other potential recruits. 

“It’s a necessity to know that you’re not alone,” Riselvato said.

 

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Mrs Whiggins

Mrs Whiggins 13049

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9 hours ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

So, while we are talking about Donald's sharpie drawings and nonsensical ramblings, this shit is happening.... 

Is anyone going to stand up and stop this shit? Fuck 2020 and voicing our opinions at the ballot box. This is fucking unacceptable and one of these empty suits needs to fucking do something.... 

https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/10/justice-departments-outlandish-arrogant-position-congressional-subpoenas/

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

The Justice Department has just taken the position that the executive branch may never be required to comply with a congressional subpoena.

If that view sounds outlandish and arrogant, that’s because it is.

The department’s assertion, which has escaped general notice since it was filed on Friday, came in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the House Ways and Means Committee to enforce its subpoena for President Trump’s tax returns. The motion contains several additional conventional arguments, but it leads with an absolutist assertion that the judiciary is powerless to address its noncompliance.

The committee’s lawsuit seeks to enforce the straightforward statutory command in federal law that “upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives . . . the Secretary [of the Treasury] shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request."

Notwithstanding the clarity of the law here, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rebuffed the request on the spurious ground that the committee lacked any valid legislative purpose, prompting Congress’s lawsuit.

And, now, the Justice Department has gone all in. Its centerpiece argument in the motion to dismiss is that nothing can be done to remedy its refusal to comply with Congress’s request.

The Justice Department is arguing that, when the executive refuses for any reason to comply — no matter how clear the legal command — it sets up “an interbranch political dispute.” And, further, Congress may not “conscript the judiciary” on its side of such a dispute.

Thus, according to the Justice Department, there is no constitutional or statutory basis for a congressional committee to try to enforce its subpoenas in the federal courts “where the Executive Branch has decided not to do so” (emphasis added).

This position, by the way, has nothing to do with the fact that the subject of the committee’s request is the president. Congress has sued the treasury secretary for failing to comply with a clear congressional command; the Justice Department’s assertion that the secretary can just blow off Congress would apply even if a private individual’s tax returns were being sought. Or, indeed, to any command to any executive branch official.

It also goes well beyond the already aggressive positions taken by the Justice Department during previous administrations. Previous departments (both Democrat and Republican) have argued, unsuccessfully, that the courts should not interfere in subpoena battles over assertions of executive privilege. Here, the government argues for a right to ignore the plain statutory command that it “shall” furnish the tax records to the committee.

Thus, the basic outlandishness and arrogance: The department‘s position serves to convert the most rank legal noncompliance into one side of an august-sounding “interbranch political dispute,” which it then declares beyond the reach of the judiciary to resolve. The unitary executive becomes the lawless executive.

If accepted, the Justice Department’s reasoning would gut Congress’s well-recognized constitutional oversight functions. The executive could simply respond to any congressional demand with a two-move checkmate: (1) refuse to comply, for good, bad, or no reason, and (2) declare an “interbranch political dispute” that the courts could not address.

In fact, the motion to require Mnuchin to turn over Trump’s tax records falls in the dead center of the traditional scope of Article III power. Look no further than perhaps the most famous and important decision in the Supreme Court’s history, Marbury v. Madison. 

 

Marbury, decided in 1803, held that the law provided no discretion for then-Secretary of State James Madison to withhold the judicial commission of William Marbury. Congress had passed a law, exactly like the statutory command at the center of the current dispute, that said the secretary “shall commission all the officers of the United States." Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion explained “it is the duty of the Secretary of State to conform to the law, and in this he is an officer of the United States, bound to obey the laws.”

Marshall relied on the fundamental distinction between discretionary powers of the executive, which are generally outside the power of the courts to examine, and nondiscretionary or ministerial responsibilities, which he evidently took as the province of the courts to enforce.

In determining that the judiciary clearly had power to remedy the executive branch’s breach of its nondiscretionary duty, Marshall stated, “the Government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right."  

The Justice Department’s motion to dismiss didn’t discuss or even cite Marbury. But both of the previous decisions rejecting the department’s position did. Look for this case to produce a stern rebuke to the department’s absolutist position.

 

 

Thank you for displaying that. It seems like a big deal to just ignore a subpoena, correct?! I mean am I, Jill Citizen, allowed to do that? If not, then they need to comply.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89304

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I'm going to spend a few days, write a book called "The Jihad Culture: The Left's Attack on Christian America", sub-titled: "How Socialists are Trying to Undermine President Trump's Legacy".

All I have to do is setup a twitter account, give shoutouts to a few morons that Trump has retweeted in the past, get them to tweet it, leading him to retweet it and then watch the beer money flow in.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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I know someone who is a Trump supporter that manages a vape shop.  He's a nice guy and I hope nothing Trump does negatively impacts his employment but I wonder what's going on in his head right now with Trump ostensibly going after the vaping industry.  

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Chuckie Finster

Chuckie Finster 22571

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2 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

I know someone who is a Trump supporter that manages a vape shop.  He's a nice guy and I hope nothing Trump does negatively impacts his employment but I wonder what's going on in his head right now with Trump ostensibly going after the vaping industry.  

Anyone who still supports Trump is not capable of rational thought.  He's thinking some version of: "Trump would never intentionally hurt ME.  This is a temporary setback that I have to get through and the payoff will be worth it in the end.  #MAGA!"

Their brains are broken.

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19320

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14 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I'm going to spend a few days, write a book called "The Jihad Culture: The Left's Attack on Christian America", sub-titled: "How Socialists are Trying to Undermine President Trump's Legacy".

All I have to do is setup a twitter account, give shoutouts to a few morons that Trump has retweeted in the past, get them to tweet it, leading him to retweet it and then watch the beer money flow in.

You don't even have to write the thing, just plagiarize a few other grifters...errr authors for the complete right wing grift experience. 

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Lagunamadre

Lagunamadre 1975

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44 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I'm going to spend a few days, write a book called "The Jihad Culture: The Left's Attack on Christian America", sub-titled: "How Socialists are Trying to Undermine President Trump's Legacy".

All I have to do is setup a twitter account, give shoutouts to a few morons that Trump has retweeted in the past, get them to tweet it, leading him to retweet it and then watch the beer money flow in.

His base doesn't strike me as "readers", I'm guessing all of those Deep State!/Socialism! books are mostly just filled with pictures of an unflattering looking Hillary, young black dreadlocked men wearing wife beaters and ticker tape parade street views post WWII. Maybe a couple of paragraphs about how Democrats are Socialists with a forward by Dan Bongino. 

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DixonHur

DixonHur 11017

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Just now, Hugo Stiglitz said:

I know we say this every day but it’s not Trump that is smart, it’s the people around him exploiting the situation. 

Well, if there are no negative consequences, why wouldn't they?  

But I've been assured by a few posters that the Dem leadership has it under control.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32290

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20 minutes ago, Bruh Man said:

America first!

 

Imagine that.

A President that can't put down a phone, so a "friendly" country decides to put monitoring shit around the White House.

No telling what the (pick any country name out of a hat) has done as well.

But hey, those liberal tears are sure sweet.

Another general fuck you to Trump voters everywhere.

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