US Politics: Chaos Made to Border

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Just to be clear, if you're POTUS you literally are in charge of all security clearances and get to dictate everything about them. If the voters (or at least a plurality of them in certain states) decide that he should be POTUS, he doesn't need to be cleared for anything. If he were working in a different position that'd be a different story, but that's not the case. 

Therein lays the problem. The military leadership, the bureaucrats in the Pentagon and the State Department, CIA, NSA, etc. have zero sense of humor and very long memories when it comes to national security. Just ask Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.  And Trump doesn't even pretend to have the integrity of those guys.

I guarantee you that there are several high level (though informal) conversation being had about what they do if Trump actually gets a second term. 

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

43 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

And you can really torture him by just sending him to Wisconsin, aka cold Florida. 

Wisconsin, that's where they produce those rolling toillette chairs for guys hitting their midlife crisis, right?

Edited January 29 by A Horse Named Stranger

[Fragile Bird]

Hey, maybe you guys gotta build that wall with Canada! An Iranian and two Canadians, including a Hell’s Angel, have been indicted in a plot to assassinate Iranian dissidents in the US.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Talking about those rolling toillette chairs, you had to mention the Hell's Angels, eh?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I still find it funny that conservatives are calling out to bikers for their rally at the Southern border.

 

Honestly if I wanted to get a bike I'd go crotch rocket, but I crashed a dirt bike when I was around 13 and said fuck it, not ever doing that again. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

25 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

I still find it funny that conservatives are calling out to bikers for their rally at the Southern border.

 

Honestly if I wanted to get a bike I'd go crotch rocket, but I crashed a dirt bike when I was around 13 and said fuck it, not ever doing that again. 

 

[Martell Spy]

Retired conservative federal judge urges Supreme Court to disqualify Trump from office

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/luttig-conway-supreme-court-trump-insurrection/index.html

Quote

 

A former conservative federal appellate judge is urging the Supreme Court to keep Donald Trump off the ballot, arguing the ex-president’s effort to cling to power after his 2020 election loss was “broader” than South Carolina’s secession from the US that triggered the Civil War.

“Mr. Trump tried to prevent the newly-elected President Biden from governing anywhere in the United States. The South Carolina secession prevented the newly-elected President Lincoln from governing only in that State,” J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, told the justices in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Monday.

“Trump incited, and therefore engaged in, an armed insurrection against the Constitution’s express and foundational mandates that require the peaceful transfer of executive power to a newly-elected President,” the brief said. “In doing so, Mr. Trump disqualified himself under Section 3 (of the Constitution).”

 

 

[Jaxom 1974]

7 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

It doesn't even have to be rural. Send him to the wrong parts of Las Vegas or New Orleans. And you can really torture him by just sending him to Wisconsin, aka cold Florida. 

 

7 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Wisconsin, that's where they produce those rolling toillette chairs for guys hitting their midlife crisis, right?

Wisconsin has many issues and faults, but I do think you meant Indiana. Indiana is the Florida of the north. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

35 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Wisconsin has many issues and faults, but I do think you meant Indiana. Indiana is the Florida of the north. 

Nah, Wisconsin is at least fun like Florida. Indiana just flat out sucks. 

[kissdbyfire]

Uh oh...

 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

"Would you rather be smart or pretty?"

"Pretty, I can fake being smart." 

Trump hires the best people. 

[Maithanet]

Even if she thinks it's true, as a lawyer, you should know better than to say that.  Lawyer is right there with doctor and engineer in terms of "job where you are expected to be smart".  To say on camera that you don't think being smart is that important is...not very smart. 

[kissdbyfire]

19 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

"Pretty, I can fake being smart." 

So, she's failing miserably as a lawyer and as a faux smart person, is that it?

19 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Trump hires the best people.

Innit? I suppose the old saying is true, "you get what you pay for"!

Edited January 30 by kissdbyfire

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

42 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

Innit? I suppose the old saying is true, "you get what you pay for"!

Who says he's even paying . I wouldn't be surprised if she's doing this for free to get attention (and not caring if she's actually doing a good job). Like I said before, she's a pretty empty suit who most lawyers on TV think is a complete idiot. 

[kissdbyfire]

1 minute ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Who says he's even paying .
 

That was exactly what I tried to imply! 

1 minute ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

I wouldn't be surprised if she's doing this for free to get attention (and not caring if she's actually doing a good job). Like I said before, she's a pretty empty suit who most lawyers on TV think is a complete idiot. 

Yup, and the MAGA crow loves her so maybe she’ll run for office at some point or becomes the lawyer of reference for all the MAGA criminals - not that all MAGAs are criminals, i mean for those who actually are.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

That was exactly what I tried to imply! 

Yup, and the MAGA crow loves her so maybe she’ll run for office at some point or becomes the lawyer of reference for all the MAGA criminals - not that all MAGAs are criminals, i mean for those who actually are.

I bet within a few years she moves to a safe district (if she's not already living in or near one) and runs for congress. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

47 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Who says he's even paying . I wouldn't be surprised if she's doing this for free to get attention (and not caring if she's actually doing a good job). Like I said before, she's a pretty empty suit who most lawyers on TV think is a complete idiot. 

Assume she's using Trump to raise her profile and all of her public appearances are auditions for her own show on Fox News. It all makes sense.

That or she is actually a moron and so staggeringly incompetent that her alma mater should be investigated for ever granting her a law degree. 

[Zorral]

Exclusive: Republican candidate Nikki Haley was targeted in second swatting attempt

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-candidate-nikki-haley-targeted-second-swatting-attempt-2024-01-29/

Related --  You know he really should be in prison.  Anyone else would be.

If It Walks Like an Insurrection and Talks Like an Insurrection …

Gift Link --

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/opinion/trump-insurrection-supreme-court.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Rk0.RMp3.NToKFlI__wpo&bgrp=a&smid=url-share

Quote

 

.... I’ve argued, relying on evidence drawn from an amicus brief to the Colorado Supreme Court, that the former president’s actions make him an insurrectionist by any reasonable definition of the term and certainly as it was envisioned by the drafters of the 14th Amendment, who experienced insurrection firsthand. If that isn’t persuasive, consider the evidence marshaled by the legal scholars Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar in a more recent amicus brief. They argue that top of mind for the drafters of the 14th Amendment were the actions of John B. Floyd, the secretary of war during the secession crisis of November 1860 to March 1861.

During the crucial weeks after the election of Abraham Lincoln, as pro-slavery radicals organized secession conventions throughout the South, Floyd, “an unapologetic Virginia slaveholder,” Amar and Amar write, used his authority to, in the words of Ulysses S. Grant, distribute “the cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.” When it became clear that President James Buchanan would not surrender Fort Sumter to South Carolina, in late December, Floyd resigned to join the Confederacy.

What’s more, the Amars note, “the insurrectionary betrayals perpetrated by Floyd and other top officials in the lame-duck Buchanan administration went far beyond the abandonment of Southern forts. They also involved, through both actions and inactions of Floyd and his allies, efforts to prevent President-elect Lincoln from lawfully assuming power at his inauguration.”

The men who wrote the 14th Amendment, partisan Republicans and strong allies of the Lincoln administration, were well aware of Floyd’s actions and wrote Section 3 with him in mind. In an 1868 speech discussing the amendment, delivered on the House floor, Representative Burton C. Cook of Illinois declared that “persons who had, like Jeff Davis, Floyd and Breckinridge held high office in the government and betrayed and well nigh ruined the government whose Constitution they had solemnly sworn to support, should not again be entrusted with power over loyal men.”

If Floyd was an insurrectionist, then, the Amars conclude, Trump is obviously one as well. “Certain inactions loom specially large when a current officer, with special obligations to affirmatively thwart other insurrectionists … instead sits on his hands, smiling, as chaos erupts around him. This is precisely the case of Donald Trump.”

There is a response to this that relates to the other major question surrounding the use of Section 3 against Trump. Is the president of the United States an “officer of the United States” and thus subject to the terms of the disqualification clause? Trump, unsurprisingly, says no. “The court should reverse the Colorado decision because President Trump is not even subject to Section 3, as the president is not an ‘officer of the United States’ under the Constitution,” reads his petition to the court.

But according to evidence gathered in another recent amicus brief, this one filed on behalf of a group of historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction (including Nell Irvin Painter, James M. McPherson and Manisha Sinha), the framers of the 14th Amendment, as well as other lawmakers of the time, clearly believed that the president was, in fact, an officer of the United States.

This was most apparent during the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, in which members of Congress routinely characterized the president as a constitutional officer. “The electors may elect a president and vice president, but the Senate only can remove them,” Senator John Sherman of Ohio said during the trial. “The president and the Senate can appoint judges, but the Senate only can remove them. These are the constitutional officers, and their tenure and mode of removal are fixed by the Constitution.”

The authors of the brief also assemble evidence to show that the framers of the original Constitution of 1787 also considered the president an officer of the United States. An early version of the impeachment clause, for example, referred to “impeachments of any national officers.” The final version of the clause states:

Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.

The president is subject to impeachment, which means, by definition, that he holds an office under the United States and is an officer of the United States. The president is also covered by the foreign emoluments clause, which applies, again, to any “person holding any office of profit or trust” under the United States. ....

 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

50 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Assume she's using Trump to raise her profile and all of her public appearances are auditions for her own show on Fox News. It all makes sense.

That or she is actually a moron and so staggeringly incompetent that her alma mater should be investigated for ever granting her a law degree. 

It could be both. Neither intelligence nor education have been a requirement at Fox. IIRC Hannity flunked out of college and Beck only took a few classes. Being loud, anger and manipulative is all that matters. 

But if we're playing the "Hey alma mater, how'd that person get a degree from your school?" game we have to start with Trump and Penn. And UGA, you're not sliding with MTG.  

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

4 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

It could be both. Neither intelligence nor education have been a requirement at Fox. IIRC Hannity flunked out of college and Beck only took a few classes. Being loud, anger and manipulative is all that matters. 

But if we're playing the "Hey alma mater, how'd that person get a degree from your school?" game we have to start with Trump and Penn. And UGA, you're not sliding with MTG.  

'Remember when Trump claimed to have never heard of economic "pump priming" and then claimed to have invented the phrase?

It wa a simpler time.