Monday, July 20, 2020

Is Trump About to Go Extra-Constitutional? Rule by Decree, Bypassing Congress?


Trump's totalitarian instincts have never lurked very far from the surface. Now there's word he's looking for ways to circumvent the House and Senate so that he can rule America by decree. And who is advising this would-be despot but John Yoo, the Bush/Cheney-era counsel who wrote an opinion that waterboarding was not torture.
John Yoo told Axios he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders that flout federal law. 
In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. 
Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights. 
“This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.” 
Yoo became notorious for a legal memo he drafted in August 2002, when he was deputy assistant attorney general in the justice department’s Office of Legal Counsel. 
It stated: “Necessity or self-defense may justify interrogation methods that might violate’ the criminal prohibition against torture.” 
Memos drafted by Yoo were used for justifying waterboarding and other forms of torture on terrorism suspects in CIA “black sites” around the world.
Trump is unrepentant about dispatching "little green men" to the streets of Portland, Oregon, over the opposition of the mayor and governor. He said he's planning to do the same to other cities soon.
Tribe called Yoo’s interpretation of the Daca ruling “indefensible”. 
He added: “I fear that this lawless administration will take full advantage of the fact that judicial wheels grind slowly and that it will be difficult to keep up with the many ways Trump, aided and abetted by Bill Barr as attorney general and Chad Wolf as acting head of homeland security, can usurp congressional powers and abridge fundamental rights in the immigration space in particular but also in matters of public health and safety.” 
Alka Pradhan, a defence counsel in the 9/11 terrorism cases against inmates in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, said: “John Yoo’s so-called reasoning has always been based on ‘What can the president get away with?’ rather than ‘What is the purpose and letter of the law?’ 
“That is not legal reasoning, it’s inherently tyrannical and anti-democratic.”

8 comments:

  1. What can one say except.......Holy Cow! Anyong

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  2. When hasn't Trump gone extra- constitutional? He's been in violation of the emoluments clause since he took office! Now, he's down by 15 and Biden's scoring at will without breaking a sweat. Trump's going to go full Tonya Harding.

    Cap

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  3. Yep, nothing like deploying heavily armed but unidentifiable soldiers/police to put down a Democratic stronghold.

    "Trump attributed the increase in violence in cities such as Chicago and New York by saying “they’re Democrat-run cities, they are liberally run. They are stupidly run.”

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-race-protests-portland/trump-portland-mayor-clash-over-causes-of-escalating-unrest-idUSKCN24K0PC

    But, hey, harper showed us that an ideological creep could simply pass unconstitutional legislation/cabinet directives knowing it would take years for the courts to catch up. It's the way kenney runs Alberta as a tinpot autocrat to the majority cheers of the loons that live there, witness the Critical Infrastructure Defence Act.

    Unfortunately, it seems to me that the right wing has taken the initiative to ensure the Covid-19 consolidates authoritarian rule over the general public world wide. Your ass is mine, says the corporate/business side of this new fascism, and climate change is as fake as the virus, yes sir. Not encouraging at all. As well as reducing society to penury where we will merely rent our existence from those in charge, the environmental destruction will proceed with institutionalized sociopaths in the vanguard.

    I hope I'm wrong.

    BM

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  4. This action generates lots of questions. Is there any chance these unidentifiable soldiers are mercenaries? Could they be one or more of those loony home grown militias?

    What's the end game? “I think Portland is a test case,” Zakir Khan, a spokesman for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Post. “They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-protests-federal-arrests/ Is Kahn right?

    Could Oregon's Governor call out the National Guard to remove the unidentifiable soldiers? That has probably been thought of and rejected as dangerous escalation but . . . ?


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  5. Cap, my sense of Trump's earlier shenanigans was that they were personal violations of the constitution but they always had the senate's complicity. Team Mitch would sometimes look the other way when they weren't running interference for Trump. Many Republican senators were open that they didn't care what was in the House instruments of impeachment. It mattered not how clear and grievous the offences, they would not allow Trump to be removed (although I'm sure there were as many senate Dems who were equally willing to convict Trump regardless).

    What the venerable professor Tribe is getting at is something different. It is Trump ignoring both parties in Congress and ruling by decree. He would be taunting the GOP caucus, daring them to stand against him.

    Trump's relationship with Team Mitch has flagged recently as those having to seek re-election come to see Trump as an anchor round their necks. Some are getting a bit shirty with Trump over his bungling of the Covid business. Trump doesn't allow that sort of disloyaltyto go unpunished, not for long.

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  6. BM, the rightwing has found fertile ground in the pandemic for energizing the base. They wasted no time in getting it out of the hands of medical professionals and under the control of politicians and their culture warriors. That seems to be the whole foundation of this anti-mask movement. It's an "us v. them" struggle, a sly attempt by the liberals to undermine their constitutional rights and freedoms. An old phrase comes to mind, 'Better dead than Red.'

    The whole thing is diabolical, that's for sure. Could you imagine what ISIS or al Qaeda would give to be able to slaughter 140,000 Americans? And Trump's bungling of this has played into the hands of Moscow. They know the US will eventually emerge from this even more divided, weakened, ergo less of a challenge abroad.

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  7. Toby, let's leave the conspiracy theories, the "what if" stuff, to the rightwing. That's a pretty deep hole, hard to climb back out of. I doubt that a governor can call up the state's national guard to oppose Trump's little green men. That sounds a lot like sedition.

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  8. How could it be sedition when the " little green men are unidentified ". There is no proof they are Ameriscan's , or troops, or agents .

    Tasking the National Guard or local police to protect local people and local property from an anonymous armed mob is quite defensible .

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