What do you get when you combine the right idea with the wrong process, the wrong strategy, and moral preening that ignores the application that the right idea would have had for the other side of an election? This stupid and futile gesture from the progressive wing of the Senate Democratic caucus. It ostensibly seeks to force Donald Trump into divesting himself of his businesses and putting his assets in a blind trust. It operates more as a sour-grapes shot that might actually weaken the argument for its core idea:
A group of Senate Democrats will introduce legislation requiring President Elect Donald Trump to divest any financial assets that pose a conflict of interest and place the money into a blind trust.
The bill would also consider any violation by Trump of conflict of interest or ethics laws a "high crime or misdemeanor under the impeachment clause of the U.S. constitution," according to a fact sheet on the forthcoming bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren's office.
"The American people deserve to know that the President of the United States is working to do what's best for the country – not using his office to do what's best for himself and his businesses," the Massachusetts Democrat said.
Democrat Sens. Ben Cardin (Md.), Chris Coons (Del.), Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.) also back the legislation. They'll formally introduce the bill next month when lawmakers return to Washington.
First off, the core principle here is the correct path to take. Any incoming president should follow tradition to eliminate potential conflicts of interest, because voters should know that their interests come first. I wrote about this earlier in the week, explaining that it eventually redounds to the president's benefit too:
In order to succeed politically ‐ i.e., get an agenda passed in Congress ‐ a president has to acquire and guard his or her political capital carefully. If an executive is seen as using the office for his personal enrichment, that political capital will dissipate quickly. Just ask Jesse Ventura what happened when he decided to moonlight as an XFL television commentator during his tenure as Minnesota governor. …
Like it or not, running for president means becoming a public servant and prioritizing the public trust over private fortunes. The best way to avoid those political landmines is to divest his interests in the business as soon as possible and hand the reins off to his sons. Trump's been running for this office for almost two years now, and he should already have a succession plan in place for this eventuality. It's time to put it into action.
However, the introduction of this bill is nonsensical, and Senate Democrats should know it. Congress can set conflict-of-interest statutes that apply to people who work in federal agencies because those operate under shared authority with the president. Congress cannot pass laws pertaining to the president (and much of his or her direct staff) because of the separation of powers in the Constitution. Presidents get voted into office by the states through popular votes within them, which makes them accountable separately from Congress. This is why divestiture and blind trusts for presidents have been tradition rather than a legal requirement. Congress cannot set conditions or qualifications for the office of the presidency without amending the Constitution to do so, and a bill requiring divestiture would in essence do exactly that.
Next question: Who enforces such a statute, and what would it entail? Congress can't conduct law enforcement actions; they can only recommend enforcement by the executive branch. The Constitution explicitly prohibits Congress from a law-enforcement and judicial role with the ban on "bills of attainder." We saw how that works with the contempt charges against Eric Holder a few years ago. Presidents who break laws can be prosecuted, as Bill Clinton discovered, but those prosecutions don't remove a president from office. Only Congress can do that, and it has to be through impeachment ‐ which is a political process, not law enforcement.
That's why citing the threat of impeachment as a consequence of this statute is redundant and silly. The Constitution already grants Congress the authority to impeach without passing statutes defining which actions are and are not "high crimes and misdemeanors." The House gets to define those for themselves when the issue arises. The Senate defines them if and only when the House approves articles of impeachment and sends them to the upper chamber for a vote on conviction and removal. (The Emoluments Clause offers a wide opening for the House on this score without Warren's bill.) In both of the only two impeachments in American history, the House thought presidential behavior qualified for it, and the Senate disagreed. The latter case involved convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice ‐ and Dick Durbin, one of these signatories, didn't find perjury and obstruction of justice to be "high crimes and misdemeanors" at the time. It's unclear why theoretical conflicts of interest would rise above Bill Clinton's false testimony in court, to which he had admitted and for which he got disbarred, but YMMV.
Furthermore, we didn't hear Warren et al warning Hillary Clinton of impeachment over the Clinton Foundation when everyone assumed she would win. The plan for the foundation if Hillary won, as it eventually emerged, was almost identical to Trump's ambiguous plans ‐ to turn over operations to offspring, in this case Chelsea Clinton. Had Republicans tried to offer a bill threatening "impeachment," we would have heard screeches of "extremists," "haters," and who knows what else from the media, even though the Clinton Foundation has been part of serious questions about conflicts of interest ever since Hillary became Secretary of State and the FBI is still probing those arrangements.
Warren and her colleagues could have made their point by proposing a "sense of the Senate" bill, which would have made the point without tipping over into self-parody. Now, though, Trump and his supporters will dig in their heels and triple-dog-dare Democrats to follow through on this empty threat. That would be a mistake for them, compound the mistake that Democrats are making now, and create years of headache for Americans who want their president focused entirely on the toughest executive job in the country, if not the world. Let's hope that Trump grasps this and finds a way to transfer the businesses to his family while putting his own assets into a blind trust.
In the future, Democrats might want to avoid taking advice from Eric "Otter" Stratton, even if they're just the ones to do it.
#3
Mr. Trump has already turned over the running of the businesses to his children, and sold a bunch of stocks back in June. Is there anything left to fuss about?
[Vanity Fair] Maybe I'm just pi**ed off, but I really don’t give a shi* about what happens to Huma to be honest with you," one close adviser to Hillary Clinton told me recently. He was irked, in particular, at Abedin’s seemingly superfluous breach of decorum during a post-election event.
On the day after Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump, this person said, Abedin appeared within the rope line while Clinton greeted her morose and woebegone supporters. "You’re staff, O.K.?" this adviser continued. "Staff is staff. You’re not a principal." (A spokesperson for the Clinton campaign notes that Abedin was seated alongside the rest of the campaign’s senior leadership team that morning. Abedin declined an interview request.)
In the bizarre month since Clinton’s loss, few people besides the candidate herself have seen their fortunes overturned as significantly as has Abedin, 40, the glamorous and charismatic former vice-chair of the campaign. For two decades, Abedin has been a fixture inside Clinton’s inner circle; she began her career as a college-aged White House intern and rose to become Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department. As a former adviser to Bill Clinton once put it to me, over time Abedin morphed into "a mini Hillary" herself. She wasn’t merely an aide, but rather an amalgamation of adviser, best friend, confidante, and perhaps even surrogate daughter. Abedin "inspires loyalty, and she’s loyal back," one Clinton aide told Amy Chozick in her widely read dissection of Clintonworld for The New York Times Magazine, in 2014.
In fact, according to Chozick, Clinton appeared to countermand those who suggested that Abedin should be relegated on behalf of the sexting antics of her spouse, the randy former congressman Anthony Weiner. Clinton, Chozick reported at the time, appeared more concerned with quarantining the so-called "night stalkers"--sycophants and hangers-on from her many decades in public life--who might try to re-exert their influence. Abedin, meanwhile, was widely expected to get a big job inside a Clinton White House. 'Hot Air' - Same subject.
#5
The MB's gotta be pretty steamed about her as well. All that long term planning, grooming, money spent to get her placement alongside the Hildabeast? All to waste? Especially galling that her sham marriage to that Jooooo pervert helped lose it?
Yep. Pissed.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/15/2016 12:20 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Time for her brother to restore the family honor?
#7
The emails on Huma/Pervert husband's computer were inexcusable. They should blame her to some extent as it brought the email deal back near the end. It was hard enough for them to drag Hillary that close to the finish line without Huma creating additional obstacles through negligence.
[Breitbart] TEL AVIV ‐ Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, is generating headlines for claiming that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election amounts to "the political equivalent of 9/11."
Morell further suggested that the U.S. should respond in a significant way to the alleged Russian actions and he has given interviews supporting reports that the CIA believes Russia tried to influence the election in favor of President-elect Donald Trump.
Absent from the news media coverage of Morell’s statements is that he is known for his leading role in helping to craft the infamously misleading talking points used by Obama administration officials to blame the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks on a YouTube video.
Beacon was founded by Phillippe Reines, who served as Communications Adviser to Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. From 2009-2013, Reines also served in Clinton’s State Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Communications. Reines is the managing director of Beacon.
#1
So the story's not actually based on fact, but on the opinion of a guy who resigned three years ago? Just that should highlight the vaporous content of the story, much less being one of Hillary's remorae.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/15/2016 1:40 Comments ||
Top||
#2
What an amazing coincidence. Phil Reines, Mike Morell, Leon Panetta, a fantastic team with worldwide offices and high-level contacts. And what was it they manufactured again at BGS ?
#3
Little wonder Trump is keeping them at arm's length. I can almost hear Mike Flynn saying.....'hey boss, you don't need that redundancy every morning, ask them for updates and spot reports. I'll read the traffic for you.'
Does anyone ever really resign from Morell's 'former' employer ?
#8
Morell further suggested that the U.S. should respond in a significant way to the alleged Russian actions...
If you leave your barn door open don't come crying to me when your cows go missing and if your server gets hacked it's your own damn fault.
OK, I made a similar comment under the post about Lindsey Graham. Instead of risking a real live shooting war with Russia, how about paying attention to cyber security? Because it isn't just the Russians who are trying to hack you. The Chinese have an entire division of the PLA dedicated to cyber warfare. Then there are all kinds of smaller players; the Romanians, the Ukrainians, the Iranians, the Pakistainians, the Brazilians, the Filipinos and on and on not to mention our own government and the kid next door.
This is all a squirrel.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/15/2016 12:51 Comments ||
Top||
[Wash Times] President Obama is delivering a generous parting gift to Planned Parenthood in the form of a rule prohibiting states from divesting millions of dollars from the nation’s largest abortion provider.
The final version of the rule, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, requires states to distribute dollars from Title X of the Public Health Service Act without taking into account whether recipient clinics perform abortions.
The edict is set to go into effect Jan. 18, two days before the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.
Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, praised Mr. Obama as a "champion for women’s health" but expressed doubt as to whether the rule will survive under Mr. Trump’s pick to head HHS, Rep. Tom Price of Georgia.
"This rule protects birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and other health care for millions of people," Ms. Richards said in a statement. "Yet this fight is not over. We are deeply concerned about the future of health care access in this country with extremists like Mike Pence and Tom Price at the helm."
Rep. Diane Black, a Tennessee Republican who sits on the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, said the Obama administration "will not have the last word" on the rule.
#1
Seeing as how most all of the PP locations only 'refer' women to accredited facilities for "cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment" (in other words, they don't do it in-house), give the money to the accredited facilities that actually do that work.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
12/15/2016 8:31 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Gosh, Mullah, wouldn't that make too much sense?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/15/2016 12:24 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Public funding.
Is there any human it cannot destroy?
Posted by: no mo uro ||
12/15/2016 17:39 Comments ||
Top||
#4
I don't think the Feds can mandate the states do anything. I do think funding should come from the states though, so we are halfway there.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[YahooNews] Top US Republican senator says Russians hacked his campaign.
What do you get when you combine the right idea with the wrong process, the wrong strategy, and moral preening that ignores the application that the right idea would have had for the other side of an election? This stupid and futile gesture from the progressive wing of the Senate Democratic caucus. It ostensibly seeks to force Donald Trump into divesting himself of his businesses and putting his assets in a blind trust. It operates more as a sour-grapes shot that might actually weaken the argument for its core idea:
[Vanity Fair] Maybe I'm just pi**ed off, but I really don’t give a shi* about what happens to Huma to be honest with you," one close adviser to Hillary Clinton told me recently. He was irked, in particular, at Abedin’s seemingly superfluous breach of decorum during a post-election event. 
