Tag Archives: US Constitution

national news, political news

Give the smaller states a louder voice

This graphic showed up on my Facebook news feed as a statement against the Electoral College.

I looked at it and then thought: Wait a minute! What’s so terribly wrong with giving smaller states, such as Wyoming, a greater voice in the election of the president of the United States?

California has those 55 electoral votes; Texas has 38 of them; Florida has 29.

I remain officially undecided about whether to toss the Electoral College aside. It would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

But the more I think about it, the less inclined I am to support such a drastic measure.

The 2016 election ended with the “loser” winning nearly 3 million more popular votes than the “winner.” But the guy who won carried the Electoral College, which is what the founders intended.

I happen to be one who doesn’t begrudge little ol’ Wyoming the extra stroke it gets from the Electoral College.

When did power sharing become a bad thing?

legal news, national news, political news

U.S. Supreme Court: a victim of collateral damage

Elections have consequences … as the saying goes.

Nowhere are those consequences more significant, arguably, than on our judicial system. Which brings me to the point. The U.S. Supreme Court has suffered what I would call “collateral damage” from the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.

A nearly perfect jurist, Merrick Garland, waited in the wings for nine months after President Obama nominated him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Sadly, Garland’s political fate was sealed about an hour after Scalia’s death when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that the Senate would refuse to act on anyone Obama would choose for the nation’s highest court.

It was a shameful, reprehensible display of political gamesmanship and yet McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans had the temerity to accuse the president of playing politics.

McConnell took a huge gamble — and it paid off with Trump’s election this past month as president. Now the new president, a Republican, will get to nominate someone.

The New York Times editorialized Sunday that whoever joins the court will be sitting in a “stolen seat.” The Times, though, offers a pie-in-the-sky suggestion for Trump: He ought to renominate Garland, a brilliant centrist who Republicans once called a “consensus candidate” when he was being considered for the Supreme Court back in 2010.

That won’t happen.

Trump, though, could pick another centrist when the time comes for him to make his selection, the Times suggested. Frankly, I’m not at all confident he’ll do that, either. Indeed, with Trump one is hard-pressed to be able to gauge the ideology tilt of whomever he’ll select, given the president-elect’s own lack of ideological identity.

Scalia was a conservative icon and a man revered by the far right within the Republican Party. His death has put the conservatives’ slim majority on the court in jeopardy. But, hey, it happens from time to time.

President Obama sought to fulfill his constitutional duty by appointing someone to the nation’s highest court. The Senate — led by McConnell and his fellow Republican obstructionists — failed miserably in fulfilling their own duty by giving a highly qualified court nominee the full hearing he deserved.

Now we will get to see just how consequential the 2016 presidential election is on our nation’s triple-tiered system of government.

Will the new president administer some kind of conservative “litmus test” to whomever he chooses? Or will he look for someone who — like Judge Merrick Garland — has exhibited the kind of judicial temperament needed on the highest court in America?

I fear the worst.

national news

Here comes the ‘holiday’; let’s enjoy it

I cannot let this time of the year pass without commenting on a typically ridiculous rant offered by the former half-term Alaska governor, Sarah Palin.

The 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee just had to go off on the Obama family because it sent out “Happy Holiday” cards during this season. The card features a Christmas-like image of a fireplace and Bo, the Obamas’ dog sitting in front of the crackling fire.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/12/sarah-palin-fox-news-attack-white-house-holiday-card-design.html

Palin ventured onto her favorite — and friendliest — venue, the Fox News Channel to spew her nonsense. As the Los Angeles Times reported: Palin told Fox News that she found it “odd” that the card emphasizes the dog instead of traditions like “family, faith and freedom.” She also said that Americans are able to appreciate “American foundational values illustrated and displayed on Christmas cards and on a Christmas tree.”

Sigh …

C’mon, Sarah! Didn’t you see the poinsettias in the picture? They’re universal symbols of Christmas, aren’t they?

As someone who grew up in the Christian faith — I was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and became a Presbyterian after I got married more than 45 years ago — I’ve never had a problem with someone wishing “holiday” greetings during this time of year.

And I have grown weary of those who keep getting their hackles raised when they see others do so.

As I keep noting on this blog, the Constitution declares that there shall be “no religious test” for anyone seeking public office. The Obama family, therefore, need not prove to anyone that they believe in the same God as most Americans.

But the “Happy Holidays” greeting is a simple reminder that the nation’s head of state recognizes that not every American celebrates Christmas. Yes, this remains a festive time of the year. So, the first family has chosen this year — as it has during their time in the White House — to celebrate the holiday in a more ecumenical manner.

Some first families have chosen to emphasize the religious aspect of the season. I honor that desire, too.

In this joyous season, though, I have to take mild umbrage — it’s not all that severe, given that it’s Christmas — at a politician yapping about the first family’s choice of message to send out during this holiday season.

Put another way: Zip it, Sarah!

***

This will conclude my snarkiness during the holiday season. I’ll be commenting on this blog throughout Christmas Eve and I might even add a comment or two after we see what Santa brought us during the night.

I’ll get back at it, though, after Christmas. The new year awaits and there will be so-o-o-o much fodder for us to ponder.

national news, political news

Yes, Trump’s presidency will be legit, unless …

I want to get something off my chest about Donald J. Trump’s pending presidency.

He will be the duly elected, legitimate president of the United States of America. The popular vote totals don’t matter. It won’t matter one damn bit to me — really and truly — that he got 46.1 percent of the vote compared to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s  total of 48 percent.

He will be as legit as Bill Clinton’s presidency was in 1992, when he won with 43 percent of the popular vote in that three-way race against George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. His presidency will be as legit as Richard Nixon’s was in 1968, when he won also with 43 percent in another three-way contest with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.

I get that many on the left will say otherwise, just as many on the right tried to dismiss President Clinton’s 1992 victory as a fluke, given the presence of Perot on the ballot. It wasn’t. Nor was Trump’s victory.

The popular vote is not the issue that threatens Trump’s presidential legitimacy. It’s the other stuff involving the Russian hackers and whether they actually had a tangible impact on the election result.

Congress needs to get to the root of what happened there. The CIA needs to reveal — to the extent that it can without compromising its own intelligence-gathering capability — what it knows about Russian involvement.

I hope for the sake of the country that we learn the Russians did not actually affect the outcome. I have a serious fear, though, that we might learn something sinister.

But let’s steer away from this vote-total argument.

Trump won where it counted, in accordance with how the U.S. Constitution sets forth the election of presidents.

political news, Uncategorized

The case for un-electing Donald Trump

trump

I’m such a fence-straddler on this one.

Our nation’s presidential electors are meeting Monday to choose the next president of the United States. Do they proceed with electing Donald J. Trump, who 306 electoral votes — 36 more than he needs — or do they deny him the votes and throw the election either to candidate he defeated or to the House of Representatives?

The Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union has declared in an editorial that the electors should deny Trump the presidency.

http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Electors-reject-Mr-Trump-10796574.php

Oh, man. I’ve read the editorial twice; I’ll read it some more. The paper makes a strong argument for the electors to yank the presidency away from someone who is wholly unprepared, unqualified and unfit for the job.

Electors from most of the states, though, are bound by state rules that require them to remain faithful to the will of their states’ majority. Other state electors — such as those from Texas — aren’t bound by those rules.

The U.S. Constitution allows such a rebellion to occur. It doesn’t quite address the chaos that would ensue if electors were to deny the Electoral College winner the presidency.

It’s never happened in the history of the Republic, although the House has chosen a president: John Quincy Adams in 1824.

So help me, I cannot yet take that leap.

I agree with the Times-Union’s assessment of Trump’s ability to do the job. His campaign-style “thank you” rallies are troubling in the extreme; he should be spending his time learning about the details of governing a nation comprising more than 300 million citizens. He’s selecting a collection of individuals for his Cabinet who have limited experience dealing with the agencies they would lead and in some cases are openly hostile to the policies they are being asked to implement.

And we have this issue of alleged Russian tampering with our electoral process. Did the president-elect benefit directly from foreign interference?

It is true, as the editorial points out, that the founders set up the Electoral College to shield the nation against “foreign influence.”

The founders also set up a mechanism for Congress to act as a check against presidential overreach. It’s called impeachment. If a president crosses any one of the many boundaries set up to limit the power of the office, the House can intercede with articles of impeachment, followed by a trial in the Senate.

I’m going to give this some more thought. I might get to you later, before the Electoral College meets.

I’ve been watching the presidential electoral process closely for four decades and I’ve never seen questions like these raised prior to the transition of one presidency to another.

It’s beginning to stress me out.

national news, political news

Here’s a possible constitutional crisis of major proportion

electoral-college-banner

Those 538 men and women who are set to meet Monday to elect the next president of the United States are poised to make some serious history, one way or the other.

Most of them come from states that voted for Donald J. Trump, the Republican, over Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrat. They comprise the Electoral College, which the nation’s founders established in the 18th century to choose the person who would govern the country.

Here’s the big-time catch: some of them are “faithless,” which means they aren’t necessarily bound by the dictates of their states’ majorities. Add to that some major-league questions about whether Russian intelligence agents and computer hackers influenced the outcome the election and you have a situation of monumental proportions brewing … possibly.

Enough of those electors might decide they can’t vote for Trump and, thus, deny the president-elect the 270 electoral votes he needs to take office in January.

What happens then if, say, not enough of them switch their votes to Clinton, making her the next president? The U.S. House of Representatives, controlled by the GOP, then gets to pick the next president.

I don’t believe this will happen. I believe Trump will collect enough votes from the Electoral College to take the oath on Jan. 20. He will become the 45th president of the United States; Mike Pence will become the vice president.

Trump likely will have the Cabinet chosen by then. The U.S. Senate committees charged with recommending whether these nominees should be confirmed will get to work and make those critical decisions.

But some of the electors have asked to be briefed fully by the U.S. intelligence apparatus on what the Russians did and whether they actually influenced the outcome of the election. Just suppose the spooks tell the electors that, yep, the Russkies succeeded in getting their man elected. What happens then if you’re an elector from a state that voted for Trump and you can’t in good conscience cast your vote for the winner?

Lots of answers yet to come forward before the big day next week.

This could be the most fascinating supposedly pro forma electoral procedure in the history of the Republic.

It could be …

business news, national news, political news

Trump making a simple matter so very complicated

08divest-top-master768

I am having trouble understanding what it is about conflict of interest that Donald J. Trump doesn’t get.

The president-elect has an enormous business empire. He has contacts throughout the world. He has enriched himself beyond most people’s imagination.

Now he’s about to become president of the United States. What should a man with all that wealth do to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest?

Let’s see, how about selling those business interests outright? Or, how about putting them into a blind trust, let someone manage those interests — and stay the hell away from everything having to do with those business interests?

Is the president-elect going to do either of those things? Apparently not, according to the New York Times.

Trump now is letting it be known he intends to keep at least an interest in his businesses while his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, run them.

Daddy Trump will still be involved, if only on the fringes, with the business empire he has built.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/politics/trump-organization-ivanka-trump.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

The U.S. Constitution refers to “emoluments,” and states that the president must not make money dealing with foreign governments. The next president is treading dangerously close — as long as he retains an “interest” in his business — of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. His businesses have extensive relationships with many foreign governments.

This shouldn’t be a close call. This should be an easy decision for the president to make. If something presents the potential for conflict of interest, you must act aggressively to remove the element that creates that potential conflict.

Trump is not about to quit the office he fought so hard to win. The only alternative is for him to quit the business. Sell it. Put it into a blind trust. Have nothing — not a single, solitary thing — to do with it.

Why doesn’t he get it?

national news, political news

‘Playing to his base’? What about the rest of us?

american-flag-burning

Light a match to Old Glory and go to jail and lose your citizenship.

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Never mind the constitutional guarantee that doing something so reprehensible is protected under the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause.

The president-elect, though, ignored that fundamental truth when he blasted out a tweet that said those who do such a thing need to spend time in the slammer and forsake their citizenship as Americans.

The Washington Post and other media, though, say that Donald J. Trump is “playing to his base,” the voters who’ve stood with him through all the insults, innuendo and idiocy that have poured from his mouth.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/in-flag-burning-comments-trump-again-plays-to-the-voters-that-elected-him/ar-AAkW3eS?li=BBnbfcL

They helped elect him president and I guess that’s his way of saying “thanks, guys.” As the Post reported: “Trump won rural America, where support of the flag is a big issue,” said Scott Reed, a longtime Republican strategist who served as Bob Dole’s campaign manager in 1996. “A lot of those homes that had Trump signs out front were also flying American flags. This is clearly part of his base politics.”

But what about the rest of the country, Mr. President-elect, that didn’t vote for you? What about those of us who are appalled by your seeming ignorance of constitutional protections and your belief — if that’s what you truly believe — that the Supreme Court got it wrong when it ruled on two occasions that burning the Stars and Stripes is protected political speech?

My wife and I fly a flag in our front yard, too, by the way.

I won’t buy into the notion that Trump isn’t my president. I didn’t vote for him, but he’ll take office in January and will assume the role of head of government and head of state. I ain’t moving anywhere. I’m staying right here in the U.S. of A. and will continue to register my gripes — more than likely quite often — over policy pronouncements that come from the president.

Trump won’t be president just for those who stood with him. He’ll be my president, too.

Thus, I hereby demand that he stop making idiotic declarations. How about taking back that crap about flag burning?

national news, political news

Twitter tirade shows danger of Trump presidency

constitution-burningb

Donald J. Trump’s propensity for popping off on social media came into amazing, sharp focus with his latest rant about flag burning.

And it demonstrates why the president-elect’s on-the-job training for the office he is about to assume is so troubling to many of us … who didn’t vote for him.

Trump went on another Twitter tirade and said that those who burn the flag out of protest should spend time in the clink and possibly lose their citizenship.

Really, Mr. President-elect?

This goonish statement underscores as well as anything he’s muttered or sputtered during the course of his fledgling political career how — in a normal election year — he wouldn’t have won the presidency.

His ridiculous assertion ignores — willfully? — that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled time and again that flag-burning is a protected form of political speech. The First Amendment is pretty damn clear about it and anyone who has read that amendment ought to know it — and that makes me believe beyond a doubt that Trump has no clue as to what’s contained in the nation’s governing document.

And yet …

Donald Trump won enough electoral votes to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton and become the 45th president of the United States.

It puzzles me to the max — even now, weeks after the election — just how this happened. Still, I accept the result, as distasteful as it is to my political palate.

I cannot help but wonder, though, how many more idiotic pronouncements the president-elect is going to make. How much more consternation is he going to cause with his utter ignorance of something so fundamental as freedom of speech and political expression?

I’ll repeat what I’ve said before and what others have said already: We have elected a dangerous man as our next president.

national news, political news

OK, so let’s just burn the Constitution, too

burning-flag

The fictional TV husband, Ricky Ricardo, once had the perfect answer to a ridiculous assertion that his wife, Lucy, had made.

“I have five words,” Ricky said. “Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye!”

That’s my response this morning to this latest gem from Twitter twit in chief Donald J. Trump, who writes: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

What in the name of all this holy and sacred is this guy thinking? Or, better yet, is he thinking — at all?

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/29/politics/donald-trump-flag-burning-penalty-proposal/index.html

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled twice in the past quarter century that burning Old Glory is a form of political expression. Thus, the high court said, it is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

For those who buy into every ridiculous utterance that flows out of the president-elect’s mouth, here is what the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Or “abridging the freedom of speech.” There it is, Mr. President-elect. It looks pretty clear to me.

This guy needs the mother of all reality checks.

He once told a TV interviewer that women should face punishment if they obtained an abortion. He backed off that nonsensical assertion not long afterward.

Now this? He wants to punish folks who burn the flag to protest government policy?

Before you accuse me of being soft on those who do such things, I feel the need to restate something I’ve said over many years. Those who seek to sway public opinion in favor of whatever point they make could not do anything more to turn that opinion against them than burning a flag.

Moreover, as one who once served in the Army and went into a war zone when ordered to do so, I take a back seat to no one in my love of country and its symbols. No one should burn a flag in my presence.

That said, it is a legal act that the Constitution protects under the very first amendment the founders wrote into our nation’s governing document.

It must stay that way.

Read the Constitution, Mr. President-elect. You’ll learn a thing or three about how this nation functions.