Tag Archives: Donald Trump

entertainment news, national news, political news

If only Arnold could switch with Trump …

I do not favor amending the U.S. Constitution to allow naturalized U.S. citizens to run for president of the United States.

But a brief retort from a noted former politician/superstar actor/turned reality TV host has me pondering. What if … ?

Donald J. Trump tossed a dig at Arnold Schwarzenegger over his ratings as the new host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” He made the remark at the National Prayer Breakfast — of all places — this morning. “Pray for Arnold,” the president said.

Sheesh!

Well, Arnold — a former California governor — responded to Trump. It’s in the link below.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/schwarzenegger-responds-to-trump-why-dont-we-switch-jobs/ar-AAmyfsb?li=BBnb7Kz

Arnold said that since Trump is an “expert” at ratings, let’s switch jobs.

It has me thinking. You know I think I actually would vote for Arnold for president were he eligible to run for the office. Too bad the Austria-born muscleman can’t.

legal news

Say ‘no’ to term limits for justices

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Donald J. Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court has spurred a discussion that needs to end.

It involves whether there should be term limits for Supreme Court justices.

The nation’s founders didn’t create a perfect government after the American Revolution. They got a few things wrong: Women didn’t have the right to vote; they allowed human beings to own other human beings.

They got a lot of things quite right. One of them was to establish an independent federal judiciary where judges are given lifetime jobs upon being confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution provides that “Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour …”

There you go. If judges behave themselves and do the job to which they take an oath, they can stay for as long as they want. That holds true for Supreme Court justices especially.

Some progressives are alarmed that Trump has appointed a conservative judge to replace an iconic conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, who’s been dead for nearly a year. Let’s limit the terms of justices, they contend.

Hey, I’m on their side most of the time. Not here. The founders had this idea that judges should be free of political pressure. Thus, the lifetime appointment gives them a measure of independence to interpret the U.S. Constitution according to what they believe it tells them.

http://blog.independent.org/2017/02/01/term-limits-for-supreme-court-justices/

History has provided ample demonstration of that independence from judges who didn’t rule quite the way their presidential benefactors wanted. They find their own voice and serve as a check on the legislative and executive branches of government.

I see virtually nothing wrong with judges serving for the rest of their lives on the federal bench — even those with whom I disagree; and believe me, I am sure I will dislike most, if not all, of Neil Gorsuch’s rulings from the high court bench when or if he is confirmed by the Senate.

Then again, given the freedom to interpret the Constitution as broadly or narrowly as he chooses, Gorsuch could surprise us all and join the ranks of men such as Earl Warren, William Brennan, Byron White, John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun — all of whom broke with how legal experts expected them to rule.

national news

Trump on Douglass: He did an ‘amazing job’

Donald J. Trump opened the White House’s commemoration of Black History Month in a most bizarre manner.

He said this today about Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century hero of the effort to abolish slavery in the United States and some other great Americans:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.”

Huh? Amazing job? Big impact? Some of those who heard the president refer to Douglass as some “who’s done an amazing job” are wondering if Trump realizes that Douglass died in 1895.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Trump-update-He-praises-amazing-job-by-10900531.php

When I hear the president refer to these historic figures as if they are contemporaries, I get this uneasy sense that Trump has no idea about whom he is speaking, that he has no clue about the struggle they endured and pain they suffered.

Am I the only American who is baffled beyond belief about the president’s seeming utter ignorance of history?

International news

So, this is how we act toward our friends?

Donald J. Trump is unchained, uninhibited … perhaps he has become unhinged.

The Washington Post reports today that the president of the United States got into a long-distance phone tiff with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then hung up on him.

What gives here?

The Australians are among our strongest allies. They’ve been with us through thick and thin. They fought with us in Vietnam, in Korea, in World War II for crying out loud!

According to The Post: “It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief — a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

“Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/no-%e2%80%98g%e2%80%99day-mate%e2%80%99-on-call-with-australian-prime-minister-trump-badgers-and-brags/ar-AAmwmJc?li=BBnb7Kz

Does the president really believe Prime Minister Turnbull really cares about the size of Trump’s Electoral College victory?

I am not yet understanding how the 45th president intends to conduct himself on the world stage. Maybe that’s by design. Perhaps he is doing all this on purpose to keep our friends and foes off balance.

But, crikey, mate! This isn’t how you talk to a long-standing ally!

International news

Obama disagrees with Trump refugee ban? No kidding!

It didn’t take Barack Obama long at all to weigh in against a policy pronouncement by his presidential successor, Donald Trump.

“The President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion,” said the former president’s spokesman, Kevin Lewis.

I’m going to take another gulp of air now and say this: I wish the former president would have stayed quiet on this one … for two reasons.

First, it should surprise no one that the ex-president opposes Trump’s idiotic refugee ban targeting those coming to the United States from Muslim-majority nations. President Obama made that point abundantly clear during his two terms in office, that the United States must not discriminate against anyone because of their religion as we fight this war against international terrorism.

The second reason is that I continue to endorse the George W./George H.W. Bush view of former presidents criticizing their successors. Bush 43 was essentially quiet during the Obama presidency; Bush 41 also kept quiet during the two terms of Bill Clinton’s presidency. They both adhered to the same principle: We had our time in the arena; that time is up and the men who followed them are entitled to conduct foreign and domestic policy without being sniped at by their predecessor.

Indeed, I was critical former Vice President Dick Cheney’s continual carping about Obama’s conduct of the office.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/05/button-it-up-mr-vp/

Don’t misunderstand me. I endorse Barack Obama’s opinion of Trump’s ban on refugees. It was poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. Several state attorneys general have filed lawsuits challenging its constitutionality.

However, Barack Obama need tell us what we already know about what he thinks about a particular Trump policy.

legal news, national news, political news

Principle pushes against politics

I just hate it when principle runs smack head-on into real-time politics.

The nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court has created just such a conundrum — at least for me.

The principle involves whether to fill the ninth seat on the nation’s highest court, an argument I made when President Barack Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

It wasn’t to be for the Garland and the president; Senate Republicans threw up their roadblock and obstructed the nomination by refusing even to consider it.

They were wrong!

Now a new president has nominated Gorsuch to Scalia’s vacant seat. Senate Democrats are threatening to do all they can to obstruct it, to block Donald Trump’s nominee from taking his seat on the bench.

I’m swallowing real hard as I write this, but it is just as wrong for Democrats to obstruct this nominee as it was for Republicans to obstruct Merrick Garland.

The principle of presidential prerogative stands firm in my view.

So does the need for the Supreme Court to be whole. It needs nine seats occupied to avoid tie votes that in effect send important cases back to lower-court rulings.

At one level, I sympathize with Democrats’ rage at the way their GOP “friends” played raw politics with Garland’s nomination. The GOP leadership took a huge gamble on the hope that a Republican would be elected president. The odds of that gamble paying off seemed to lengthen considerably when Donald Trump won the GOP presidential nomination this past summer.

Trump fooled a lot of us by defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn to nominate people to become justices on the highest court in America.

By all accounts, Gorsuch is qualified. He’s not my ideal justice candidate. To be candid, given Trump’s seeming lack of ideological conviction, I’m not at all certain he even fits whatever core values inform the president’s thinking.

The fundamental point, though, is whether it is right for Democrats to threaten to keep the seat vacant for another year — or perhaps for the entire length of time a Republican president is recommending potential justices.

It is not right!

Judge Gorsuch deserves a Senate committee hearing and a full vote in the Senate — just as Judge Garland did.

Principle ought to matter more than politics — even when one’s political sensibilities are being trampled.

legal news

GOP’s amnesia surely must be cured

I cannot believe a Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania actually said this. But he did.

“We did not inflict this kind of obstructionism on President Obama.”

That came from Patrick Toomey.

It takes my breath away. I might need some smelling salts before I get done with this blog post.

Oh … yes you did, senator!

I get that Donald Trump’s selection of Neil Gorsuch as the next Supreme Court justice has angered Democrats. I also get that the president is entitled to nominate someone of his choosing.

What I do not get is the crass, brassy and classless argument from Senate Republicans — namely Sen. Toomey — that they didn’t obstruct President Barack Obama’s efforts to govern.

Good grief, dude! You made it your top priority!

The hands-down example of obstruction occurred after Antonin Scalia died suddenly while vacationing nearly a year ago in Texas. The Supreme Court justice’s corpse was still warm when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that the Senate GOP would block anyone selected by the then-president to succeed Scalia.

President Obama unveiled Merrick Garland as his nominee to the Supreme Court. McConnell held firm on his pledge. He blocked the nomination. He obstructed the president from fulfilling his constitutional duty to nominate a candidate for a federal judgeship.

Then, as if he had forgotten what he had done, McConnell accused the president and Senate Democrats of “playing politics.”

Are you bleeping kidding me, Mr. Majority Leader?

So here we are. Another president has picked another judge to the highest court. Democrats are furious at the treatment an earlier nominee got from their Republican colleagues.

And Republicans now are saying out loud — and apparently without a hint of shame — that, by golly, they didn’t obstruct a president from the opposing party.

They need treatment for their selective amnesia.

legal news, national news, political news

Hold on! Court balance won’t change

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All this hyperventilating over Donald Trump’s choice for the U.S. Supreme Court is making me dizzy.

The president tonight brought out Neil Gorsuch, a judge on the 10th Circuit of Appeals, as his nominee for the nation’s highest court.

He’s a conservative, just as Trump promised. He is a “strict constitutional constructionist,” again as Trump vowed. He’s also a disciple of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, as Trump pledged.

Now we’re hearing talk about the “nuclear option” that Senate Democrats might employ to stop Gorsuch’s confirmation. They’ll oppose this fellow, seemingly as payback for the shabby treatment Senate Republicans leveled against President Obama’s choice to succeed Obama. Remember that? Senate GOPers said within hours of Scalia’s death that they would block anyone the president nominated. Obama selected Merrick Garland and the Senate didn’t even give him a hearing and a vote.

Let’s take a deep breath here.

I want to make a couple of points.

One, I detest the notion of Donald Trump nominating anyone to the court. But he won the presidency without my vote. He won enough electoral votes to take the oath of office. Thus, he earned the right to choose anyone he wants.

Gorsuch isn’t my kind of justice. But someone else is the president.

Two, the ideological balance of the U.S. Supreme Court is not going to change when — or if — Gorsuch is confirmed. Scalia was a conservative icon. He was a heroic figure among political conservatives. Placing another judicial conservative on the high court restores the court’s narrow 5-4 conservative bent.

I feel compelled to note that the court — with that narrow conservative majority — made two decisions that riled conservatives, um, bigly. It upheld the Affordable Care Act and it declared same-sex marriage to be legal under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Would a Justice Gorsuch change that equation? I don’t see it. A nominee to succeed, say, one of the liberals on the court would most assuredly prompt a titanic political battle … as it should.

None of this will matter, of course, to Senate Democrats who are enraged at the president over many — seemingly countless — issues. His behavior in the first 10 days of his presidency, culminating with his firing of an acting attorney general over her refusal to defend Trump’s paranoid refugee ban, has angered Democrats to their core.

Thus, the fight is on.

It pains me to acknowledge it, but I must. Donald Trump vowed to nominate someone from a list of 20 or so jurists he revealed during his campaign. He has delivered on his pledge.

Judge Gorsuch isn’t to my liking. Moreover, my candidate lost. The other guy won. As they say, elections do have consequences.

education news, local news, political news

Seliger takes brief turn as governor of Texas

I have had the pleasure and the honor of knowing many honorable men and women in public life throughout my 37 years in journalism. This blog post is about one of the good guys I have had the honor of knowing professionally and personally.

I wrote it initially for another medium, but I have chosen to post it here. My interview with state Sen. Kel Seliger took place just before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States.

***

On a day just prior to the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump – when Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were out of the state to attend the festivities in Washington, D.C. – Kelton Gray “Kel” Seliger had the task of serving as Texas’s acting governor.

It’s a responsibility – absent the perks of the job – granted to him by Patrick, who just days earlier had named him president pro tem of the Texas Senate. He was put in charge of the state in the absence of the two top statewide elected officials.

Seliger, a Republican who has served in the Senate since 2004, didn’t arrive this day with any Texas Rangers security detail in tow. There were no special arrangements made, no announcement of his arrival, no fanfare.

Seliger represents a district that stretches from the Texas-Oklahoma border about 100 miles of Amarillo to the Permian Basin, which is another 200 miles south. He maintains Senate offices in Amarillo and Midland and is now essentially a full-time legislator, having sold the steel business he owned with his brother, Lane, several years ago.

He is a native of Borger who graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and who returned to the Panhandle to stake out his future. Seliger entered public service as an Amarillo city commissioner in 1989 and then served as mayor from 1993 until 2001 before joining the Senate after President George W. Bush appointed the late Sen. Teel Bivins to be U.S. ambassador to Sweden.

Seliger chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee and serves also on the Senate Education Committee.

We chatted for a time over lunch. Here is what I learned about Kel Seliger.

Should the state start over with its standardized testing requirement for public school students?

“There’s no need to start over,” Seliger said. “But we need to refine it. We need accountability. These tests are for adults, too,” he said, referring to educators. “Kids take tests all the time. Start over? No. Make it better.”

Are you getting special protection from the Texas Rangers while serving as acting governor?

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said. “They may be around, watching my back. I’m quite sure if they had the remotest sense my new temporary status created a situation, they’d be here in a heartbeat.”

Are you empowered to act fully as governor?

“If there is a situation that requires immediate action as governor, yes,” he explained, referring to a possible natural disaster or other catastrophic event. “But if there was something I would encounter that would require action of another sort, I would check with Gov. Abbott to see if he is OK with whatever I would do.”

But what if we have a natural disaster? Could you then act as governor?

“We have emergency people, first responders, on site. (Department of Public Safety) officials would tell me what’s happened. They then would put me in touch with the governor as quickly as possible” to coordinate the state’s response, Seliger replied.

Why are you serving?

“I love public policy,” Seliger said, “and this is the place to do public policy. If you have a good idea, you can work with people and get things done. In Washington,” he said, echoing the new president, “nothing gets done.”

What has been your greatest success in the Senate?

“I think I have made a meaningful contribution to things that matter. I have been able to focus on water policy and supporting water conservation districts,” he said.

What piece of legislation that has your name on it makes you most proud?

Seliger said he doesn’t have a “particular favorite,” but said he is proud of Senate Bill 149 which “allows kids who don’t pass the STAAR test, but who do all the rest of their course work and then stand before a committee of teachers and administrators to walk across the stage and get their diploma.” He also is proud of a bill he authored that the 2015 Legislature approved that set aside money for construction of buildings on 64 higher education campuses in Texas. “And that includes about $6 million for construction of West Texas A&M’s downtown campus in Amarillo.”

And your biggest disappointment?

“I had a bill that would have banned ‘dark money,’” Seliger said, explaining that “dark money” comprises funds that come from tax-exempt sources but which the public “has no idea who’s giving it” to politicians. “This bill was vetoed after the 2013 session by Gov. (Rick) Perry.” He said the then-governor’s reason for vetoing the bill “was not discernable.”

Do we pay state legislators enough to serve?

“We get paid enough so that people don’t have the impression we’re doing this for the money,” he said of the $600 monthly stipend, plus the per-diem expense paid to lawmakers while the Legislature is in session. “And contrary to what a lot of folks believe about the Legislature, we don’t get just rich people to serve,” he said. “Many legislators are working people who give up their regular jobs to serve in the Legislature.”

How does your Senate district benefit tangibly from your service in the Texas Senate?

“Others should be the ones to make that judgment. I like to think we’re working on issues relating to public education and higher education,” Seliger said. “Everyone who serves in elected office believes that they are making the world a better place. I’m just trying to work with people in our West Texas cities, towns and universities.”

Describe your relationship with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

“We have an effective working relationship,” Seliger said of the man who presides over the Senate. “Look, he named me (Higher Education Committee) chairman. He didn’t have to do that.”

You almost lost your re-election bid in 2014. Are you going to run again in 2018?

“I don’t know,” Seliger said. As for his 2014 Republican Party primary challenge from former Midland Mayor Mike Canon, he responded, “I won with 52 percent of the vote. I don’t think that’s ‘almost losing’ the contest.” He continued: “I don’t intend to stay in the Senate until I’m a doddering old fool, drooling on my lapels.”

What did you see for yourself when you were 10 years old?

Seliger smiled broadly. “I saw myself as Roy Rogers,” he said. Why Roy Rogers? “Hey, I was 10 years old – living in Borger, Texas.”

 

International news

Is this an anti-Muslim rule … or not?

Donald J. Trump swears up and down, left and right — puts his hand on a stack of Bibles and says “Scout’s honor” for all I know — that his ban against refugees is not an “anti-Muslim” initiative.

The president, though, has delivered to our enemies a prime-time, gold-and-silver-plated recruitment tool.

He calls our enemies “radical Islamic terrorists.” Yes, they are.

They also are experts at distorting people’s intentions, even their very words, twisting them into propaganda fodder.

What the president has done is create a climate for terrorists such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda to target American Muslims to join their fight against the “infidels.” He also has delivered to a much wider audience the very message that his two immediate predecessors — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack H. Obama — fought like hell to avoid delivering. Presidents Bush and Obama said clearly: We are not at war with Islam! The enemies are the monstrous murderers who have perverted a great religion.

Now we have the potential for the precise opposite message being delivered to those who might be inclined to join a radical militant movement, to take up arms and to join the fight against the rest of the civilized world.

The president of the United States is expected to speak with absolute clarity and precision. When we’re dealing with the complexities of the current world geopolitical climate, any misstep or clumsy language can produce dire consequences.

The president’s refugee ban has roiled members of the president’s own party, created a firestorm within the legal community over its very constitutionality, and it has possibly enraged Muslims around the world — and in the United States — to the point of causing grievous harm.