Category Archives: Law
Trump’s Peaceful Transition
President Obama promised Donald Trump a peaceful transition to the White House. He said so the day after Trump’s victory. Since then he’s issued 145 “midnight regulations.”
Peaceful Transition
The transition hasn’t been all that peaceful according to Piers Morgan. Instead Obama pitched a presidential “temper tantrum”. Morgan says, Barack “hates Donald and everything he stands for.”:
Since the election, as the New York Times reported, he’s banned oil drilling off the Atlantic coast, named over 100 people to a range of senior government jobs, created new environmental monuments, commuted the sentences of 232 inmates and pardoned 78 others, protected funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, ordered the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay and blocked new Israeli settlements.
Awesome Beautiful Presidential Power
President Obama banned oil drilling in parts of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. His proclamation is permanent and irreversible. The president says he derives this power from the Continental Outer Shelf Land Act.
He commanded the planet to heal and the oceans to slow their rise eight years ago. So this would seem a minor extension of his mandate.
But not everyone agrees he has the power to enforce his will on future presidents and Congresses. Here’s Kevin Williamson in National Review:
Legally speaking this is, as Professor Patrick Parenteau of Vermont Law School wryly put it, “uncharted waters.”
Awesome Beautiful Presidential Power
David Harsanyi in The Federalist agrees the president can’t have have his way with those who come after him. But he fears that future presidents may not want to overturn Obama’s will. So much the better to expand their own awesome beautiful presidential power:
So Republicans could likely overturn this diktat as they can the rest of Obama’s rickety legacy, predominately built on circumventing the law-making branch of the United States government. The problem is that Trump (and anyone else who comes along) has little reason not to adopt Obama’s unprecedented use of the executive power.
Harry Reid’s Nuclear Winter
During Harry Reid’s tenure as Senate Majority Leader he didn’t get President Obama’s nominees approved at a pace to his liking. Democrats had a simple majority but not the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. So Harry invoked the “nuclear option”. Which is to say he changed the rules. Now, under the new Senate rules, only a simple majority of 51 votes is required to approve most presidential nominees. Supreme Court appointments not included.
Nuclear Option
Until the November 8 shocker, the Majority Leader had expected Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. In October he bragged that he had set the table for easy approval of future Supreme Court nominees too. And so he had.
But what he didn’t count on was a Republican president and 52 Republican senators.
Now, as Harry Reid retires to his own personal nuclear winter, he leaves his colleagues glowing in the dark.
Flag Burning
Trump tweet of the week: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences, perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!”
The Huffington Post reported that most people think President-elect The Donald goes too far. They think flag burners should keep their citizenship. However, they’re cool with the jail part.
Flag Burning
Justice Scalia, for his part, wasn’t cool with either jail or loss of citizenship for burning a flag. Here are a few lines from a Pittsburgh Post Gazette editorial on Scalia’s opinion of flag burning:
“If I were king,” the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said in an interview, “I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. … Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. … Burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning is a protected form of free speech. And Salon said Trump was cool with that when he appeared on The David Letterman Show in 2015.
Of course, the court also ruled that campaign issue advocacy spending by corporations and unions is a protected form of free speech. We know Hillary’s not cool with that. The Citizens United case involved a movie critical of her. Here’s the trailer.
My favorite example of the exercise of free speech by flag burning occurred at the RNC convention in Cleveland last summer. The burner became the burnee. He caught himself on fire.
Court of Public Opinion
FBI Director Comey recommended that Hillary not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. But he presented her case on national TV anyway. A verdict was rendered on election day. Hillary was convicted in the court of public opinion. Her sentence was loss of the White House.
She’s Suffered Enough Already
Now President-elect Trump has issued a get out of jail free card. He doesn’t want to see her prosecuted in a court of law either.
Court of Public Opinion
Meanwhile, some Democrats don’t believe there were enough Deplorables in the court of public opinion. They want a recount.
Green candidate Jill Stein is leading the charge. She wants a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. She’s raised more money so far than she did for her presidential campign.
Oops. She can’t guarantee the money will go to a recount.
