|
Trump's Lawyers Have Gone to Some Dark and Unexpected Places to Keep Don McGahn From Testifying |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 30 April 2020 12:29 |
|
Pierce writes: "The Democrats in the House of Representatives would like very much to get McGahn under oath to talk about the president*'s efforts to bury the story of Russian ratfcking."
Former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II. (photo: Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
Trump's Lawyers Have Gone to Some Dark and Unexpected Places to Keep Don McGahn From Testifying
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
30 April 20
Justice Department attorneys told a federal court that only the president* can enforce a congressional subpoena.
 ack in the Before Times, folks were intent on finding out how thoroughly the Volga Bagmen had ratfcked the 2016 election on behalf of the president*’s campaign. (Answer: a metric fckton.) Critical to these inquiries was Don McGahn, who used to be the White House counsel. The Democrats in the House of Representatives would like very much to get McGahn under oath to talk about the president*’s efforts to bury the story of Russian ratfcking. The White House, through its house counsels in the Department of Justice, has been fighting those subpoenas.
On Tuesday, the matter came before an unusual en banc hearing of the District of Columbia’s federal circuit appeals court. The smart money says that the House will prevail and that the White House will then appeal that ruling to the Supreme Court. But the arguments on Tuesday went into some dark and unexpected places. From Politico:
A lawyer representing the Trump administration offered a sweeping argument that Congress has no authority to take legal action to enforce its subpoenas because that power lies solely with the president. Rather, lawmakers must rely on a set of political tools — from choking off funding to blocking presidential nominations to impeachment — to bend a stonewalling president to the Congressional will.
The DOJ is arguing here that the Congress can draft subpoenas against the administration*. It can serve subpoenas on the administration*. But only the president* can enforce Congressional subpoenas, including those directed at himself. The law, indeed, can be an ass, but it doesn’t often bray, kick, and bite a kid in the front row of the Big Top. This argument prompted some serious musings from the bench, and some welcome evidence that these judges recognize what a sui generis ball of sleaze this administration* is.
“How is Congress to conduct its constitutional duty of oversight in the face of the type of utter disregard this administration has shown for that oversight?” the George W. Bush appointee asked Mooppan. “Hasn’t this administration eschewed the traditional norms of compromise and negotiations that you rely on in your arguments so heavily?” The judge who joined with Griffith in that opinion, fellow Bush appointee Karen Henderson, was on the call Tuesday but passed up the chance to question the lawyers or discuss her own views on the disputes. ...
Most of the nine judges who joined in the rare en banc session Tuesday seemed receptive to the House’s concerns, with one judge musing the Trump administration was so intent on sidelining the courts that the public would be left only with "revolution" as an alternative.
Have I mentioned recently that electing a reality-show host whose business career was built on grift was not a good idea?
 |
|
Congress Quietly Boosts Spending on Lawmakers' Exclusive Concierge Health Clinic |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34639"><span class="small">Lee Fang, The Intercept</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 30 April 2020 12:29 |
|
Fang writes: "In the first weeks of the pandemic, few had access to the same rapid Covid-19 testing that was made available to lawmakers through the clinic."
Rep. G. K. Butterfield, left, and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, wear face masks as they talk on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Bill Clark/Getty)
Congress Quietly Boosts Spending on Lawmakers' Exclusive Concierge Health Clinic
By Lee Fang, The Intercept
30 April 20
 n mid-March, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., became one of the first lawmakers to announce he had Covid-19, after testing positive for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
He received his diagnosis promptly from congressional doctors employed by the Office of the Attending Physician, and recovered by early April. Coronavirus testing was made available early and often for members of Congress, who enjoy concierge medical services courtesy of a world-class government health clinic.
Diaz-Balart, like many other voices on Capitol Hill, has denounced increased public spending on health services as a dangerous “government takeover of healthcare.” But like every lawmaker, he enjoys gold-plated medical care from OAP, which provides on-call services at taxpayer expense — and recently got a boost in funding.
Just months before the pandemic, lawmakers hiked funding for the OAP clinic, a move that has not been previously reported. The last congressional appropriations bill, passed in December, increased the budget for the office to $3,868,000 this year. Then, in March, the CARES Act, the sweeping $2.2 trillion bailout legislation, included a special provision that appropriated an additional $400,000 to the OAP clinic as part of a package of special funds to prepare the capital for coronavirus response and hygiene.
All together, the OAP budget has increased more than 25 percent over the last decade. The move to secure the health and safety of lawmakers contrasts sharply with the policy focus of Congress, which has largely faced a stalemate over the expansion of low-cost health care services over the last decade. In the first weeks of the pandemic, few had access to the same rapid Covid-19 testing that was made available to lawmakers through the clinic.
The OAP has been described as “some of the country’s best and most efficient government-run health care.”
Lawmakers are only charged around $600 in annual fees, which covers a small fraction of the costs for OAP operations. The vast majority of the budget comes from money delegated by the federal government. Even the low flat rate isn’t necessarily required. Some lawmakers who have declined to pay the nominal fee are not turned away from the clinic, according to previous reports.
The clinic, managed by Dr. Brian Monahan, a rear admiral in the Navy, employs three doctors, a pharmacist, and over a dozen nurses and medical technicians. The clinic not only provides coronavirus testing, but routine flu vaccines, lab work, physicals, and a range of emergency treatments. Lawmakers have claimed that they use the OAP office as their primary care physician. It also also treats some medical emergencies among tourists.
Members of Congress also receive regular physical therapy care at the clinic. An on-site radiology suite provides X-rays. Specialty doctors from military hospitals routinely visit the OAP at no extra charge, while lawmakers are often referred for free outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
In recent weeks, the OAP has played a critical role in helping lawmakers respond to the rapid spread of coronavirus. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and other lawmakers who tested positive have consulted closely with doctors from the OAP on ways in which to quarantine themselves and recover.
The office has taken the lead on producing public health policies for congressional operations during the coronavirus pandemic. A recent congressional guidance issued by OAP advises the proper use of face masks in the capital and the use of the gallery space above the House of Representatives to facilitate social distancing.
The CARES Act also provided $12 million for the Capitol Police and an additional $25 million for capital construction crews to prepare sanitation supplies for the administration of congressional buildings.
Dale Fountain, the chair of Enact Universal Healthcare for California, a single payer advocacy group, said he was disappointed to learn about Congress moving to shore up its own taxpayer-funded health care.
“Speaker Pelosi has been adamant in her rejection of single payer for everyone,” said Fountain, noting that the omnibus spending bill in December repealed three tax provisions of the Affordable Care Act while boosting the OAP.
“It has been obvious for awhile that when it comes to her own healthcare and her own projects, ‘how will we pay for it?’ was never a concern,” he added.
|
|
|
The Supreme Court May Soon Give Trump More Power to Fire Anyone He Wants |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54179"><span class="small">Leah Litman, Slate</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 30 April 2020 12:29 |
|
Litman writes: "Its actions underscore the dangers of increasing presidential control over an administrative state that could otherwise be guided by expertise and facts: Autocratic presidents can use the personnel power to suppress facts and mislead the American people."
Supreme Court building. (photo: Will Dunham/Reuters)
The Supreme Court May Soon Give Trump More Power to Fire Anyone He Wants
By Leah Litman, Slate
30 April 20
And Congress would be powerless to stop him.
 t a coronavirus task force briefing last week, President Donald Trump floated the possibility of injecting bleach as a cure for the coronavirus. Soon after, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Twitter that disinfectants can cause health problems and should be used only according to their instructions. The apparent clash raised the question: What if the president threatens to fire officials who refuse to echo his dangerous speculations?
The Trump administration has been using the president’s power over personnel (the power to hire and fire federal workers) to prevent government officials from sharing facts about the coronavirus that are inconsistent with the administration’s preferred message. Its actions underscore the dangers of increasing presidential control over an administrative state that could otherwise be guided by expertise and facts: Autocratic presidents can use the personnel power to suppress facts and mislead the American people. Notwithstanding that threat, the Supreme Court appears poised to give the president more power over personnel, not less—and prevent Congress from protecting federal officials in the future.
It’s not hard to see how the president’s use of the personnel power runs the risk of confusing and harming Americans. On April 21, the Washington Post reported that CDC Director Robert Redfield had warned that a subsequent wave of the virus “next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” That warning is inconsistent with the president’s preferred message that things are getting better. Thus, at the next day’s coronavirus task force briefing, Donald Trump trotted out the CDC director to cast doubt on the story. (The director maintained that while the quote was accurate, “the headline [of the story] was inappropriate.” The headline stated, “CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating,” rather than “more difficult.”) The White House press secretary subsequently suggested Redfield was merely talking about the need for flu shots.
Also on April 22, the official who led the federal agency involved in developing a vaccine, Dr. Rick Bright, claimed that his superiors had removed him from his post after he questioned the viability of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. A recent study by Veterans Affairs hospitals found more deaths among coronavirus patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine than those who were treated with other care. But the president had previously described the drug as a “game-changer” and expressed hope that the drug would be used more broadly.
These examples illustrate some of the troubling consequences of the president’s power over personnel—or at least this president’s power over personnel. Presidents can exercise the power to hire and fire federal officials in ways that both obscure facts and endanger lives—such as by minimizing the looming specter of another major coronavirus outbreak in the coming fall or winter or by touting bleach as a cure for the virus. Presidents can put their employees to the choice of staying on message or losing their jobs.
What if Congress wanted to do something about that—and tried to protect expert health officials from a president who is allergic to the facts?
More than 75 years ago, the Supreme Court allowed Congress to insulate federal officials from presidential removal. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the court said that Congress could prevent presidents from removing Federal Trade Commissioners except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” These restrictions are sometimes called “for cause” removal restrictions because they prohibit presidents from removing an official for mere policy disagreements. (Indeed, no head of any agency has ever been removed for cause.) In Humphrey’s Executor, the court reasoned that being “independent of executive authority” was necessary for officials “to exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts,” rather than being subject to political whim.
But Congress might not be able to rely on that decision for much longer. Conservative judges, including one of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, have started to question the wisdom and correctness of Humphrey’s Executor. They have maintained that the Constitution requires the president to exercise unfettered discretion over the power to fire high-level executive officers. When Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he claimed that agencies led by officers protected by for-cause removal were an anomaly—and questioned whether Humphrey’s Executor was correctly decided.
They have maintained that Article 2 of the Constitution vests all executive power in the president and that the executive power includes the ability to fire the heads of administrative agencies. (My colleague Julian Mortenson has debunked this interpretation of Article 2 in a series of papers.)
This term, the full Supreme Court may very well agree with Kavanaugh’s aggressive interpretation of Article 2. The court is poised to decide a case about the constitutionality of the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In the course of urging the court to find the bureau unconstitutional (the bureau is led by a single director who is removable for cause), the Trump administration is asking the court to either overturn Humphrey’s Executor or to limit the decision to its facts. Either route would ensure that presidents, including this one, have the authority to remove, for any reason, the heads of any agencies that are exactly the same as the FTC.
That would mean that Congress could not insulate agencies or departments—including a new office of pandemics—headed by single individuals from presidential removal. A decision along those lines could also limit Congress’ ability to protect existing offices and office heads from presidential control.
Critics of the administrative state like to say that increasing presidential control over agencies would be good for the health of our democracy and the rule of law. But as the coronavirus has made clear, there are costs to increasing presidential control as well: What if the president can simply fire every official who says that injecting bleach could kill you?
|
|
RSN | Joe Biden Needs an Intervention: An Open Letter to DNC Chair Tom Perez |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 30 April 2020 12:15 |
|
Solomon writes: "Joe Biden is not helping to assemble a broad tactical alliance. Instead, he's ignoring the wisdom that Jesse Jackson offered at the Democratic National Convention in 1988: 'It takes two wings to fly.' Right now, Biden is idling in the cockpit of a political aircraft with one wing."
Vice President Joe Biden and DNC chair Tom Perez. (photo: Getty)
Joe Biden Needs an Intervention: An Open Letter to DNC Chair Tom Perez
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
30 April 20
 hatever our political differences, vast numbers of Democrats and others agree that it’s imperative to defeat Donald Trump. But with scarcely five months to go before the voting starts, Joe Biden is not helping to assemble a broad tactical alliance. Instead, he’s ignoring the wisdom that Jesse Jackson offered at the Democratic National Convention in 1988: “It takes two wings to fly.”
Right now, Biden is idling in the cockpit of a political aircraft with one wing.
As chair of the Democratic National Committee at a time when the party’s presumptive nominee for president seems likely to crash and burn, you should be openly working to fix the problem rather than merely proclaiming that Biden is a great candidate.
Indications are profuse that Biden is proceeding with a business-as-usual campaign while elevating establishment figures. His rhetorical nods toward Bernie Sanders supporters have been notably superficial, while the nitty-gritty of policy is being placed in corporate hands.
On April 27, The Nation summed up one of the latest ominous signs: “Larry Summers is a dead albatross around Biden’s neck. Why should we believe Biden’s promises of progressive reforms, when he seeks out the advice of this plutocrat-loving economist?”
I have often heard you talk about the “north star” of party principles. Surely that must involve democracy. Yet the cancellation of the New York presidential primary is a flagrant Machiavellian maneuver by that state’s Democratic Party leadership.
“This means that our campaign will receive no delegates from New York, weakening our ability to fight for a progressive platform and progressive rules at the Democratic convention,” the Sanders campaign pointed out in a statement on April 29. “It also means our voters are less likely to turn out, which will hurt progressive New York candidates who are still facing primaries.” Using the pandemic as an excuse for the cancellation was clearly bogus, since the entire New York election on June 23 could be conducted by mail.
The corrosive ill will created by such machinations — heightening progressives’ distrust of the Democratic Party — will weaken support for the Biden general-election campaign across the country. As the Sanders campaign put it, what Democratic Party power brokers did in New York “is an outrage, an assault on democracy.”
But where is your voice to challenge this “assault on democracy”? The corporate cats seem to have your tongue. With silence, you’re an enabler of this travesty. You should firmly declare that New York will be stripped of all its national-convention delegates unless this decision is reversed and the state’s presidential primary is reinstated.
A related situation looms in California and some other states, threatening to deny Sanders his statewide allocation of delegates beyond congressional districts. The threat involves undemocratically depriving Sanders of delegates that he — and millions of people who voted for him — are entitled to. But again, your voice is silent.
You might think it’s all well and good for you to claim a “hands off” approach of deferring to decisions by state party leaders. But in mid-March you didn’t hesitate to flatly proclaim that Illinois, under a Democratic governor, should go ahead with an in-person presidential primary election, thereby aiding Biden’s momentum to widen his delegate lead over Sanders. To the detriment of public health, you publicly and emphatically sought to influence a state decision about a Democratic primary.
But now, your enabling silence is conspicuous as hundreds of duly elected Sanders delegates are in jeopardy nationwide.
As in New York, the bogus pretext in various states is that Sanders is no longer a candidate — even though, when he announced the suspension of his campaign three weeks ago, the senator explicitly stated that “I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates.” And, he added, “we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible at the Democratic convention, where we will be able to exert significant influence over the party platform and other functions.”
The committees and delegates of the national convention will make key decisions on crucial platform issues, such as healthcare as a human right, student debt, immigration reform, institutional racism, the climate emergency, economic justice and much more. Also on the line are major choices about whether the party will democratize or slam the door on internal reforms.
In a mass email that the DNC sent out last weekend, you declared with ample self-congratulation: “Today, the DNC looks massively different than it did in the wake of the 2016 election. That’s a good thing. In early 2017, we were rudderless…. [I]t was obvious we had to rebuild our party from the ground up.” You wrote of “rebuilding trust with Democrats across the country” — and asserted “that is exactly what our new leadership did.”
But whatever trust has been rebuilt over the last three years is now being damaged by your refusal, as DNC chair, to speak up for party democracy in the states where it is now under threat.
Biden is a weak candidate in grave danger of losing a decisive number of progressive votes in the fall. Consider the latest polling data that has just appeared under this USA Today headline: “Nearly 1 in 4 Sanders Supporters Not on Board Yet with Voting for Biden.”
That’s what happens when a presidential campaign is all set to fly with one wing.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
n April 2, the Republican Party more or less joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States Plus (OPEC+). That is the upshot of reporting by Timothy Gardner, Steve Holland, Dmitry Zhdannikov, and Rania El Gamal for 
