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Trump Broke the Law. Congress Must Now Defend the Separation of Powers. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53004"><span class="small">Patrick Leahy, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Saturday, 18 January 2020 09:28 |
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Leahy writes: "On Thursday morning, hours before senators were sworn in to serve on President Trump's impeachment trial, an independent, nonpartisan government watchdog confirmed what I have long suspected: When Trump froze congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine as part of an effort to compel Ukraine to investigate his political rival, he broke the law."
The Capitol in Washington, D.C., is seen at dawn. (photo: AP)
Trump Broke the Law. Congress Must Now Defend the Separation of Powers.
By Patrick Leahy, The Washington Post
18 January 20
 n Thursday morning, hours before senators were sworn in to serve on President Trump’s impeachment trial, an independent, nonpartisan government watchdog confirmed what I have long suspected: When Trump froze congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine as part of an effort to compel Ukraine to investigate his political rival, he broke the law.
That’s because a central feature of our republic, defined by its separation of powers among the three branches of government, is that Congress, not the president, controls the “power of the purse.” James Madison argued that this was “the most complete and effectual weapon” to counter “all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches.” The nation’s founders enshrined their vision in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, establishing that Congress alone possesses the power of the purse. The president can propose funding for whatever projects he wants, but Congress ultimately decides where to direct the American people’s tax dollars.
Nearly 200 years later, in 1974, Congress overwhelmingly enacted the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) in response to President Richard M. Nixon’s overreach into Congress’s appropriations power. The ICA grants presidents limited ability to cut or delay any spending appropriated by Congress. If presidents wish not to spend appropriated money, they must seek and obtain Congress’s approval. Even a delay in spending requires notice to Congress.
On Thursday, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office concluded that, because the “Constitution grants the President no unilateral authority to withhold funds,” the administration “violated the ICA.” The GAO further found that the administration’s excuses for the president’s actions “have no basis in law.”
A violation of a law, by itself, is not necessarily sufficient to warrant impeachment and removal from office. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” required by the Constitution refer instead to misdeeds in high office — a “violation of some public trust,” according to Alexander Hamilton — which need not be criminal. It is now the Senate’s responsibility to decide whether the president abused the powers of his office for personal gain when he withheld congressionally appropriated funds from an ally in violation of the Impoundment Control Act.
In fiscal 2019, Congress appropriated $250 million in military assistance for Ukraine, a U.S. ally, through the Defense Department, and Trump signed that assistance into law. Russian-backed forces invaded Ukraine in 2014, forcibly annexing Crimea. Approximately 13,000 people have since been killed, and more than 1.5 million displaced.
The Pentagon strongly supported the military assistance and certified last spring that Ukraine had implemented anti-corruption measures required by Congress as a condition of the aid. But the president secretly froze the aid two months later, over warnings from Defense Department officials that doing so risked violating the ICA, while the president and his associates pressed Ukraine to launch baseless investigations that would help him politically. The president released the aid in September — after he got caught.
In my 43 years on the Senate Appropriations Committee, where I now serve as vice chairman, I have never seen anything like it.
Senior White House aides, such as budget official Michael Duffey and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, could tell us exactly what happened, but Trump directed them not to testify before the House. The Senate must insist on hearing from these and other key witnesses.
If Trump disagreed with Congress’s appropriation, he could have vetoed the bill. He did not. Thereafter, he could have proposed a “rescission” to block the aid under the ICA, which requires congressional approval. He did not. Or, with congressional notification, he could have deferred the funds — but only for specific reasons under the Impoundment Control Act that the GAO found did not apply. He did not attempt this either. As the GAO opinion makes clear, the president chose a fourth option, one that violated the law.
The ICA is not just a technical appropriations law. It reinforces the control over taxpayer dollars the Constitution reserved for Congress. Having won independence from a monarchy, the framers feared an unchecked executive with the power to use public dollars as a slush fund for his personal interests. After all, if the president can interpose his personal interests between congressional appropriations and a designated funding recipient, such as Ukraine, what would stop him from withholding development funds intended for a U.S. city until the mayor endorses him? What stops him from holding any part of the $4.7 trillion annual federal budget hostage to his personal whims?
Congress chose to provide military assistance to an ally that is literally under attack by Russia. The president chose to delay that aid, violating the law, because he viewed his political interests as more important.
Each senator has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. And on Thursday we took yet another oath to do “impartial justice according to the Constitution.” Will the Senate now defend the Constitution’s carefully balanced separation of powers? How we answer this and other critical questions in the coming weeks will define America’s democracy for generations to come.
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Mitch McConnell's Impartiality Problem |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52995"><span class="small">Joel Mathis, The Week</span></a>
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Friday, 17 January 2020 13:56 |
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Mathis writes: "This afternoon, if all goes according to schedule, all 100 members of the United States Senate will take an oath to 'do impartial justice' as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be among those sworn in to judge the president's case."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (photo: Timothy D. Easley/AP)
Mitch McConnell's Impartiality Problem
By Joel Mathis, The Week
17 January 20
 his afternoon, if all goes according to schedule, all 100 members of the United States Senate will take an oath to "do impartial justice" as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will be among those sworn in to judge the president's case.
If he takes the oath seriously, McConnell's first act after that should be to recuse himself.
McConnell won't do that, of course — he is the honey badger of American politics. But there can be no question that McConnell has no intention of approaching Trump's impeachment with impartiality. He has already passed judgment on the House of Representatives' case against the president — calling the Articles of Impeachment "weak" — and, more troubling, promised "total coordination" with the White House in steering the Senate trial to its conclusion.
"This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it," he said in December. "Impeachment is a political decision."
Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) called for McConnell's recusal in December. She will serve at the trial as one of the House-appointed impeachment managers, and on Wednesday said she still believes McConnell should step aside.
"For the Senate Majority Leader to publicly announce that he has no intentions of being impartial and, as a matter of fact, he's coordinating every step with the White House and there will be no difference between the White House and his views, is absolutely shameful," she said in a press conference. "It's hard to take that one back and put that toothpaste back in the tube."
Demings is right.
McConnell is too, sort of. It is true that the Senate is a political body. Most of its members have dreamed about being president; all of them have risen to their current positions — and stayed there — by being obsessively attuned to donors, voters, and anybody else with influence over their careers. Asking the most political people in the world to put politics aside and be impartial is nearly impossible. Even the Founders saw that.
And yet there's that darned oath.
The impeachment oath doesn't allow for exceptions. It doesn't obligate its takers to "do impartial justice" unless senators really like the president, or unless the political incentives make it difficult. It simply commands impartiality.
The three years of Trump's presidency have featured a lot of public pondering about why Republicans go along with his worst behavior, why — with rare exception — leaders like McConnell can't call him out, oppose him, or otherwise "put country over party." There are a lot of answers. Some of them involve their fear of Trump and his ability to end their political careers. Some of it is that they see what Trump has given them — tax cuts, deregulation, and a slew of conservative judges — and have decided this president's downsides are worth the benefits. And many Republicans don't put country over party because they truly believe that what is good for one is also good for the other.
That should be no surprise. Test a few Democrats, and you'd probably find they possess a similar belief.
Impeachment is different, though. The oath challenges senators to think hard and critically about the difference between what is good for the party and what is good for the country. It suggests that there is a higher duty than winning the next election, something more important than pledging allegiance to one's own biases. It requires politicians to do something they almost never have to do: be unselfish. Impartiality may be a nearly impossible standard, but there is something to be said for trying to live up to it.
McConnell probably won't make that attempt. He will take the oath and then immediately violate it — even if, as law professor Lawrence Lessig has suggested, that violation makes him a perjurer. Who, after all, will hold him accountable?
The impeachment trial is meant to judge Trump. But the ramifications go beyond this presidency. History is already starting to render its verdict on the honor of McConnell — the impeachment trial is one more piece of evidence that will find him wanting.
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FOCUS: BlackRock Will Move Away From Fossil Fuels, Citing Climate Change |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 17 January 2020 12:31 |
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McKibben writes: "If you felt the earth tremble a little bit in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, it was likely caused by the sheer heft of vast amounts of money starting to shift."
In response to mounting public pressure, Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, announced in a letter to investors that the firm will make some modest policy changes related to climate change. (photo: Damon Winter/New York Times)
BlackRock Will Move Away From Fossil Fuels, Citing Climate Change
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
17 January 20
 f you felt the earth tremble a little bit in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, it was likely caused by the sheer heft of vast amounts of money starting to shift. “Seismic” is the only word to describe the recent decision of the asset-management firm BlackRock to acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis and begin (emphasis on begin) to start redirecting its investments.
By one estimate, there’s about eighty trillion dollars of money on the planet. If that’s correct, then BlackRock’s holding of seven trillion dollars means that nearly a dime of every dollar rests in its digital files, mostly in the form of stocks it invests in for pension funds and the like. So when BlackRock’s C.E.O., Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to investors to explaining that climate change has now put us “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” it marked a watershed moment in climate history.
He’s right about the financial future, of course—one can’t look at the clouds of smoke now obscuring the Australian continent and come away thinking that we can maintain our present course. But anyone paying attention—which includes investment-fund C.E.O.s—has known the score for years. What’s changed now are a couple of factors.
For one, fossil-fuel stocks have begun to drag down portfolios. As the Times observed, “Had Mr. Fink moved a decade ago to pull BlackRock’s funds out of companies that contribute to climate change, his clients would have been well served. In the past 10 years, through Friday, companies in the S&P 500 energy sector had gained just 2 percent in total. In the same period, the broader S&P 500 nearly tripled.”
But, at least as important, public pressure just keeps mounting. Activist campaigns have been working to make the financial industry start to pay attention. (I’m involved with one, and was among those arrested, on Friday, after a sojourn in the lobby of a Chase branch.) In the past few months, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual, and the Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., have all put forth new climate policies, and the European Investment Bank—the largest international public bank in the world—announced that it would stop lending to fossil-fuel projects altogether.
Meanwhile, more and more people around the world have started questioning their financial advisers. Climate change, Fink said in his letter, is “almost invariably the top issue that clients around the world raise with BlackRock.” And BlackRock’s clients aren’t the only ones concerned, so you may well see Vanguard and State Street, the other asset-managing behemoths, following this lead in the months to come.
BlackRock’s actual policy changes are modest compared with Fink’s rhetoric. At least at first, the main change will be to rid the firm’s actively managed portfolio (about $1.8 trillion in value) of coal stocks; but coal, though still a major contributor to climate change, is already on the wane, except in Asia. The companies that mine it have tanked in value—even Donald Trump’s coddling has been unable to slow the industry’s decline in this country. So an investor swearing off coal is a bit like cutting cake out of your diet but clinging to a slice of pie and a box of doughnuts.
And Fink is apparently stuck in a decade-old time warp, suggesting on CNBC that “natural gas plays a very large role in the energy transition.” This is also the new official position of the American Petroleum Institute; sadly, the science shows that fracking for natural gas releases large amounts of methane, the second-most significant contributor to climate change.
The other weakness of the plan is that it doesn’t directly address BlackRock’s main business, which is passive index funds. The company has previously maintained that it can’t do anything about the contents of those indexes. But BlackRock’s announcement suggests that this position is changing. In the months ahead, I’d be surprised if the firm didn’t persuade Standard & Poor’s and other index makers to produce “sustainable” versions of their main products—at which point, if BlackRock began nudging its biggest customers into those investments, the shift of money would be far greater.
But BlackRock is so enormous that the signal it sent will likely be heard even through the layers of detail. “I, for one, see this as the beginning of the end for the fossil-fuel system,” Kingsmill Bond, an analyst who used to work at Citibank and Deutsche Bank, and is now with the London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, told me. “Who, now, will want to hold the stranded assets of the fossil era?”
His observation, he said, is based on what investors call the “greater fool theory.” “Many people hold assets on the expectation that they will be able to sell them to someone else. And now the world’s largest asset manager has very publicly stated that ‘a significant reallocation of capital’ will take place sooner than most anticipate—indeed, ‘because capital markets pull future risk forward, we will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than we see changes to the climate itself.’ ”
So, Bond explained, “If you have a gas network or a coal ship or a diesel-car factory, Fink is essentially saying that there will very shortly be no buyers for these assets. And, because markets think that one through, it means that the next time you try to refinance your loan on these assets, or the next time you try to sell them, you will struggle. In fact, that is how capital markets pull risk forward.”
There is still much work to be done. For today, though, it’s enough that the biggest guy on the block has begun knuckling under to reality—a reality that Fink acknowledges will only grow larger. “This dynamic will accelerate as the next generation takes the helm of government and business,” he wrote. “As trillions of dollars shift to millennials over the next few decades, as they become C.E.O.s and C.I.O.s, as they become the policymakers and heads of state, they will further reshape the world’s approach to sustainability.”
It’s come late—too late to save the Arctic, too late to save the species that have likely gone extinct in Australia’s fires, too late to save the homes of millions of people around the world forced to flee them amid withering droughts and rising seas. But if, for a moment, you want to feel a little hopeful about the future of the climate, then today is your day.
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FOCUS: Should Facebook and Twitter Stop Trump's Lies? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
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Friday, 17 January 2020 12:15 |
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Reich writes: "Zuckerberg's Facebook sends Trump's unfiltered lies to 43 percent of Americans, for whom Facebook is a source of news. And Dorsey's Twitter sends them to 67 million Twitter users every day."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Should Facebook and Twitter Stop Trump's Lies?
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
17 January 20
 acebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’ll run political ads even if false. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says he’ll stop running political ads.
Dorsey has the correct approach, but this entire debate about ads skirts the bigger question: Who’s responsible for protecting democracy from big, dangerous lies?
Donald Trump lies like most people breathe, and his lies have grown more vicious and dangerous as he’s been cornered – conjuring up conspiracies, spewing hate, and saying established facts are lies, and lies are truths.
This would be hard enough for a democracy to handle, but Zuckerberg’s Facebook sends Trump’s unfiltered lies to 43 percent of Americans, for whom Facebook is a source of news. And Dorsey’s Twitter sends them to 67 million Twitter users every day.
A major characteristic of the Internet goes by the fancy term “disintermediation.” Put simply, it means sellers are linked directly to customers with no need for middlemen.
Amazon eliminates the need for retailers. Online investing eliminates the need for stock brokers. Travel agents and real estate brokers have become obsolete as consumers get all the information they need at a keystroke.
But democracy cannot be disintermediated. We’re not just buyers and sellers. We’re also citizens who need to know what’s happening around us in order to exercise our right to, and responsibility for, self-government.
If a president and his enablers are peddling vicious and dangerous lies, we need reliable intermediaries that help us see that they’re lies.
Intermediating between the powerful and the people was once the job of publishers and journalists – hence the term “media.”
This role was understood to be so critical to democracy that the Constitution enshrined it in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.
With that freedom came a public responsibility to be a bulwark against powerful lies.
The media haven’t always lived up to that responsibility. We had yellow journalism in the nineteenth century, and today endure shock radio, the National Enquirer, and Fox News.
But most publishers and journalists have recognized that duty. Think of the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate investigation, and, more recently, the exposure of Trump’s withholding $400 million in security aid to Ukraine until it investigated Trump’s major political rival, Joe Biden.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey insist they are not publishers or journalists. They say Facebook and Twitter are just “platforms” that convey everything and anything – facts, lies, conspiracies, vendettas – with none of the public responsibilities that come with being part of the press.
That is rubbish. They can’t be the major carriers of the news on which most Americans rely while taking no responsibility for its content.
Advertising isn’t the issue. It doesn’t matter whether Trump pays Facebook or Twitter to post dishonest ads about Joe Biden and his son, or Trump and his enablers post the same lies on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Or even if Russia and Iran repeat the lies in their own subversive postings on Facebook and Twitter.
The problem is we have an American president who will say anything to preserve his power, and we’ve got two giant entities that spread his lies uncritically, like global-sized bullhorns.
We can’t do anything about Trump for now. But we can and should take action against the power of these two enablers.
If they are unwilling to protect the public against powerful lies, they shouldn’t have so much power to spread them to begin with.
The reason 45 percent of Americans rely on Facebook for news and Trump’s tweets reach 67 million Twitter users is because these platforms are near monopolies – dominating the information marketplace.
No television network, cable, or newspaper comes close. Fox News’s viewership rarely exceeds 3 million. The New York Times has 4.9 million subscribers.
Facebook and Twitter aren’t just participants in the information marketplace. They’re quickly becoming the information marketplace.
Antitrust law was designed to check the power of giant commercial entities. Its purpose wasn’t just to hold down consumer prices but also to protect democracy.
Antitrust should be used against Facebook and Twitter. They should be broken up. So instead of two mammoth megaphones trumpeting Trump’s lies, or those of any similarly truth-challenged successor to Trump, the public will have more diverse sources of information, some of which will expose the lies.
A diverse information marketplace is no guarantee against tyranny, of course. But the system we now have – featuring a president who lies through his teeth and two giant uncritical conveyors of those lies – invites tyranny.
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enator Sanders’s poll numbers have seen a steady rise over the last few months. A new poll released today shows Bernie leading Vice President Joe Biden nationally among registered voters. A whole host of recent polls have shown Bernie leading or near the top in early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and the delegate-rich state of California, which begins voting on the same day as Iowa.
