Tag: Trump weakening U.S. Constitution

Wake Up, GOP, Warns Liz Cheney: Trump Is Still Waging ‘War On The Constitution’

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The Wyoming lawmaker also called the sex trafficking allegations against Matt Gaetz “sickening.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called on her party Sunday to move on from former President Donald Trump, saying in an interview on “Face The Nation” on CBS that he’s peddling his old lies and continuing to wage “war on the Constitution.”

In an incendiary speech Saturday at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser for the Republican National Committee, Trump yet again baselessly claimed the election had been illegally stolen from him. He attacked former Vice President Mike Pence for lacking “the courage” to block voters’ choice of Joe Biden as president. He expressed no regrets about, nor remorse for, the deadly Capitol riot, The Washington Post reported.

“The former president is using the same language that he knows provoked violence on January 6th,” Cheney said of the speech. “As a party, we need to be focused on the future. We need to be focused on embracing the Constitution — not embracing insurrection.” Continue reading.

Republicans fear Trump may cost them Senate

The Hill logoSenate Republicans are feeling high anxiety over President Trump’s aggressive response to nationwide civil unrest, which they fear is alienating middle-of-the-road voters who are crucial to keeping their majority after Nov. 3.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared at the beginning of the election cycle that winning over college graduates and women in the suburbs would be key to retaining the Senate majority in 2020.

With the election five months away, Senate Republicans worry that Trump is blowing up that strategy with his laser-like focus on his base instead of swing voters. Continue reading.

Australia will investigate attack on journalists by police in Washington

SYDNEY, AUSTRAILIA (CNN Business) — Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for an investigation after two of the country’s journalists were attacked by police in Washington DC on Monday.

During a live morning newscast on the program “Sunrise” on Tuesday in Australia, police were seen using their shields to clear Channel 7 News US correspondent Amelia Brace and photojournalist Tim Myers from the scene. The Australian outlet is a CNN affiliate.

The video shows police hitting Myers and punching his camera. Another officer then directs the pair, who were trapped against a wall, to move on, before appearing to smack Brace in the back with a baton.

Marise Payne, the country’s foreign minister, said that Morrison had “contacted the Australian Embassy in Washington DC on Tuesday instructing them to investigate the troubling incident and provide further advice on registering the Australian government’s concern.” Continue reading.

Trump has sown hatred of the press for years. Now journalists are under assault from police and protesters alike.

Washington Post logoThere are those who argue that President Trump’s endless disparagement of the news media is harmless — perhaps a little extreme at times, but mostly just a lot of talk.

Sure, he throws around terms such as “enemy of the people,” claims that accurate reporting unflattering to him is “fake news” and gleefully insults individual reporters — especially women of color. True, he likes to threaten to use the powers of his office to interfere with the business concerns of media companies he does not favor or to punish their owners.

But, come on, what has he really done that’s so bad? Continue reading.

Trump’s Claim of Total Authority in Crisis Is Rejected Across Ideological Lines

New York Times logoTrading barbs with governors about their powers over when to ease restrictions on society, the president made an assertion that lacks a basis in the Constitution or federal law.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s claim that he wielded “total” authority in the pandemic crisis prompted rebellion not just from governors. Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum on Tuesday rejected his declaration that ultimately he, not state leaders, will decide when to risk lifting social distancing limits in order to reopen businesses.

“When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Mr. Trump asserted at a raucous press briefingon Monday evening. “And that’s the way it’s got to be.”

But neither the Constitution nor any federal law bestows that power upon Mr. Trump, a range of legal scholars and government officials said. Continue reading.

A history of the Trump War on Media — the obsession not even coronavirus could stop

Washington Post logoPresident Trump took the lectern in the White House press briefing room with a somber face on the afternoon of March 19, the day the tally of confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases was expected to pass the 10,000 mark.

But about an hour into a briefing filled with bleak data, a correspondent for conservative One America News Network known for her pro-Trump advocacy asked him a question, and a smile crossed his lips.

She was asking about the treachery of the “left-wing media.” One of his favorite subjects. Continue reading.

Trump’s eruption at an NBC reporter says it all about his alternate reality on coronavirus

Washington Post logoUpdate: Trump’s campaign issued a release Saturday attacking Alexander, even as Trump and the coronavirus task force began their briefing. The release accuses Alexander of arguing there is no “magic drug” for coronavirus, when in fact Alexander was quoting Dr. Fauci saying that.

President Trump on Friday excoriated an NBC reporter for pressing him on whether he was being overly optimistic about the government’s ability to deliver drugs to treat the coronavirus. But the exchange epitomized just how out of tune Trump is with actual developments and his top health officials.

At the daily news briefing, Trump played up the promise of a malaria drug to possibly treat the coronavirus. He was asked about its application to other similar diseases like severe acute respiratory syndrome, for which he said he thought the drug had been “fairly effective.”

But then Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading immunologist, stepped in to qualify things. Continue reading.

The dark roots of political censorship in the American system

AlterNet logoEvery month, it seems, brings a new act in the Trump administration’s war on the media. In January, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo exploded at National Public Radio reporter Mary Louise Kelly when he didn’t like questions she asked — and then banned a colleague of hers from the plane on which he was leaving for a trip to Europe and Asia. In February, the Trump staff booted a Bloomberg News reporter out of an Iowa election campaign event.

The president has repeatedly called the press an “enemy of the people” — the very phrase that, in Russian (vrag naroda), was applied by Joseph Stalin’s prosecutors to the millions of people they sent to the gulag or to execution chambers. In that context, Trump’s term for BuzzFeed, a “failing pile of garbage,” sounds comparatively benign. Last year, Axios revealed that some of the president’s supporters were trying to raise a fund of more than $2 million to gather damaging information on journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outfits. In 2018, it took a court order to force the White House to restore CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. And the list goes on.

Yet it remains deceptively easy to watch all the furor over the media with the feeling that it’s still intact and safely protected. After all, didn’t Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rail against the press in their presidencies? And don’t we have the First Amendment? In my copy of Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1,150-page Oxford History of the American People, the word “censorship” doesn’t even appear in the index; while, in an article on “The History of Publishing,” the Encyclopedia Britannica reassures us that, “in the United States, no formal censorship has ever been established.” Continue reading.

Fox Judge: Mocking Constitution Makes Trump Unfit For Office

In nearly three years in office, President Donald Trump has spent federal dollars not authorized by Congress, separated families and incarcerated children at the Texas/Mexico border in defiance of a federal court order, pulled 1,000 American troops out of Syria ignoring a commitment to allies and facilitating war against civilians, and sent 2,000 troops to Saudi Arabia without a congressional declaration of war.

He has also criminally obstructed a Department of Justice investigation of himself but escaped prosecution because of the intercession of an attorney general more loyal to him than to the Constitution.

At the outset of his presidency, Trump took the presidential oath of office promising that he would faithfully execute his obligation to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. James Madison, the scrivener of the Constitution, insisted that the word “faithfully” be in the presidential oath and that the oath itself be in the Constitution to remind presidents to enforce laws and comply with constitutional provisions, whether or not they agree with them, and to immunize the oath from congressional alteration.

View the complete commentary by Judge Andrew Napolitano on the National Memo website here.