Impeach him a hundred times if we have to: Trump lies that jury trials are needed for immigration cases

 Trump, asked if he has to 'uphold the Constitution,' says, 'I don't know': Trump said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that he’s following lawyers’ advice as he tries to execute rapid deportations, arguing that giving immigrants due process is time-consuming

 

... "We’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials", he said. ... That would not require full trials, as Trump suggested. ...

This is the same slow-walking of the law and trying an end run around the law and fundamental disrespect for the law that we see all too often and increasingly from presidents from both political parties.

 

We are either a nation of laws or we are no longer America.

 

Sick of this bullshit.

Fareed Zakaria: Trump uses an unprecedented eight national emergency declarations for his own end run around the constitution, the Congress, and the courts

 ... Trump has declared eight national emergencies in his first 100 days, more than any other president. ...

Invoking an emergency has come to mean that the president can bypass Congress, intimidate courts, and run roughshod over normal procedures, even civil liberties. And while the current number is striking, it’s not a Trumpian innovation. Presidents have become addicted to emergency powers, unlike many other countries. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about how to declare or end an emergency. This has allowed presidents to organically assume a wide range of powers. This usually happened during wartime. ...

Today, Americans are living under dozens of ongoing national emergencies, mostly tied to foreign policy like sanctions. The oldest standing one, targeting Iran, dates back to the Carter administration. Others come from the post-9/11 era, when Congress granted the executive branch sweeping new powers, all in the name of national security. Both parties have used emergency powers to serve their broader agendas. In 2022, President Joe Biden attempted to forgive student loan debt by using an emergency authority related to the COVID-19 pandemic. ...

More.

Like failing to establish a formula for the continued growth of representation, thus unwittingly concentrating power in an oligarchic Congress by default, the constitution's silence about emergencies is yet one more example of the founders' inability to imagine every which way one branch might try to exploit it, which is an increasingly pressing problem in our increasingly illiberal society.

Democrat Rosa DeLauro (CT-3) is correct: Elon Musk is an unelected interloper, with no authority and no legitimacy who makes a mockery of the appropriations process

 

 Musk exercises nonexistent dictatorial line-item-veto powers over spending and personnel as a "super cabinet" official who was never confirmed by the US Senate like the other cabinet members he now tells what's what.

The whole scheme is illegal and unconstitutional, which is why Trump is now all of a sudden denying that Musk is head of the so-called DOGE, just like Trump hastily made Musk a special government employee after lawsuits were filed on February 3 questioning Musk's authority.

It's an end run around the constitution no less serious than the National Popular Vote Compact, which seeks to neuter the Electoral College.

Trump has been making this bullshit up as he goes and has been since Musk endorsed Trump after the July assassination attempt and then became part of Trump's circle of intimates in August.

The tech oligarchy got front row seats at the inauguration for a reason.

Congress closing in on shutdown deadline with no clear plan 

“We cannot come to a deal where you hammer out gains, losses, but you come to a conclusion and you come to a meeting of the minds,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters. “That should not be subject to some third party deciding that that’s not what they want.”

“We had a deal last year, all of us and so forth, and then there was an interloper with no authority, no legitimacy, nonelected, who said, ‘Don’t vote for it,’” DeLauro said, as Democrats have continued to zero in on tech billionaire Elon Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

US Chamber of Commerce intends to sue Democrat-controlled FTC for passing rule 3-2 banning noncompete agreements

Congress has not given the agency explicit authority to ban noncompetes. ... The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest pro-business lobbying group in the country, has said it will sue to block the rule. ... While the dissenting commissioners said they did not support noncompete agreements carte blanche, they did not believe the agency had the authority to issue the rule without an express directive from Congress.

More.

It's a BFD, as Joe would say.

Millions of American workers are not completely free to work where they may because of noncompete, nondisclosure, and confidentiality agreements they must sign as a condition of employment or as a condition of severance on termination of employment.

The FTC vote covers only the noncompete issue and represents an end run around Congress which has failed to pass appropriate legislation.

Four true words

 Trump lacked the discipline.      

Stated here.

That's still the fundamental problem, but that's been the case from the beginning.

Character counts. Trump has never had it and never will. I cut my losses with Trump in 2018 when he exposed himself as a phony on his chief plank, illegal immigration. He already did that in August 2016, so fool me once, shame on Trump. I am not ashamed to state it over and over again.

The rest of the party still hasn't come around, however, with so-called conservatives still yammering on about stuff like pOPuLiSm. But that's because opposition to illegal immigration was never a GOP value. The GOP would never be upset because he lied about that.

It's hard to imagine the GOP pointing to anything in particular which was a line too far. 121 voted in the House to object to the 2020 Arizona vote, 138 to the Pennsylvania vote. Not even three horrible elections in a row is proving to be decisive.

Meanwhile Democrats have exploited Trump's weakness, and therefore the GOP's, to consolidate power with extraordinary new depth. The new regime of mail-in voting everywhere changes everything. The chain of custody of ballots in voting precincts is broken forever.

It's the end run around representative government we only imagined the National Popular Vote Compact would be. It's the path to pure democracy. It's the end of legislatures, the end of republicanism, and makes the tyranny of the majority and the repression of the minority the new, terrible future.

A Supreme Court in principle deferring to the states on everything from election law to drugs, marriage, abortion, gender, etc. is no bulwark against what's coming, indeed, what's already here.

The people will decide by referendum.

The people be damned.

What rot from AP Obama: "Watergate and Jan. 6 are rooted in the same ancient thirst for power at any cost"

 "Two presidents tried an end run around democracy."

Give me a break.

Presidents are term-limited by the constitution. Even if by hook or by crook one of them managed to steal his reelection, out he goes after that because it says so. Everyone agrees with this. No one questions it. No president would get away with staying in office one day longer than the second term permits.

If you want to see the ancient thirst for power, look at the Seniority list for the US House. 

Some of those placeholders have been holding on to power there for decades.

Seven go back to the 1980s.

Thirty-eight go back to the 1990s.

Sixty-eight go back to the 2000s.

They've watched presidents come and go since Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton.

Of the top fifty by seniority, just eleven are Republicans.

Of the top 113, just thirty-eight are Republicans.

75 remaining senior Democrats are the foundation in the House of the people pressing their power hungry vendetta against the private citizen, Donald Trump. They are also the foundation in the House of the people robbing Americans blind and putting the country $30 trillion in debt.

What we have is a tyranny of the legislative. An imperial presidency isn't even in sight.

The only coup in view is the cuckoo who wrote this story.

The National Popular Vote Compact, an end run around the US Constitution which also creates faithless electors, is actually supported in Michigan by stupid Republicans and a Hillsdale college instructor

My lunatic former state senator, Dave Hildenbrand, was the chief Republican sponsor of the compact in 2018. He's a lobbyist now.

The former state GOP Chair Saul Anuzis is a huge supporter and consultant to the NPV organization.

You can read all about such fools here and here.

Because the Republican controlled lower chamber has blocked a bill to make it the law since 2018, supporters of NPV are now organizing an end run . . . around THEM.

They intend to make this a ballot initiative, which in Michigan has been the go-to method for deciding hot topics to which elected representatives don't want their names attached through legislation. The method has been the way they wash their hands of issues instead of having the courage to take a stand for or against them.

Ballot initiatives in Michigan should have been curbed long ago, but when you have a spine made of jello, you can't curb anything.

So, given the success of Democrats in 2018 sweeping state offices and a handful of left of center ballot initiatives with them, quietly promoted by Barack Obama's wingman,  Eric Holder, and backed by money from George Soros, it looks like a fait accompli already.

Michigan Republicans are too dumb and too libertarian to stop this.

The only hope is that the US Supreme Court will eventually rule the NPV unconstitutional, given the fact that it has already ruled that faithless electors must award their Electoral College votes to the certified winner of a state wherever such laws require it, not to whomever they want:

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously upheld laws across the country that remove or punish rogue Electoral College delegates who refuse to cast their votes for the presidential candidate they were pledged to support.

The decision Monday was a loss for "faithless electors," who argued that under the Constitution they have discretion to decide which candidate to support.

Writing for the court, Justice Elena Kagan, in a decision peppered with references to the Broadway show Hamilton and the TV show Veep, said Electoral College delegates have "no ground for reversing" the statewide popular vote. That, she said, "accords with the Constitution — as well as with the trust of the Nation that here, We the People rule." ...

Thirty-two states have some sort of faithless elector law, but only 15 of those remove, penalize or simply cancel the votes of the errant electors. The 15 are Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Washington, California, New Mexico, South Carolina, Oklahoma and North Carolina. Although Maine has no such law, the secretary of state has said it has determined a faithless elector can be removed. ... For centuries, almost all electors have considered themselves bound to vote for the winner of the state popular vote.

More.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis does end run around Biden's rationing of monoclonal antibody drugs, buys direct from UK

 Now why would DeSantis do that if it isn't true that Biden cut off Floridians dying from C19?

Florida ranks 4th for total announced deaths from C19, behind number one and two California and Texas, and number three New York.

Story here.

National Popular Vote to become law in Nevada, making it 15 states and DC trying for an end run around the Electoral College

Nevada passes National Popular Vote bill in bid to upend Electoral College:

The compact would take effect after states totaling 270 electoral votes, and with Nevada, the total would reach 195.

Rush Limbaugh claims to be the cutting edge of societal evolution, but can't help a caller from Colorado on the National Popular Vote

It's a frickin' end run around the constitution, but Limbaugh just yammers "I'll have to look into it".

Pathetic.

My no good dirty hippy Michigan Republican Party is libertarian, not conservative

The robocalls from the Michigan Republican Party are going out this weekend, urging the voters to vote against liberal proposals to "reform" gerrymandering and to allow "automatic" and same day voter registration.

The calls notably mention these as proposals 2 and 3, but never mention proposal 1 which aims to legalize possession, use and cultivation of marijuana.

It's just like term limited Republican Governor Rick Snyder's robocalls urging votes for lowly state senate and house candidates without once mentioning Republican Bill Schuette for governor, John James for Senate, or Tom Leonard for Attorney General, the Donald Trump and NRA endorsed candidates.

To be sure, a Yes vote on proposals 2 and 3 would give Michigan liberals the victories they can't achieve at the ballot box. The strategy is to make an end run around their decades of electoral failure in order to get control of redrawing district lines to favor Democrats. Flooding the zone with their dubious voters is simply the second part of the one-two punch strategy. And if their voters are high on election day, so much the better.

Not recommending a No vote on proposal 1 is simply more proof that the Michigan Republican Party isn't conservative and doesn't deserve the votes of conservatives. After decades of the war on tobacco, somehow smoking marijuana is suddenly supposed to be OK when the evidence is pouring in that it's not.

Combined with the large number of anti-Trumpers among their ranks, Michigan Republicans doubly don't deserve our votes when they run as libertarians in Republican disguise. There's a party for that. It's called the Libertarian Party. They should join it, especially you, Justin Amash, you faker.

We can't vote for Democrats, but we can vote US Taxpayers Party in many instances, and failing that, for hamburger condiments like ketchup, mustard, pickles and onions.

And on the proposals, I'll make it easy for you. Just vote No on all of them, including the Early Childhood proposal and the Caledonia operating millage. 

Good news: Trump does end run around Obamacare, expands ability of more associations to offer plans using Executive Order

From the story here:

The president signed an executive order "to promote healthcare choice and competition" Thursday morning at the White House. 

It is said to expand access to "association health plans" – group plans written by trade associations, small businesses, and other groups. Such large group plans do not have to abide by all the requirements of individual plans under 'Obamacare.' The order also tasks administration officials to develop policies to increase competition in the health insurance industry.

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal of Obamacare's individual and corporate mandates instead of the stinker bill now being proposed by the Republicans in the Senate.

That way those of us who can obtain real insurance like we did before will obtain it again but at a cheaper cost than now, and those who can't will still have Medicaid, but funded by dead certain payrolls instead of the hodge podge of state and federal funding now.

Because of Obamacare, those who have insurance are subsidizing at enormous expense to themselves those who have become covered since 2009 under the plan, mostly under Medicaid. Medicaid alone has swelled by 25 million people thanks to Obamacare. It's a massive income redistribution scheme from those who have insurance to those who don't, which is manifestly unfair. There are easily 48 million people in this country making less than $15,000 a year who have no skin in this game yet qualify for Medicaid.

The answer, short of returning to the status quo ante where millions are kicked off of Medicaid, is to make more people pay their fair share. This means taxing every dollar of compensation with a Medicaid tax, just like we do with Medicare. The burden should be born by everyone, including those now receiving Medicaid.

Currently we have about 55.5 million enrolled in Medicare, supported by a 1.45% payroll tax. It isn't enough support, but there it is.

Medicaid on the other hand has exploded under Obamacare to coverage of 75 million, but state budgets, like individuals' budgets under Obamacare's outrageously expensive health insurance, are breaking badly under the burden. 33 will fall short of revenue targets in the current fiscal year.

The proportional Medicaid payroll tax rate implied by 75 million program participants is at least 1.95%.

This is Trump's opportunity to put Medicaid on a sounder footing.

Republicans won't like this plan because it involves a new tax, even though many people are already paying this tax to one degree or another depending on their tax obligation in their state of residence. The revenues, insufficient as they are, are already collected at the state level, but variably.

So it's not really a new tax. It's a new collector.

Democrats ought to love this idea, for the obvious reason. It codifies the nation's "obligation" to the poor's healthcare in the form of a tax, just as Medicare codifies the nation's obligation to the elderly's healthcare. With it they can claim Obamacare is still the law of the land in some form.

Pelosi and the House Democrats are well positioned to deliver this in the form of a bill to send to the more evenly divided Senate because Paul Ryan and a coalition of 75 or so liberal Republicans could get it over the goal line, just like they did so many times before in league with the Democrats, making an end run around the House conservatives.

The Senate would go for the bill because it is simply more liberal all around. Democrats there would vote for this, along with liberal Republicans.

Trump needs to get this done and off the table.

We've been arguing about it now in earnest for 8 years already and are just plain sick of it.

Enough already!

Repeal Obamacare root and branch, and institute a Medicaid tax.

In 2012 Obama called gasoline at $2.50 a phony promise, three years later it's $1.77

The promise of $2.50 a gallon gasoline was made by presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 2012, which just shows you how a truly smart politician who knew what was coming, unlike Obama by the way, hoped to get elected and get the credit for predicting and delivering something which would have happened anyway.

But does it need to be repeated that oil and gasoline price reductions happened INSPITE of Obama's war on so-called fossil fuels?

Yes, it does.

Obama's done everything he can to stop the country from discovering and using fossil fuels, but private industry and initiative have done an end run around the president, a sort of payback for the president's end runs around the constitution.

This ain't over by a longshot.

A Rival Electoral College

As we pointed out previously, the National Popular Vote Campaign is an extra-constitutional end run around the constitution's designated amendment process which seeks to replace the constitutionally prescribed electoral college with a rival process in which states agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote nationally.

Is this not a form of sedition, indeed a revolt, against our long-accepted "federal democracy"? Jeff Jacoby is right to style the rival proposal a "national democracy," utterly foreign to our experience.

He also rightly points out for The Boston Globe in "Massachusetts for Palin?" that the new process would have nullified the votes of Massachusetts voters by awarding their electoral college votes to Republican winners of the popular vote nationally, like Richard Nixon and George Herbert Walker Bush, when they had voted instead for liberal Democrats, like George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.

Jacoby's assessment coheres with our own:

Massachusetts is the sixth state to approve this end run around the Constitution, following Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington. It is no coincidence that all six are Democratic strongholds. The movement is fueled by lingering Democratic resentment of George W. Bush, and of the Electoral College system that made him president in 2000, even though Al Gore drew more popular votes. It is a comical irony that if the compact ever goes into effect, its only practical impact in these states will be to occasionally award their presidential electors to the Republican nominees their voters reject.

But the other side of the coin is that in 2008, just two of the eleven largest states by population went Republican, and just three of the next largest ten. The situation for them in 2008 would have been just the reverse under the National Popular Vote scheme, and Republican majorities in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri and Arizona would have seen their electoral votes cast for Obama, not McCain.

To quote a famous ex-president: "That doesn't make any sense."

ANOTHER ATTEMPTED END RUN AROUND THE CONSTITUTION

People who think one state, Florida, jammed an unwanted president down the throats of the American people in the year 2000 now want to make sure this happens more frequently, but on a broader scale. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess. It's called the National Popular Vote (NPV) campaign, an innovation of recent provenance whose latest progress is in Massachusetts, reported here.

I think these people are motivated by a vendetta against George Bush. They still can't get over the guy, and it makes absolutely no difference to them that the country ratified Florida's decision in 2000 by re-electing George Bush decisively in 2004. 

Massachusetts is about to join five other states in what is really an attempted power grab for the Democrat party. I say they are a pestilence on the body politic, and it's time to stop them before more states join Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, Washington and Massachusetts and attempt to sully a presidential election and throw the country into another constitutional crisis.

Imagine what would happen if enough states with 270 electoral votes got together to agree to this, and tried to force their will on the rest of us because their states individually voted to do so. Can you imagine your president elected by just 11 states? That's all it would take under their proposal: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina and Georgia, the eleven most populous states with 271 electoral college votes in all. Do you want them deciding who your president should be?

In 2008, only Texas and Georgia went Republican, giving the Democrats 222 electoral votes. Of the next ten most populous states, Virginia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Missouri, Washington, Indiana, Minnesota, Arizona, Maryland and Wisconsin, only Tennessee, Missouri and Arizona went Republican, giving the Democrats another 77 electoral college votes, more than enough to win.

So in any given election, just 21 of the 50 states could control the outcome of the election, with Democrats highly favored to win the White House every time, by a margin of 299 to 81 in those states. The supporters of the NPV complain that under the present arrangement where it's "winner takes all electoral votes," more or less, in 48 states, elections get determined by battleground states, where candidates actually have to compete for votes. The horror. Their solution? Eliminate the battle.

These five, and now six, states don't want to award their electoral college votes based on who won the election in their respective states, but rather to the winner of the most votes nationally, so that not only can the will of the people of their own states be subverted if necessary, but the will of other states as well, for that is what this revolution of elections would accomplish. It marginalizes the 29 states with fewer than 10 electoral votes by telling them their votes for president don't matter.

And it is easy to imagine a situation where the voters in a state are told that even though they voted for president X the electors of their state are going to vote for president Y because their state is a party to the NPV sponsored law which requires them to cast their votes for the overall winner. It is amusing to imagine electors attempting to hide behind the skirts of this law in this way and pointing the finger at voters in another state exclaiming "They made me do it!"  

The constitution is deliberately arranged as it is to protect the smaller states by population from being lorded over by the states with the larger. That is why even the smallest states have two senators, same as the largest do, to act as a counterweight to the power and interests of the larger states. That is also why changes to the constitution must be approved by states, 75% of them, not popular majorities. The NPV is an end run around this amendment process, which stands in the way of changing the electoral college system, the real enemy of the NPV. On those grounds alone it should be challenged in court as an extra-constitutional attempt to change the constitution. 

Can you imagine a country where a minority of states vote to ignore the electoral college system and try to force their president on the majority? To do so really would be to create two countries, because what the NPV campaign does in actuality is create a rival electoral college. If that isn't seditious, I don't know what is. 

Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man frames the issue helpfully:

The fourth and most worrying element of the NPV campaign, in my eyes, is that it's a blatant attempt to bypass the Constitution of the United States. The provision of an Electoral College is a federal, constitutional matter, not determined by each individual State. You'll find it in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, as modified by the 12th, 20th and 25th Amendments. If we want to change that (or any other) part of the Constitution, there's a mechanism provided to do so (Article 5). The NPV campaign ignores this altogether, and seeks to alter the way in which individual States allocate their electoral college votes without modifying the Constitution itself.

Appropriately quoted in the Boston Globe article, linked above, is Massachusetts Senate minority leader Richard Tisei, who says: "The thing about this that bothers me the most is it's so sneaky. This is the way that liberals do things a lot of times, very sneaky. This is sort of an end run around the Constitution."

Truer words were never spoken.