Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Trump scares the Europeans. He doesn’t scare them because he expects them to pay for their own defense. All of his predecessors had the same expectation. He frightens the Europeans because he ignores their rhetoric while mercilessly exposing their true policy and refuses to accept it. They are scared that Trump intends to exact a price from them for their weak-kneed treachery.
Intends to exact a price. That is what Trump’s political enemies really object to about him.
If your dispute with Trump and your call for his removal are based on policy (and his language about policy), rather than about discrete factual predicates amounting to legal violations, then you should eschew the language of the criminal law and push forward with debates (in this forum and elsewhere) about the prospective dangers you think Trump is creating or the harms he has already caused. But as I said, the country survived Johnson. To the extent that the argument against Trump is based on his saying stuff you think outrageous, I think the country will survive his talking big. I would also add that Trump has done little (as I see it) which substantially departs from his campaign statements—so a removal based on political disagreement about the expected consequences of policy is not going to be one with a strong democratic justification.
Technical point: It may be that deporting foreigners is not a criminal punishment, but exiling/banishing/deporting Americans who are in the country legally would seem to me to amount to a violation of a 14th Amendment liberty interest. This brings up an important cultural divide in America today (and not just in America, but across the Western world). Many of Trump’s supporters see the elites as being indifferent between their fellow citizens and foreigners. I ask you not to prove them correct.
According to a number of right wing media sites — Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze”, Gateway Pundit, True Pundit among others — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is going to face a House authorizing vote for an impeachment investigation after Rosenstein was caught out lying to HSCI Chairman Nunes about his communications with former FBI attorney Lisa Page in her testimony Thursday and Friday of last week.
This impeachment vote will invoke “United States Vs Nixon (1974)” which was a 9-0 SCOTUS decision in favor of Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski during Pres. Nixon’s impeachment proceedings that said there are no “Executive” or “National Security” classification privileges versus a House impeachment investigation subpoena. And thus President Nixon had to turn over the contents of the White House tapes of President Nixon’s office to Jaworski.
In the summer of 2016, just before the GOP convention, the Trump children hired Paul Manafort and fired Cory Lewandowski who had been the campaign manager since 2015 and all through the primaries.
The rationale for Manafort was that he knew how to round up delegate votes at the convention.
Mr. Manafort, 66, is among the few political hands in either party with direct experience managing nomination fights: As a young Republican operative, he helped manage the 1976 convention floor for Gerald Ford in his showdown with Ronald Reagan, the last time Republicans entered a convention with no candidate having clinched the nomination.
He performed a similar function for Mr. Reagan in 1980, and played leading roles in the 1988 and 1996 conventions, for George Bush and Bob Dole.
Mr. Manafort has drawn attention in recent years chiefly for his work as an international political consultant, most notably as a senior adviser to former President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, who was driven from power in 2014.
His “experience” was 20 years in the past and he proved to be a rapacious employee, demanding $5 million dollars for “outreach” soon after being hired.
The Lewandowski book, “Let Trump be Trump” is a very good description of the campaign, written with David Bossie.
In August, after sidelining him for a month, Trump fired Manafort, and, according to Lewandowski, it was because he learned that Manafort was “a crook.”
Mueller, and his traveling road show, is now holding Manafort in prison awaiting trial which keeps getting postponed.
A Washington, D.C., judge on Wednesday set a trial date of Sept. 17 for Paul Manafort, just weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, a spokesperson for the former Trump campaign chairman confirmed.
Manafort has pleaded not guilty to numerous charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including money laundering, tax fraud and bank fraud conspiracy.
Nowhere in the charges is there any allegation of contact between the Trump campaign and Russia. Manafort is being charged with financial crimes related to work he did for Ukraine a decade ago.
Now it seems, that serious misbehavior occurred with the DOJ and FBI in this case.
The gist of the story is that Andrew Weissmann was meeting with AP reporters in April of 2017, approximately a month prior to the formal construct of the Robert Mueller investigation. The information from the meeting, which was essentially based on research provided by the “reporters” about Paul Manafort, was then later used in the formation of the underlying evidence against Manafort to gain a search warrant.
I would not be terribly surprised to see the whole case thrown out for prosecutorial misbehavior.
The conclusion of a Glenn Reynolds USA Today column about pro-governing-class selection bias in US Supreme Court nominations:
To counteract this, we might want to bring a bit more diversity to the court. I’m not recommending that we eliminate the informal requirement that judges have law degrees (though non-lawyer judges were common in colonial times, and some countries still use them). But maybe we should look outside the Ivy League and the federal appellate courts. A Supreme Court justice who served on a state court — especially one who had to run for election — would probably have a much broader view of America than a thoroughbred who went from the Ivy League to an appellate clerkship to a fancy law firm.
I would expand on this thought to suggest US presidents give preference to candidates who have run small businesses, have had run-ins with bureaucratic authorities and/or been arrested.
Lex adds:
Agreed.
If Trump gets a second term, I’d like to see Mike Lee on the Supreme Court.
I like Glenn Reynolds’s idea: 59 Justices. Nine appointed by the President, and one appointed from each state by the governor. Bloody brilliant.