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.
Trump
The Manafort Case.
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.
On Public Display of MAGA
San Antonio, the town that I am pleased to say is my place of residence, made the national and international news this week and not in a good way. My particular quadrant of suburban San Antonio was the scene of the now-notorious MAGA-hat-stealing-and-drink-throwing-incident. (A good selection of the resulting headlines are here )
The Whattaburger outlet where this took place is about two and a half miles from my house, adjacent to a brand-new Walmart, and the bank branch I used to do business with, and around the corner from the bank branch that I now do business with. The arrested-and-released-on-bail Kino Jimenez lives in another outlaying suburb apparently with his mother. He also seems to have committed a series of prior offenses; not exactly an upright citizen, it appears, and one with extraordinarily poor impulse control. Looking at the video of this incident and keeping in mind that nothing good happens at 2 AM I see a rather thuggish Hispanic guy getting his jollies picking on a couple of weedy Anglo teenagers in an all-but-empty-restaurant in the wee hours. I’d venture a guess that if it hadn’t been the MAGA hat, it would likely have been something else. Bullies always find an easy target, and a ready justification for their thuggish impulses.
Seth Barrett Tillman: Poland’s Judicial Crisis: My Post on CONLAWPROF
Arrayed against the policy of the elected government of Poland (which ran for election twice on this policy) is: the EU Commission (not elected), the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (not elected), the Council of Europe / Venice Commission (not elected), and any number of Polish judges — all appointed by a process wholly insulated from democratic control. But I repeat myself.
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I cannot prove this, but I expect if during our domestic squabbles involving the elected arms of the government manipulating the federal courts (circa 1802, and again circa 1863, or even today in relation to court packing) a bunch of international organisations told us what to do, such interventions would not have been (and will not be in the future) very welcomed, and might very well have made (and will make in the future) normal political compromise less likely.
“Purge”. If you want more Trump … but I repeat myself.
Draining the Swamp
Romney’s greatest charm was his history of taking a chainsaw to businesses and setting them on their feet. Those virtues are not always apparent in a campaign nor necessarily popular. Mick Mulvaney, backed by a businessman who was appalled at the waste in government (as almost all sentient beings are but someone that has planned large projects more clearly), is doing what I for one voted for Romney to do.
Simplifying permits, narrowing focus clears the brush, then we can build. The enlarging of bureaucracies encourage flakey, dishonest, bullshit laws that we don’t follow – that was Obama’s plan and we see it at its worst in the immigration fiasco, it works well to produce fear, malaise, and arbitry enforcement. The Home Land secretary put it best when she asked Congress if they had thought about the road they were going down in criticizing her for enforcing the laws they had made. Extraneous laws & large bureaucracies stunt growth, use up energy and frustrate. The result is malaise and a nation with less and less “trust”.
[Note: rewritten – parts unconnected – the commenters connected them but I realize it was rude of me. Great link! I added a second)