Re: Election results

776
I have a sneaking suspicion that we really will visit the question of whether a president may pardon him or her self in something more than an academic setting.
Subliterate Buffooery of the right...
Literate Ignorance of the left...
We Are So Screwed

Re: Election results

778
rolandson wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 7:33 pm I have a sneaking suspicion that we really will visit the question of whether a president may pardon him or her self in something more than an academic setting.
If Trump does pardon himself, we could find out. Trump would have to be charged with a federal crime, assert his "self pardon" and then it would be up to the court to decide. George Conway had an interesting interpretation of the constitution.
"[The President] shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."
He said that the word "grant" means giving to someone else not oneself. The strict constructionists on SCOTUS would ultimately decide.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Election results

779
being allowed to pardon himself would place him above the law. i can't imagine any judge allowing it.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

Re: Election results

780
I will only accept a self pardon if it is signed not with Sharpie, but with this.

Image


[/s]

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Election results

781
tRump follows GW Bush’s definition of the constitution. “It’s just a Goddamn piece of paper.”
Like most Repugs they only believe in the constitution when it is used in their favor.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Election results

782
The strict constructionists will have fun with this:
The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment.
Literally read, an impeached President loses the power to grant pardons. There's a reason Nancy made such a big deal about it.

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783
The next hurdle in this drawn out process is Monday, December 14th when the certified electors vote in their state capitals. Not every state cancels and replaces a faithless elector, but no doubt the Trumpistas will try something just so Donnie can say he got more electoral votes in 2016 than Biden in 2020.
https://www.fairvote.org/faithless_elector_state_laws
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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wings wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 9:09 pm The strict constructionists will have fun with this:
The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment.
Literally read, an impeached President loses the power to grant pardons. There's a reason Nancy made such a big deal about it.
That's a way-out interpretation of the clause! Not only out of left field, not even in the ball park!
Clinton granted pardons after being Impeached. Andrew Johnson did as well.
Wikipedia wrote:On Christmas Day, 1868, Johnson issued a full and unconditional pardon and amnesty to all former Confederates of the rebellion
That was also in his Lame Duck period as Grant was the PE. Johnson had been Impeached in February of that year.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: Election results

785
YankeeTarheel wrote: Sat Dec 12, 2020 12:19 pm
wings wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 9:09 pm The strict constructionists will have fun with this:
The President ... shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment.
Literally read, an impeached President loses the power to grant pardons. There's a reason Nancy made such a big deal about it.
That's a way-out interpretation of the clause! Not only out of left field, not even in the ball park!
Clinton granted pardons after being Impeached. Andrew Johnson did as well.
Wikipedia wrote:On Christmas Day, 1868, Johnson issued a full and unconditional pardon and amnesty to all former Confederates of the rebellion
That was also in his Lame Duck period as Grant was the PE. Johnson had been Impeached in February of that year.
And Jimmy Carter pardoned draft evaders from the Vietnam War.

Impeachment is the name of the process, but also the name of the first step followed by trial and conviction or acquittal. I assume that the pardon power wouldn't extend to anyone impeached and removed but not just impeached. However that would be up to the courts to interpret.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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786
Oh, the originalists would certainly argue that the clause means a president could pardon criminal convictions but not the impeachment of judges or other officers. No doubt about that. But the strict constructionists would look at the words alone. They don't clearly indicate to whom the condition 'impeachment' refers, recipient or president, but it would be a straightforward case to argue that an impeached president, removed or not, should not be allowed to pardon those implicated in the charges that lead to his impeachment. E.g., Flynn and Stone.

Case law has been determined by the Oxford comma before.

Re: Election results

787
A federal judge in Wisconsin on Saturday bluntly dismissed a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump challenging Joe Biden’s win in that state, further cementing Biden’s victory in the national presidential election. Trump’s latest court loss — one of almost 60 in the past month by his campaign and allies in state and federal courts — came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a likely fatal blow to his bid for a second term. In the Wisconsin case, Trump was suing the state elections commission.
The judge in the case, Brett Ludwig, who was appointed by Trump to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, on Thursday held a hearing where the president’s lawyers made their arguments to set aside the result of the state’s popular election, which Biden won by more than 20,000 votes.

“This is an extraordinary case,” wrote Ludwig in his decision Saturday.“A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred.” “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits,” the judge wrote. “In his reply brief, plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed’ .... It has been,” the judge continued. Ludwig dismissed the lawsuit “with prejudice,” underscoring his belief that Trump had no valid claim.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that guidance issued by the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to absentee ballots, “along with election officials’ conduct in reliance on that guidance,” deviated so much from state election law “that the election was itself a ‘failure,’ ” Ludwig wrote. But Ludwig wrote that Trump “has not proved that defendants violated his rights under the Electors Clause.”

“To the contrary, the record shows Wisconsin’s Presidential Electors are being determined in the very manner directed by the Legislature, as required by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution,” the judge said.
Ludwig noted that the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a dissent in the 2000 case that ended the counting of ballots in Florida for the election contest between President George W. Bush and Al Gore, wrote that Congress on “the sixth day of January” rules on “the validity of electoral votes.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/12/trump-l ... n-win.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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Some Americans may easily have the wool pulled over their eyes by Trump’s whining and his legal team’s circular reasoning legalese... but judges? Nah, most have passed Logic 101 and can spot a fallacy when they see one. From miles and miles away!

Smacked down, with prejudice!
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

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Trump Allies Eye Long-Shot Election Reversal in Congress, Testing Pence
Some House Republicans plan to try to use Congress’s tallying of electoral results on Jan. 6 to tip the election to President Trump. The attempt will put Republicans in a pinch.

President Trump lost key swing states by clear margins. His barrage of lawsuits claiming widespread voting fraud has been almost universally dismissed, most recently by the Supreme Court. And on Monday, the Electoral College will formally cast a majority of its votes for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.

The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come, and to pose yet another awkward test of allegiance for Republicans who have privately hoped that the Electoral College vote this week will be the final word on the election result.

For the vice president, whom the Constitution assigns the task of tallying the results and declaring a winner, the episode could be particularly torturous, forcing him to balance his loyalty to Mr. Trump with his constitutional duties and considerations about his own political future.

The effort is being led by Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, a backbench conservative. Along with a group of allies in the House, he is eyeing challenges to the election results in five different states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — where they claim varying degrees of fraud or illegal voting took place, despite certification by the voting authorities and no evidence of widespread impropriety.

“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”

Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator’s signature also affixed. No Republican senator has yet stepped forward to say he or she will back such an effort, though a handful of reliable allies of Mr. Trump, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have signaled they would be open to doing so.

The president has praised Mr. Brooks on Twitter, but has thus far taken no evident interest in the strategy. Aides say he has been more focused on battling to overturn the results in court.

Even if a senator did agree, constitutional scholars say the process is intended to be an arduous one. Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.

Several Senate Republicans — including Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — have forcefully rejected the idea of overturning the results, and their votes would be enough for Mr. Biden to prevail with the support of Democrats.

“The Jan. 6 meting is going to confirm that regardless of how many objections get filed and who signs on, they are not going to affect the outcome of the process,” said Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University who has written extensively on the electoral process. “We can say that with clear confidence.”

But he noted that the session could still carry consequences for the next few years. If even one Republican senator backed the effort, it could ensure that the partisan cloud hanging over the election would darken Mr. Biden’s presidency for years to come. If none did, it could send a definitive message to the country that despite Mr. Trump’s bluster, the party trusted the results of the electoral process and was finally ready to recognize Mr. Biden as the rightful winner.

Mr. Brooks is far from the first lawmaker to try to use the tallying process to challenge the results of a bitter election loss. House Democrats made attempts in 2001, 2005 and even 2017, but they were essentially acts of protest after their party’s nominee had already accepted defeat.

What is different now is Mr. Trump’s historic defiance of democratic norms and his party’s willing acquiescence. If Mr. Trump were to bless the effort to challenge the congressional tally, he could force Republicans into a difficult decision about whether to support an assault on the election results that is essentially doomed or risk his ire. Many Republicans are already fearful of being punished by voters for failing to keep up his fight.

The dilemma is particularly acute for Mr. Pence, who is eyeing his own presidential run in 2024. As president of the Senate, he has the constitutionally-designated task of opening and tallying envelopes sent from all 50 states and announcing their electoral results.

But given Mr. Trump’s penchant for testing every law and norm in Washington, he could insist that Mr. Pence refuse to play that role. And either way, it will call for a final performance of the delicate dance Mr. Pence has performed for past four years, trying to maintain Mr. Trump’s confidence while adhering to the law.

“The role the V.P. plays in the transition is something that people have never focused on and never think about, but with Donald Trump, you now have to consider all the possibilities,” said Gregory B. Craig, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.

In 1961, Richard M. Nixon, who had just lost the election, oversaw the vote tabulation and had to decide whether to recognize competing electors from the new state of Hawaii. Mr. Nixon ultimately made a decision that hurt his vote total but had no effect on the final result that John F. Kennedy had won. Forty years later, after the 2000 election, Al Gore had to reject objections from his fellow Democrats and certify the victory of George W. Bush, who had won the state of Florida after the Supreme Court ordered a recount ended in that state.

Since the election, Mr. Pence has sent mixed messages about how far he would be willing to go to help Mr. Trump. In the early days of the transition, Mr. Pence fended off requests from the president’s loyalists to back specious claims about election fraud. But more recently, he publicly praised the failed lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas to have votes from battleground states thrown out.

Democrats said they were confident that Mr. Biden would emerge unscathed, but his transition team has begun coordinating with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, to prepare for the possibility that one or more senator would sign onto the challenges.

Mr. Brooks has been trying to drum up support. He met last week with about a half-dozen senators, including Mike Lee of Utah, and separately with the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

“My No. 1 goal is to fix a badly flawed American election system that too easily permits voter fraud and election theft,” Mr. Brooks said. “A possible bonus from achieving that goal is that Donald Trump would win the Electoral College officially, as I believe he in fact did if you only count lawful votes by eligible American citizens and exclude all illegal votes.”

It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal brief supporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor.

Some Republicans including Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Matt Gaetz have also signaled they could support an objection. Mr. Brooks said he had been speaking with others who were interested. But prominent allies of the president who have thrown themselves headfirst into earlier fights, like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio or even the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have so far been publicly noncommittal.

“All eyes are on Jan. 6,” Mr. Gaetz said on Fox News Friday night after the Supreme Court rejected Texas’ suit. “I suspect there will be a little bit of debate and discourse in the Congress as we go through the process of certifying the electors. We still think there is evidence that needs to be considered.”

Mr. Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he would “wait and see how all the legal cases turn out” before deciding what to do.

Mr. Johnson plans to hold a hearing this week “examining the irregularities in the 2020 election,” featuring Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who is a favorite of the right, and at least two lawyers who have argued election challenges for Mr. Trump. Whether he proceeds to challenge results on Jan. 6, he told reporters last week, “depends on what we find out.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/us/p ... pence.html

I'm afraid the Trumpenfuhrer idiots will never give up and will continue to cause trouble for years to come.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Election results

791
He'll lose January 6th, the House and Senate can debate but they'll never agree to disenfranchise voters in the states that Biden won. Until then Trump will continue to fund raise, promising donors that he's close to winning. It's becoming more and more critical to win those two GA senate seats, toss up races right now but Democrats need to put McConnell out of business.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Election results

792
My birthday is today. But I imagine my best present will come tomorrow, December 14th, when the EC hammers this election home.

It’s true that we will be dealing with the division and subversion of the GOP for some time to come but I fully look forward to seeing Trump fighting in court after January. And with that we will also start to hammer home Democracy as the will of a self-governing people slowly but surely.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

Re: Election results

793
Bisbee wrote: Sun Dec 13, 2020 4:39 pm My birthday is today.
happy happy joy joy
eta: fixed quote tag
Last edited by lurker on Sun Dec 13, 2020 5:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
i'm retired. what's your excuse?

Re: Election results

794
Bisbee wrote: Sun Dec 13, 2020 4:39 pm My birthday is today. But I imagine my best present will come tomorrow, December 14th, when the EC hammers this election home.

It’s true that we will be dealing with the division and subversion of the GOP for some time to come but I fully look forward to seeing Trump fighting in court after January. And with that we will also start to hammer home Democracy as the will of a self-governing people slowly but surely.
Happy Birthday, Bisbee. Today is George Schultz's 100th birthday, and would have been my wife's 95th birthday.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: Election results

795
Image

Happy, happy. Joy, joy!
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

Re: Election results

796
Happy birthday, Bisbee. I will quietly hum the birthday song to you while waiting for the EC to complete their duty.

Here’s to many more trips around the sun for you.
Image

Re: Election results

798
Bisbee wrote: Sun Dec 13, 2020 4:39 pm My birthday is today. But I imagine my best present will come tomorrow, December 14th, when the EC hammers this election home.

It’s true that we will be dealing with the division and subversion of the GOP for some time to come but I fully look forward to seeing Trump fighting in court after January. And with that we will also start to hammer home Democracy as the will of a self-governing people slowly but surely.
Belated Happy Birthday !!!!!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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