SaintsInDome2006

I’m all ears. What happens procedurally if Trump were to seek a 3rd term under some legal theory which we all believe to be completely ridiculous.

Actually this is the sort of thing that happens in 3rd world countries, yes I agree the primary factor in keeping Trump off the ballot is the pressure from competing factions, especially the Thiel faction. That’s where we are, it’s not a constitutional argument, it’s just raw power.

The USSC has given Trump two paths: - We know any act Trump claims is official is protected by presidential immunity. This just encourages Trump to state anything he does is 1. Official and 2. An emergency. - Colorado banned Trump from its ballot on the basis he had engaged in insurrection. There was a trial, Trump had top flight lawyers there. (Please I don’t want to talk about if it was an insurrection). The USSC decided that *States can’t declare when a president or presidential candidate has engaged in insurrection, only Congress can. So if Congress is either not in session or completely tied up (constantly) there’s nothing for a state to keep him off the ballot anywhere.

Explain how stopping it would work.

If the Congress is inactive & the USSC is cowed (& at best full of long delays) no there’s nothing to stop him. We just have constant breaches of the Constitution.

Let’s just say I take an America First position and I agree with you, flatly, 100%. Great. Ok let’s look at just Americans (assuming of course they can prove their forbears got here legally & have all their paperwork). We Americans want totally closed borders, almost no unemployment, Medicare, social security, affordable healthcare & etc (safe streets, access to all guns, low insurance, negligible inflation, cheap goods, all our goods & manufacturing, cheap cars, be a net exporter, cheap energy, & most importantly very low taxes on individuals & corporations). We also want: to remain the sole superpower in the world, to tell other countries to do what we say, & to push back China. We want all of that. I raised Reagan elsewhere. People completely forgot how we got here with free trade, global dominance, a defeated communism. Trump is completely unraveling all those policies. But besides all that, Americans want EVERYTHING, all of it, at once. There’s no reality or accountability to any of it. How that ties into authoritarianism & free speech is the more the People (who are referenced in the Constitution) demand such accountability & redress for deteriorating conditions (which is inevitable) the more the state will seek to push down on that to retain power.

I mean “state” like all government authority. Our state constitutions are the same though. Our system restricts the government, it has *no role in the constitutional order, it’s limited & constrained regularly. If you want a constitution where the government has “rights” look at the USSR & several constitutions outside the US. But FYI almost always they put duties on individuals *to the state as well. It’s a 2 way street, but in reality once people get hold of power it only goes in one direction. As for your examples - there are laws that protect law enforcement & government property assault, harassment, & destruction of public property. By all means prosecute those, do it vigorously & with full effect. But federal troops have no role in any of that IMO. And we’ve seen countless examples of people engaging in 1st amendment activities being pepper sprayed, tear gassed, assaulted, seized, arrested without cause.

So, just about this. Here in NO we just had a controversy where the (since indicted, rightfully) Democratic mayor (Cantrell) brazenly sat outside at a noted FQ balcony restaurant. A woman who had her apartment across the street also on a balcony took pictures, and then provided them to the Picayune who ran them in the paper & online. The person whom she was eating with was a cop who was her assigned bodyguard who it was rumored (ultimately correctly) to be her lover & with whom she took expensive trips, did luxury things, & used a primo Cabildo condominium owned by the city (but intended for VIPs) to shack up in, all on the public dime. The mayor sued the woman who took the pics & the paper too IIRC. What are your thoughts on that, appropriate or not? TIA.

The White House East Wing through the years: Famous moments in its history - The East Wing has been demolished to make way for President Trump's ballroom. >> 1902: Construction of the East Terrace The precursor to the East Wing -- called the East Terrace -- was built in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt. According to the White House Historical Association, the East Terrace served as a visitors entrance, as seen in archival images. …Now known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), the bunker has been known to sequester national leaders in times of danger, such as when Vice President Cheney was taken there after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Trump during the George Floyd protests in 2020, according to White House archives. …<<

I think with approval from Congress the executive branch can make any change to any public building, including the Eisenhower executive building. Yes, in fact Patel announced he reopened the investigation into the locker more than a month ago. I support that. Still no report.

The Truman bowling alley is not in the White House.

There’s actually a law for that, it’s called FARA. i really don’t think everyone does this specific thing. In fact children who’ve been accused of profiting from presidencies is a really short list - Hunter Biden, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, Donald Junior. That’s it, Thats the list historically, like whole existence of the US. The point of the above is that the magnitude is so incomprehensible now, but I won’t underrate what Hunter Biden did. IMO the biggest item in his favor was that Weiss never indicted him & Bondi hasn’t indicted the companies that hired him to this day. Such situations don’t practically exist - you’re talking about a candidate whose child just happens to be a foreign lobbyist or someone who just gets government contracts? That almost never happens. Junior wasn’t an arms manufacturer before this contract, this caveat you raise doesn’t even apply to him. Actually I think we *had a solution. Campaign finance laws & robust prosecution of public officials who pay to play & outright take graft & bribes. The conservative USSC has knocked back almost all of that. Another tool the FEC has been completely neutralized. I do think the populist call against the ‘swamp’ was effective. People wanted it, but what we have now is a far, deeper, wider, murkier, much more fetid swamp that has no precedent. DC has sunk into the swamp now. It’s swallowed up by it. This is far beyond any historical corruption in scale, and the best comps now are outside US - leaders like Marcos, Putin, Peron, Batista, Amin, Assad, Hussein. I wish I was kidding.

IMO conservatism is constitutionalism, and so the constitution says individuals are protected by the Constitution, not the state. I don’t know what to say about politics, but I do believe in fundamentals & retail skills. I think two bad candidates make for bad politics & bad results. I don’t think the American people value (as a plurality anyway) character in office or the Constitution anymore. Whet can I say the sleazy country club manager & condo salesman offered them a deal & they took it.

What are the chances a person was friends with two infamous sex traffickers?

Elites. Guess how many billionaires are in Trump’s cabinet & WH executive staff.

The 1st Amendment’s 6 Freedoms: - No establishment of religion, - free exercise of religion; - freedom of speech, - freedom of the press; - the right of the people peaceably to assemble, - the freedom of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

>>In an interview with TIME on Thursday, President Donald Trump said Israel would lose U.S. support if it annexed the West Bank.<<

>> In a video shared with ABC News, Nathaniel and a Palestinian-American man he was traveling with, Yaser Alkem, are seen stopping at a checkpoint with what appear to be two Israeli military vehicles. Two minutes later, the journalist walked up to the soldiers, who questioned him. "I am an American, I am visiting," Nathaniel can be heard saying in the video. "We just need help getting out because the settlers over there are blocking us. This is the only other way -- just back to Turmus’ayya, back to the village. We just want to go home." The soldiers then asked him to retrieve his passport from the car, the video shows. "They told us to park the car and wait with them until the settlers were gone, so they would secure our presence," Alkem told ABC News. "They said they would make sure the settlers were gone before letting us through. We followed their directions." However, the IDF troops did not protect the farmers, according to Nathaniel and Alkem, who captured the incident on video. Video shows the group being chased by more than 20 masked men whom witnesses say were Israeli settlers. In the videos, IDF troops were not seen intervening as the attack escalated rapidly. … Turmus’ayya is home to a large number of Palestinian-American citizens, including Yaser Alkem, who returned to live there full-time after 35 years in California. "We have no one to turn to other than our home country, which is the United States of America, and it has so far let us down," Alkem told ABC News. "We’ve asked for assistance. We’ve asked for protection. We’ve asked for equal treatment."<< - The backstory to this is apparently (ahem) Ambassador Mike Huckabee (noted Fox host & base player) hasn’t been taking phone calls from Americans seeking assistance on attacks. This has included residents & at least one reporter. So here a Palestinian woman was abused, nearly killed, hospitalized & the embassy who is informed of it by the reporter says they’re not aware of it.

These people. Apparently he lived in Perry County, TN, the shooting Trump was referring to was the 2024 Perry High School shooting in Perry, Iowa. The guy peppered a Perry TN Kirk vigil page with posts highlighting their hypocrisy (given the circumstances I’d call it trolling). It sounds like sheriff used the ‘Perry shooting’ reference as an excuse to hold him. +++ >> As the story spread, confusion persisted over the basic facts. Because the Facebook thread was only visible to members of the Perry County group, it was unclear to most people when, exactly, Bushart posted the memes or how people reacted — let alone whether the response could be described as “mass hysteria.” But Weems insisted that Bushart wanted to sow panic, telling The Tennesseanthat “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.” Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools. Although the Perry County Schools District did not respond to messages from The Intercept, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a series of open records requests with the school district asking for any communications to or from staff pertaining to the case — including terms like “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.” In response, the director of schools wrote that there were no records related to Bushart’s case. “The Perry County Sheriff’s Department handled this situation,” he wrote. “You would think that if a school district or a school was the target of a serious threat, they would have an email or a text message or something to students, to parents, to the safety officer, to the community, saying, ‘Here’s what has happened. Don’t worry. Everything is all right,’” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with FIRE who has been monitoring the case. “They have nothing.” Meanwhile, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to records requests by FIRE. In a phone call with The Intercept, a sheriff’s deputy told The Intercept that any records related to the case would have to be subpoenaed. “I’m not releasing anything due to the scrutiny and the harassing phone calls we’ve had,” he said, then hung up. But Weems himself responded to an email earlier this week. He said that the Perry County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page “has been in the process” of being deleted since July but declined to comment further. “There is a lot of false quotes being made in regard to this case,” he wrote. “Therefore, I’m not gonna continue to discuss the case until it’s settled in court.” Bushart’s lawyer has not responded to messages about the case. Bushart’s wife declined to speak on the record on the advice of the attorney. But Bushart’s son defended his dad on social media, calling the prosecution “an egregious violation of his 1st Amendment rights” and spelling out what has been clear from the start: The meme he shared was meant to show “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.” For now, Bushart faces the prospect of spending Thanksgiving in jail. On Tuesday, a member of the Justice for Larry Bushart page created a [account] to raise money for his legal defense. “This isn’t just for Larry; this is a stand against overzealous law enforcement acting on skewed interpretations of free speech,” it reads. “Remember: today it’s someone else; tomorrow it could be you or me.” To Steinbaugh, who has litigated First Amendment violations all over the country, Bushart’s case stands out. “One thing that’s unique about it is that nobody has done a course correction here,” he said. “It would be one thing to have law enforcement overreacting and detaining someone … and then the next day, saying, ‘OK, message received, we’ve done our due diligence. That’s all we need to do here.’ This guy’s been incarcerated since this happened over quoting the president. Cooler heads should have prevailed by now.”<< The Intercept.

A Reagan-Bush debate on immigration.

My fellow Americans: It's sometimes said that if you put three economists together in a room and ask them a question, you're liable to get more than three answers. It's true, economists don't often agree. But there is one issue on which almost all responsible economists, whatever their political persuasion, are unanimous. They agree that free and fair trade brings growth and opportunity and creates jobs. And they all warn that high trade barriers, what is often called protectionism, undermines economic growth and destroys jobs. I don't call it protectionism; I call it destructionism. That's why our motto is: free and fair trade with free and fair traders. Now, we've seen that governments sometimes don't play by the rules. They keep exports out of subsidy -- or subsidize, I should say, industries, giving them an unfair advantage. Well, our patience with unfair trade isn't endless, and we're taking action to bring other nations back in line to ensure that free trade remains fair trade. We're aggressively using existing trade laws to pry open foreign markets and force others to play by the rules. This week, for instance, we signed a breakthrough trade agreement that'll open up Japanese markets to U.S. semiconductors and prevent the Japanese from dumping semiconductors in our markets. And last month, after intensive negotiations in response to a deadline I set, the European Community agreed to keep its market open to U.S. farm exports. These agreements are examples of positive, result-oriented trade action. Instead of closing markets at home, we've opened markets to U.S. products abroad, thus helping to create more American jobs. Instead of erecting destructionist import barriers, we're tearing down foreign barriers to make trade freer and fairer for all. Because, believe me, when Americans are competing on a level playing field, they can outproduce and outsell anyone, anywhere in the world. We've been tough with those nations who've been unfair in their trading practices, and that toughness has produced results. And with hard-pressed industries like textiles and apparel that have gone through difficult times, we've taken strong action to help. We renegotiated agreements with Taiwan and Hong Kong over a year early to expand product coverage and tighten controls of imports from those countries. We are pursuing negotiations with Korea to tighten restraints on their exports to us and improve opportunities for our producers in their market. And just this week we completed a tough, new multifiber arrangement with our trading partners that will include products not previously covered and which gives us tools to prevent damaging import surges. This is result-oriented action. What doesn't bring results is the sort of destructionist legislation now before the House of Representatives. Next week the House will vote on whether to override my veto of a textile trade bill, and I'm hopeful this won't happen. My Council of Economic Advisers estimates this bill would cost you, the consumer, $44 billion over the next 5 years: $70,000 for every job saved, jobs that pay about $13,000 on average. Even worse, these temporarily protected jobs would be more than offset by the loss of thousands of other jobs -- jobs in retail, marketing, and finance and jobs directly related to importing, such as dockworkers and transportation workers. And then there are all those who would be thrown out of work as we began to feel the effects of foreign retaliation, and you can bet there would be retaliation. I'm thinking, especially, of our struggling agricultural sector and its many connected industries. At a time when we're trying to increase agricultural exports, let's remember that some of the first victims of retaliation would be our farmers -- kicking them when they're already down. So, our trade policy remains a positive one that will not play off one region against another or one American worker against another, doing grievous damage to the industries involved. In trying to help workers in ailing industries, we must be careful that the cure is not worse than the disease, like the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that deepened and prolonged the Great Depression. The best way to help is with the progrowth policies of free and fair trade that have created more than 10 million new jobs in the last 3\1/2\ years. In the last 7 months 1,650,000 people have found jobs in the United States. There's more than Europe and Japancombined in the last 10 years. And by the way, recently released figures show the leading economic indicators are up and unemployment has dropped to 6.8 percent. You know, the Europeans talk about the American miracle of economic growth and job creation. Well, I'm going to do everything I can to keep that miracle of hope alive, creating jobs and opportunities for all Americans. Until next week, thanks for listening, and God bless you. Note: The President spoke at 12:06 p.m. from Camp David, MD. President Ronald Reagan

Isn’t California by itself like the 5th biggest economy in the world? Try Louisiana, our life expectancy is like Bangladesh’s.

I’m not being difficult, just interested in the subject. - Yes we had the Korean War, IIRC our 2nd deadliest war, without a DOW. Because of what happened with Korea & Vietnam the US created the War Powers Act, which is another permutation for events like Clinton attacking AQ in Afghanistan & Sudan.

Ha ok thanks, I thought that was oddly well stated.

I think you’re talking legal war. There were 3 AUMF’s & the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Tricky one is the Korean War. We also had de facto wars with Grenada & Panama. And there was the insurgents landing in Cuba. The GWOT AUMF is why the US can effectively be at war with terrorists in places like Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mozambique, Niger.