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Repug Congress run by McConnell and ryan ?
GMAFB
President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey has set off a lively debate over whether the move amounts to a “cons utional crisis.” On the one hand, there is little doubt that Trump had the legal authority to oust Comey. On the other hand, the firing may have violated norms of judicial independence: Comey was overseeing an investigation into whether members of Trump’s team had connections to Russian efforts to interfere in last year’s presidential election. There is fairly wide agreement among scholars that this week’s news raises serious questions about abuse of power and the rule of law; there is much less agreement as to whether it is a cons utional crisis, per se.
Complicating the debate is the fact that there is no single, clear definition of what a cons utional crisis even is. Back in February — the last time the phrase “cons utional crisis” was making headlines — we identified four different types of crises. They were, in brief:
The Cons ution doesn’t say what to do: Something happens for which the Cons ution doesn’t provide instructions.
The Cons ution’s meaning is in question: The text offers conflicting possibilities or throws up a phrase like “high crimes and misdemeanors” or “commerce among the states” that invites different interpretations.
The Cons ution tells us what to do, but it’s not politically feasible: Like having the House of Representatives decide the 2000 election.
The ins utions themselves fail: Congress, the president, the courts and the states are all supposed to check each other in order to uphold the Cons ution. But they don’t always do what they’re supposed to.
Comey’s firing doesn’t fall neatly into any one of these buckets, but it has elements of at least three of them. Let’s go through them quickly:
Ins utional failure
Almost as soon as Comey’s firing was announced, commentators started comparing the move to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, in which President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in. There are some clear, surface-level similarities between the two incidents, which both involved the ouster of officials investigating the White House. But there are also key differences. In 1973, the attorney general and deputy attorney general both resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order. (Solicitor General Robert Bork, who took over the Justice Department, then fired Cox.) This week, by contrast, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein cooperated with Trump; Rosenstein wrote a memo outlining the case against Comey (although it stopped short of calling for his ouster), and Sessions wrote a letter to Trump calling for his firing. Trump has since said that he had already decided to fire Comey, and did so for reasons unrelated to the justification laid out in Rosenstein’s memo. Rosenstein and Sessions, therefore, appear to have provided Trump a pretext for a decision he planned to make anyway.
The Cons ution isn’t very specific about how each of these ins utions — the White House and the Department of Justice — is supposed to behave, especially when the latter is investigating the former. But if the White House is interfering with a federal investigation, that certainly seems like an ins utional failure. The ins ution designed to oversee the White House to mitigate such abuses, Congress, also has seemed very reticent to do that job so far — another form of failure. This touches on the next form of crisis:
Cons ution says what to do but it’s not politically feasible
The system of checks and balances we all learned about in grade school isn’t explicitly discussed in the Cons ution, but the idea that the branches of government are meant to help keep each other in check is still a bedrock principle of the U.S. system of government. James Madison, writing in Federalist 51, explained that, “Ambition should be made to counteract ambition.”
That’s not how things are working in the federal government right now. Congressional Republicans have mostly stayed quiet, or expressed “reservations” in a noncommittal way. They have very understandable electoral incentives for behaving this way, but if those political considerations prevent them from performing a vital cons utional job — overseeing the executive branch and investigating presidential abuses of power — this is a form of crisis.
(rest of a long analysis here:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...tional-crisis/
Repug Congress run by McConnell and ryan ?
GMAFB
Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-13-2017 at 08:35 AM.
Trump makes people lose their more than any POTUS I can remember.
cucked german in 1936:
hitler makes people lose their more than anyone i can remember lololololol liberal screeching lol
Well at least he has you here to eat his for him.Trump makes people lose their more than any POTUS I can remember.
Admitting that the firing was at least in part because of Comey's unwillingness to cooperate regarding the investigation was a serious blunder.
It is? He could shoot somebody and not lose any voters from his base.
Polling is starting to show that he is losing support from the poor uneducated white trash contingent that he won on. Sure there are always going to be the Darrins and DMCs who will eat his but the electorate at large is not turning in his favor. I'm not saying that they will vote dem but I would not expect such a turnout next time around unless the dems select a historically bad candidate again to act as a foil.
This specifically is a political issue. The Senate probe including the GOP members is having kittens over it for example. It is going to be all but impossible for him to obstruct even clandestinely now that he has admitted to doing so already. He ahs lost the benefit of the doubt.
Senators Grassley and Feinstein basically admitted that Trump is not the subject of any FBI investigation. The fact that Comey wouldn't admit that is why he got axed.
Because he's as unstable as any POTUS we've had.Trump makes people lose their more than any POTUS I can remember.
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