Jeff Sessions is out

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_Doctor Steuss
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Doctor Steuss »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:I sure hope so. I'd rather the investigation turn up nothing than turn up collusion, money laundering, blackmailing, and espionage.

Please, god, let there be nothing.

- Doc

Lol. You rascal.
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." ~Charles Bukowski
_Water Dog
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Water Dog »

Kevin Graham wrote:Image


:rolleyes:
_Kevin Graham
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Kevin Graham »

Water Dog wrote:
Kevin Graham wrote:Image


:rolleyes:


Call what a draw? You present no argument at all. Stop pretending you're this tough debating guy. You're a small fry who obsessively scrubs Right Wing Twitter feeds for your opinion on things.
_Kevin Graham
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Kevin Graham »

Meanwhile, Conway's Husband says Matt Whitaker's appointment is unconstitutional and FOX News' Andrew Napolitano said it could be illegal.

“Under the law, the person running the Department of Justice must have been approved by the United States Senate for some previous position. Even on an interim post,” Napolitano told Fox News’ Dana Perino.

So there is an actual breaking the law by Trump, meanwhile, WD is obsessed over the potential breaking of a law by creating a law to protect Mueller.

So add this to the list of impeachable offenses.
_SteelHead
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _SteelHead »

It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener at war.

Some of us, on the other hand, actually prefer a religion that includes some type of correlation with reality.
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_Chap
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Chap »



Read the article. It appears to be really, really important.

If this is true, how on earth did the White House let Trump make such a colossal error?

Trump’s Appointment of the Acting Attorney General Is Unconstitutional


The president is evading the requirement to seek the Senate’s advice and consent for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and the person who will oversee the Mueller investigation.

By Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III
Mr. Katyal and Mr. Conway are lawyers.
Nov. 8, 2018

Matthew Whitaker, named acting attorney general on Wednesday after the forced resignation of Jeff Sessions, was Mr. Sessions's chief of staff.CreditCreditCharlie Neibergall/Associated Press
What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. His article got a lot of attention, and it wasn’t long before President Trump picked up the argument, tweeting that “the Appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”

Professor Calabresi’s article was based on the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. Under that provision, so-called principal officers of the United States must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate under its “Advice and Consent” powers.

He argued that Mr. Mueller was a principal officer because he is exercising significant law enforcement authority and that since he has not been confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unconstitutional. As one of us argued at the time, he was wrong. What makes an officer a principal officer is that he or she reports only to the president. No one else in government is that person’s boss. But Mr. Mueller reports to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. So, Mr. Mueller is what is known as an inferior officer, not a principal one, and his appointment without Senate approval was valid.

But Professor Calabresi and Mr. Trump were right about the core principle. A principal officer must be confirmed by the Senate. And that has a very significant consequence today.

It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.

Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.

If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.

Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.

What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.
Editors’ Picks

Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys.

We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody. His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but Mr. Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.

In times of crisis, interim appointments need to be made. Cabinet officials die, and wars and other tragic events occur. It is very difficult to see how the current situation comports with those situations. And even if it did, there are officials readily at hand, including the deputy attorney general and the solicitor general, who were nominated by Mr. Trump and confirmed by the Senate. Either could step in as acting attorney general, both constitutionally and statutorily.

Because Mr. Whitaker has not undergone the process of Senate confirmation, there has been no mechanism for scrutinizing whether he has the character and ability to evenhandedly enforce the law in a position of such grave responsibility. The public is entitled to that assurance, especially since Mr. Whitaker’s only supervisor is Mr. Trump himself, and the president is hopelessly compromised by the Mueller investigation. That is why adherence to the requirements of the Appointments Clause is so important here, and always.

As we wrote last week, the Constitution is a bipartisan document, written for the ages to guard against wrongdoing by officials of any party. Mr. Whitaker’s installation makes a mockery of our Constitution and our founders’ ideals. As Justice Thomas’s opinion in the N.L.R.B. case reminds us, the Constitution’s framers “had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.” He added “they knew that liberty could be preserved only by ensuring that the powers of government would never be consolidated in one body.”

We must heed those words today.

Neal K. Katyal (@neal_katyal) was an acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama and is a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in Washington. George T. Conway III (@gtconway3d) is a litigator at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York.
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_Water Dog
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Water Dog »

Maybe George Conway is right. I do find it odd that of all people, he's the one being used to present this argument, though. Is he intimidated by his wife or something?
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

How would an interim appointment be illegal when the Senate isn't in session until 2019?

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_Water Dog
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Water Dog »

So, Andrew McCarthy takes on this issue of Whitaker's eligibility. As usual, he illuminates the discussion.

Matthew Whitaker joined the Trump Justice Department as Sessions’s chief of staff in October 2017. The date is relevant. The president has named him as acting attorney general under the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (the relevant provisions are codified at Sections 3345 and 3346 of Title 5, U.S. Code). There has been some commentary suggesting that because Whitaker was in a job (chief of staff) that did not require Senate confirmation, he could not become the “acting officer” in a position (AG) that calls for Senate confirmation. Not so. The Vacancies Act enables the president to name an acting officer, who may serve as such for 210 days, as long as the person named has been working at the agency or department for at least 90 days in a fairly high-ranking position. Whitaker qualifies.


https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/ ... nt-choice/
_Kevin Graham
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Re: Jeff Sessions is out

Post by _Kevin Graham »

Water Dog wrote:So, Andrew McCarthy takes on this issue of Whitaker's eligibility. As usual, he illuminates the discussion.

Matthew Whitaker joined the Trump Justice Department as Sessions’s chief of staff in October 2017. The date is relevant. The president has named him as acting attorney general under the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (the relevant provisions are codified at Sections 3345 and 3346 of Title 5, U.S. Code). There has been some commentary suggesting that because Whitaker was in a job (chief of staff) that did not require Senate confirmation, he could not become the “acting officer” in a position (AG) that calls for Senate confirmation. Not so. The Vacancies Act enables the president to name an acting officer, who may serve as such for 210 days, as long as the person named has been working at the agency or department for at least 90 days in a fairly high-ranking position. Whitaker qualifies.


https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/ ... nt-choice/



No, that was already covered by Judge Napolitano on FOX News, who said this restriction applied to everyone, even interim appointments.

ETA: The Vacancies Act only applies if he quit, but Sessions already said he was asked to resign, meaning he was fired. On top of this there is the issue that Mr. Whitaker has also repeatedly criticized the Mueller investigation indicating that his taking over control of that investigation from Rod Rosenstein — which has just occurred — may be a direct ethics violation under DOJ rules.
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