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Required Reading
Powerline’s Scott Johnson has this brief, outstanding summary of the greatest political scandal in our nation’s history up today. This is absolutely required reading.
At the time, I thought Fast & Furious was the greatest political scandal in our history. Getting American law enforcement officers killed with weapons that our own government sold to criminal gangs in a foreign country in an effort to change popular opinion sufficiently to demand that we change the 2nd Amendment of our own Constitution. Holy Toledo.
But this scandal, in which officials of our own government attempt to overturn an election by using the power of their unelected offices, with active assistance from the media – my God. When appointed bureaucrats decide that they consent to democracy only when it goes their way, then how far are we from typical third world socialism?
At first, I thought the term “Deep State” was a bit overwrought. I was wrong. This is not hyperbole. This is an immediate threat to freedom and democracy around the world (imagine the world without American democracy). This ends either with one party rule, or it ends with torches and pitchforks. Unless our government successfully excises this “Deep State” cancer, which is now widely metastatic. Regardless, I think this is enormously important, and I don’t see how it can end well. Somebody, please tell me I’m over-reacting. Please?
Published in General
I found Ramesh Ponnuru’s column (one of those linked by Scott Johnson at Powerline) interesting.
Ponnuru argues that it would be an abuse of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution if it were discharged to remove Trump from the Presidency simply because people didn’t think Trump was doing his job as President well. Ponnuru argues that the 25th Amendment exists so that a President can be removed when the President is unable to do the job, not that he isn’t doing the job well, the in eyes of some.
But in order to remove Trump from the Presidency using the 25th Amendment, not only would Vice President Mike Pence have to agree with this, so would a majority of Trump’s cabinet and so would a two-thirds supermajority of the US House of Representatives and a two-thirds supermajority of the US Senate.
In other words, it would only happen if Trump’s popularity among Republican voters was “underwater.” As long as Trump has the approval of 90 percent of Republican voters, it ain’t happening.
Ponnuru writes that if someone in the Trump administration was trying to remove Trump from the Presidency using the 25th Amendment, he was involved in something more quixotic than sinister.
Yes and may I add that this is also true with certain non-lethal commodities such as cocaine. I worked closely with the DEA for a few years.
These guys were trying to end the 2d Amendment plain & simple. Crickets.
I really do think that their side believes that all the “right people” (and I do not mean politically right) will totally see his actions as a smart thing to have done! That he was fired by the OrangeManBad is actually a resume point for people like him.
And, he might make a lot of money on his book before he ends up in jail.
Another post in this thread pointed out that her brother just doesn’t even read or listen to anything that doesn’t agree with him. I know soooo many people like that! In my family! And why would they?? They read and listen to all the “right people”–NPR, NYT, WaPo, LA Times, etc. etc. I, too, read and listened to all of those sources for decades. Then, I was so excited to discover other points of view! And they said what I was thinking! I wasn’t crazy after all!
I do. First, most of these guys are lawyers. No doubt from the finest law schools (allegedly) in the land, where I presume they are acquired some familiarity with both basic English and the niceties of constitutional interpretation. And, unlike the various interpretations of the Second Amendment where Madison et al can not testify, we have a full and detailed record of the purpose of Amendment 25.
In fact, every person involved in this circus was alive when the Amendment was written, passed and approved by the states. I turn to Section 4…
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
There is no unwritten codicil, unlike Faber’s Constitution, permitting the gelding of the President because of bad Tweets or other eccentricities.
If, big if in my mind, these creatures had the courage of their convictions, they would have marched into Pence’s office and made clear their concerns. But that kind of courage only appears in movies.
I disagree. According to CBS news, Fast and Furious was also used to make the case for altering existing gun laws and regulations.
and according to Investors Business Daily
Fast and Furious was (among other things) a conspiracy to deprive US citizens of their 2nd amendment rights.
Seriously? Point taken on your last paragraph—these need sunlight. But, F&F wasn’t just badly handled: it’s my understanding that guns sold thru it were lost, meaning they disappeared. Weren’t they supposed be tracked? They only reappeared when they were used to kill Agent Brian Terry, and others! Or was that the method of tracking—when they’re used in a crime? I saw reports of FFL holders threatened by Holder’s guys if they didn’t cooperate in BREAKING THE LAW. Or is my memory finally going? Someone help me out here….
I read he was doing the interview to get ‘in front’ of what might be coming (we can only hope!). Talked about by the empty 24 hr. heads enough, it gets diluted and turned into ‘old news’.
Dude what busts my gut about this is how it was obvious at the time. We (@DocJay & others) discussed that fact in real time back in the day. No one (of consequence) cared then or cares now.
Already feels like a Banana Republic to me.
I don’t disagree with your overarching premise – there is a Deep State with an unremitting hostility to conservatives. We learned that with Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame at the CIA trying to hamstring the Bush administration because of an Ivy League faculty lounge mentality. But I don’t think you are right to get so worked up on this specific issue. If meetings like this were held to paralyze a Tom Cotton presidency I would agree with you, but Trump is and was so unworthy, so untrustworthy and so unbalanced that a group of bureaucrats could in good faith think that these preliminary meetings were a necessity.
Rod Rosenstein disagrees. In the statement released after McCabe’s 60 Minutes preview, he denies, denies, denies and even says, in effect, it is not within in the DOJ’s purview to discuss the 25th. Alan (Hillary supporting) Dershowitz calls it a coup d’etat!
And it’s not just the totally inappropriate, seditious discussion, it’s all the other corrupt actions of the DOJ, FBI, Clapper, that commie Brennan, etc in unjustly exonerating Hillary and trying frame DJT. These people are dirty — head to toe.
The 25th Amendment is not for someone who is a sleazebag (like Clinton or LBJ), evil (like Wilson), corrupt (like Nixon or Obama) or incompetent at the job (like Carter or Obama). For those cases, impeachment or defeat in the next election is the appropriate remedy.
The 25th Amendment is for a president who is incapacitated. For example, imagine Reagan was put in a coma by his attempted assassination. He is still alive, but he literally cannot do the job at all. There was no constitutional option to invoke succession before the 25th Amendment. The Kennedy assassination is what caused the amendment to be created. It’s actually a profoundly anti-euthanasia statement – people who are incapacitated are still alive and still people.
Anyway, people said Bush was an idiot and compared him to a monkey. People insulted Reagan the same way – I’ve seen numerous old clips mocking him that way. Keep the 25th Amendment strictly under control, or it will be used on people you like, not just Trump.
I’m curious. Why didn’t he, do you think?
One thing, Clinton apparently called Trump the night before he declared. At the time the question was: did he tell him to run or not to run? We’ll likely never know, but he could either have been trying to feel him out, or to dissuade him. Bill Clinton could have hung up the phone and summed up the conversation and Trump’s character (as an outside and headstrong) and called his friends at the DOJ and CIA.
Another thing, the third door is not “talk about it”. We’ve been doing this for forty years and all it came to was more talk. The third door is peaceful rebellion with work stoppages. SO start saving up for a long, long strike. And maybe if Trump were to go on live TV and lay out all the salient evils he could in the three to five minutes they give hem before they cut him off, and tell everyone to go to the window and shout.
Another thing, “Has our respect for the law declined to the degree that nobody in the government needs to worry about prosecution? What the heck is going on??” Yes, with the loss of the rule of law, now law has begun to be scoffed at.
Another thing, “If the police showed up at his house with a warrant, Mr. McCabe would say that he didn’t know why they were there. And I think he’d be telling the truth. It just wouldn’t make sense to him.” Or else the Deep State itself in such disarray that they are dividing into factional groups and developing an every-man-for-himself attitude.
Another thing, “There are people on this very website who are fully invested in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, wish to see the President removed from office, and they are allegedly on our side. If we can’t convince them, how are we going to convince the low-information voter?” There seem to be two crazy things simultaneously. The Left is diseased with mass hysterical Mass Munchhausen’s and on the Right an obsessive-compulsive anti-Trump Monomania; both crippling the public discourse.
Another thing, if you try to contact me by facebook, I will unfriend you, viralize your post, and see you lose your job.
No, there’s not much chance, unless Trump does something really – how did you say it? – the most disruptive force he can find to destroy the Deep State.
He could give a speech. He’s good at that.
Trump’s speech: I would like to say to my fellow patriots that there is so much wrong with this country that it will soon not stand unless we act. The coup against me, and yes it was a coup, and still is, is one of the three worst things in American government history; the Civil War, the Assassination of Lincoln and the Government Coup, against ANYONE, any president, it happened to be me. The country is in such debt that when the dollar fails, and it will, your current pay will be worth nothing, you will get subsistence wages from welfare, and you will live in near poverty. The government wants to take your money, your health care, your job, your car, your food and your meat, your manhood, your personal pride and replace you with subservient mice. Don’t be mice. Be MEN. The Rule of Law is now non-existent. No one who commits crimes, rapes, intrusions, picking your pocket goes to jail in a way that stops them doing it again. Abortion dehumanizes life, babies lives, so much that cities that have the high abortion rates are the cites where those born grow up to kill their neighbors. We see it every night on the News. Except the News doesn’t want you to know. Big corporations control google and facebook and what you think while you’re on amazon, and then tell the government what you buy, what you own, what you say, what you write and what you are going to do, and they get to sell you a T-shirt or a phone game while doing it. You’re always watched, always listened to, and they will break into your house and kill you if they want to make an example of you. Stand up do the right thing, and just like the old movie shout, “I’m mad as hell over all this and I’m — click, scraaaatch,
Well that was very interesting. It looks as if the president has finally shown just how crazy he is, and I’m hearing now that the President has been removed by order of the Twenty-fifth Amendment and the Vice President, Mike Pence, has just been arrested. It looks like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will be the first woman president. A big day, a great day for America!
Now that would get the ball rolling.
I can always dream, can’t I?
Rob and Peter?
I think a lot of this “coup” talk is a persecution complex that is popular in some political circles.
During the impeachment debate over President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the Democrats tried to make Bill Clinton into the victim, a victim of ruthless conservative Republicans who wanted to overturn the 1996 election results.
But here’s the thing. Both the impeachment process and the 25th Amendment are constitutional processes. This isn’t a group of generals pointing a gun at the President and saying, “We are taking over.” This is entirely constitutional.
It’s also very difficult to accomplish.
Notice that no president has every been removed from office via impeachment or the 25th Amendment. That’s because with impeachment, a majority vote of the house and a two-thirds majority of the Senate is requires.
The 25th Amendment process is even harder because a two-thirds majority of the house is required instead of just a majority and in addition, one needs the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet to sign on.
If Clinton had been removed, Al Gore would have become president. If Trump were removed Mike Pence would have become president. The partisan balance of power would not change.
It’s really nothing to worry about because [a] it won’t happen and [b] even if it did happen, Trump wouldn’t be replaced by Kamala Harris. Mike Pence would be president. A slight difference, not a large one.
Are you saying, “Nothing to see here please move along?”
Yes.
I realize that playing the victim is popular among both Leftists and conservatives. But it’s still seems irrational.
This is 100% true and it is incredibly weird.
Trump knows that Russians have leverage over him and/or he’s an international criminal so he runs for president anyway. Or he works with the Russians to get elected. While the IRS has been giving him a never ending colonoscopy since the early 1990s.
There are at least a half a dozen other bizarre things like this.
My new theory is, there is a type of conservative that doesn’t have any libertarian sensibilities at all. The Tom Nichols types and separately the people that make money off of establishment Republican politics. Rick Wilson, Nicole Wallace. Those are the ones that think like this.
They are supposed to tell their boss, and then their boss is supposed to tell Congress. They can skip all of the cloak and dagger.
I love this.
Meaning what?
I love this #2.
Why would I listen to Rosenstein? Or Dershowitz?
Calling it a coup d’etat, when nothing happened, is precisely why I find the objection to be hysterical.
Yes, seriously. It’s a sting operation. In a sting, you let the bad guys get away with something in an effort to catch worse guys. Of course some of the guns were going to disappear. How could you stop that? Have an agent follow each gun?
OK, I looked at this, and it looks like more conspiracy theory. The contemplated regulation was reporting of the purchase of multiple long rifles. This is hardly a deprivation of 2nd Amendment rights.
Yes. Female agents can multi-task or so I have been informed (to death).
I only there were people, let’s call them — investigative reporters — whose job it was to dig deep for the facts and report them intelligently to the public. Of course, they would need to be educated on how to do this job by, say — a journalism school — where they would be taught to tell the truth and keep their personal opinions out of their reporting. And then, there would be a need for some sort of media outlet, like perhaps — newspapers or even television — to share this “news” with the people. Then we could know what’s really going on.
If only…
First, thanks for reminding us how pathetic Bush was dealing with this complete hoax. His inaction and non-responsiveness allowed the deep state media to advance the absurd narrative, and then ultimately left long-standing ally Scooter Libby in the desert with no water. Shrug, “just politics” Bush. This success emboldened them.
Your opinion of Trump and Cotton is irrelevant. We live in a nation of laws. There’s nothing about Trump that warrants this kind of hysteria. People who are that susceptible to propaganda have no place in positions of authority and should be disgraced. But you are also a victim so I’m predicting you will disagree.
From 2017 to 2019, Republicans had the trifecta – the House, Senate, and Executive branch. If nothing happened to Hillary then, surely McCabe feels confident nothing will happen now, especially with the Dems running the House. He merely compared the risk of prosecution vs. the reward of a big bucks book deal and took the money . . .
I think he is in such a bubble of “right-thinkers” that any information that challenges his views is clearly unreliable and not to be paid any attention.
I went through the same thing several years ago when my older brother was still alive. They both were rabid believers in climate warming and as I have said in other posts and replies, I think there is a lot to be skeptical of. I put together an email with a set of links to articles and websites with scientific evidence of a more moderate view. They never looked at any of them.
Their avoidance of alternative information was also notable in discussions. If you had a factual rebuttal of a point they were making, they would not try to counter it, but would switch to a different point. It was very frustrating, but they are a useful proxy for what a large part of the population believes.
When I suggested the “third door” here (#5), I was referring to the author’s third alternative: “…our government successfully [excising] this ‘Deep State’ cancer.” Not are rebellion.