Attention to the Unseen

Reuters reports: The U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on Monday for one of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, allowing his administration to implement a rule denying legal permanent residency to certain immigrants deemed likely to require government assistance in the future. The justices, on a 5-4 vote, granted the administration’s request to lift a lower court’s injunction that had blocked the so-called public charge policy while litigation over its legality continues. The rule has been criticized by immigrant…

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Just Security reports: All relevant judicial precedents make clear that Bolton should not be able to invoke executive privilege to avoid testifying in the Senate impeachment trial. As a threshold matter, there is no precedent for the president invoking executive privilege to preclude the private testimony of a witness who is able and willing to testify. Bolton is a private citizen who is no longer a member of the executive branch. He has already indicated his willingness to testify, and…

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Neal K. Katyal, Joshua A. Geltzer and Mickey Edwards write: An overwhelming number of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe the Senate should hear from relevant witnesses and obtain documents during President Trump’s impeachment trial. Striking new revelations about the president’s role in the Ukraine affair, as reported from an unpublished manuscript by John Bolton, underscore the need for his testimony and that of others. Yet Republican members of the Senate have signaled that they intend to uphold Mr….

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Maya Wiley writes: The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump has begun. Senators now face the monumental question of whether to remove the president from office—and yet, something bigger is at stake here. The Constitution’s fundamental design is on trial too. This is clear from the articles of impeachment themselves. Start with the first article, which charges that the president abused his power by holding support for an ally foreign government hostage to better his chances at reelection, rather…

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BuzzFeed reports: The country’s top intelligence official has failed to turn over to Congress a report on the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, sources said, flouting a law passed last month. In December, lawmakers passed a sweeping defense bill that included a provision ordering the director of national intelligence to send Congress an unclassified report identifying those responsible for Khashoggi’s death at a Saudi Arabian consulate in 2018. The legislation set the deadline for the report at 30…

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The New York Times reports: Scholars have roundly rejected a central argument of President Trump’s lawyers that abuse of power is not by itself an impeachable offense. But it turns out that another important legal figure has contradicted that idea: Mr. Trump’s attorney general and close ally, William P. Barr. In summer 2018, when he was still in private practice, Mr. Barr wrote a confidential memo for the Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s legal team to help the president get…

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Jonathan Turley writes: In my December testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, I raised objections to the House rushing the impeachment forward on an incomplete and inferential case. There are ample defenses to be raised on both articles without claiming, implausibly, that this was handled perfectly. This is probably why presidents and professors run in different circles. Where professors see this trial as a teachable moment, Trump sees it as a television moment. Trump knows television and may know his…

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George T. Conway III writes: This is what happens when you don’t pay your legal bills. President Trump, whose businesses and now campaign have left a long trail of unpaid bills behind them, has never discriminated when it comes to stiffing people who work for him. That includes lawyers — which is part of the reason he found the need to make some curious last-minute tweaks to his team, announcing the addition of the legal odd couple of Alan Dershowitz…

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Jonathan Chait writes: In May of 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had wrapped up his party’s nomination, but when the notion he might win the presidency seemed remote at best, Benjamin Wittes wrote one of the very early essays attempting to analyze how an obviously authoritarian president might abuse his powers. “The soft spot, the least tyrant-proof part of the government, is the U.S. Department of Justice,” he argued, laying out how prosecutorial discretion could allow a president to harass…

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The Daily Beast reports: 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is calling on financial regulatory agencies to investigate whether associates and attendees of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago illegally traded in defense company stocks or commodities after he gave them a heads up that he was planning something “big” in response to Iran’s killing of an American contractor in Iraq. The Daily Beast previously reported that Trump told allies at his Palm Beach club, that he had something “big” in…

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David Rohde writes: Last October, Attorney General William Barr appeared at Notre Dame Law School to make a case for ideological warfare. Before an assembly of students and faculty, Barr claimed that the “organized destruction” of religion was under way in the United States. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” he said. Barr, a conservative…

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The New York Times reports: Arriving at the United States border in Washington State early Sunday morning after a skiing trip to Canada, Negah Hekmati and her family were pulled out of line for further questioning by Customs and Border Protection agents. The family found itself in a room filled with fellow Iranian-Americans, many of whom had already been held for hours. The agents wanted to know the identities of Ms. Hekmati’s parents, siblings, uncles and cousins. Her husband, a…

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Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III write: The importance of John Bolton’s offer to testify if subpoenaed in the impeachment proceedings against President Trump cannot be overstated. In a single stroke, Mr. Bolton, the former national security adviser, elevated truth and transparency over political gamesmanship. The Senate must take him up on his offer, as well as demand the testimony of President Trump and the administration officials he has barred from testifying. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell,…

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Bloomberg reports: The U.S. has “come to take democracy for granted,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, urging his fellow judges to keep educating the public about the workings of the federal government and the Constitution. Roberts, who is slated to oversee the Senate‘s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the coming weeks, used his year-end report Tuesday to laud the federal judiciary’s work on civic education, while issuing a thinly veiled warning about the fragility of American democracy in…

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Noah Feldman writes: Donald Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives marks just the third time in history that a president of the United States has had to face trial in the Senate. The charges in the articles of impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee against Trump differ in important ways from those brought against Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and they deserve close scrutiny. Trump’s possible defenses also merit careful analysis. Even if Trump does not…

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