Attention to the Unseen

David French writes: [T]here is a statutory basis for military intervention in domestic affairs, and the statute — called the Insurrection Act — is so poorly drafted that I have come to call it America’s most dangerous law. The Insurrection Act is almost as old as the United States itself. The law dates to 1792, and it permits the president to deploy American troops on American streets to impose order and maintain government control. There is nothing inherently wrong with…

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Akhil Reed Amar, Josh Chafetz, and Thomas P. Schmidt write: Donald Trump has not even returned to office, and already a constitutional crisis may be in the making. Trump has started announcing the people he intends to nominate for positions in his new administration. That is his prerogative. Several senators have criticized some of Trump’s choices. That is their prerogative (and two Trump nominees have already withdrawn under pressure). But rumors have been circulating of a plan to have Trump…

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Margaret Sullivan writes: In late November, Reality Winner – who turned 33 this week – finished her lengthy punishment for sending a government document to a news organization. It’s past time for her to be pardoned so that she can move on with her life and, particularly, her education. She wants to be a veterinary technician, get a good-paying job and move out of her mother’s Texas house, but having a felony in one’s background doesn’t help with any of…

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Jonathan Martin writes: President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions. Biden’s aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated…

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Garrett M. Graff writes: It goes almost without saying that Kash Patel, whom Donald Trump picked over the weekend to lead the F.B.I., is supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. That’s what even those who know Mr. Patel well are saying. “He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy,” his supervisor in the first Trump administration, Charles Kupperman, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual…

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Politico reports: In his sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden did not just protect his son. He also handed President-elect Donald Trump a template to shield his own allies and stretch the pardon power even further. Legal experts say Trump now has fresh precedent — and political cover — to issue expansive pardons absolving his allies not only of specific offenses, but even any undetermined crimes they may have committed. With the singular exception of Gerald Ford’s pardon…

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The New York Times reports: As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process. Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that…

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Politico reports: Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s. President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade. Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in…

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HuffPost reports: John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped bring down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, urged President Joe Biden to go further with his pardons. Biden on Sunday pardoned son Hunter Biden, who was found guilty in June in a firearms case and pleaded guilty in September in a tax case. The president, who had previously vowed not to pardon his son, is facing criticism from both the left and right over the move. But…

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The New York Times reports: Several Republican lawmakers fell in line on Sunday behind President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plan to choose Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I., defending the incoming president’s right to install a loyalist who has vowed to use the position to exact revenge on Mr. Trump’s adversaries. Mr. Trump’s announcement on Saturday that he intends to replace Christopher A. Wray, the current F.B.I. director, who still has three years left on his 10-year term, with Mr. Patel…

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The Associated Press reports: [In 2014, when the justices unanimously ruled that Democratic President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were illegal, Justice Antonin] Scalia, an icon of the right, applied his originalist approach to the Constitution to conclude that there was little doubt what the framers were trying to do. The whole point of the constitutional provision on recess appointments, adopted in 1787 in the era of horse and buggy, was that the Senate could…

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The Independent reports: A bipartisan bill to boost transparency and make sure incoming presidents stick to an ethics plan was so uncontroversial that it passed the Senate by a voice vote in 2020. Donald Trump then signed it into law. But now, after blowing past deadlines to adhere to the law after winning the White House a second time, Trump appears to have excluded himself from those same ethical guidelines. Trump missed two months of deadlines before finally signing off…

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By Molly Redden This story was originally published by ProPublica Donald Trump is entering his second term with vows to cut a vast array of government services and a radical plan to do so. Rather than relying on his party’s control of Congress to trim the budget, Trump and his advisers intend to test an obscure legal theory holding that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike. “We can simply choke off the money,” Trump said…

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Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write: The six-page filing that special counsel Jack Smith submitted Monday is surely one of the strangest requests a federal prosecutor has ever had to make. Smith moved to dismiss charges against Donald Trump for election subversion, asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to toss out the case due to an “unprecedented circumstance”: The defendant has, of course, been reelected president. In the filing, he assures the judge (and the public) that the government “stands fully…

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