Music: The Funky Knuckles — ‘New Birth’
Trump’s appointment of the acting attorney general is unconstitutional
Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III write: 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…
Matthew Whitaker, Mueller’s new boss, concluded last year there was ‘no collusion’ with Russia
The Daily Beast reports: A year-and-a-half before he took responsibility for overseeing the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Matthew Whitaker, now the acting attorney general, had already reached a conclusion. “The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” he said in an interview on the Wilkow Majority show. “There was interference by the Russians into the election, but that was not collusion with the campaign. That’s where the left seems to…
Acting attorney general opposes principal of constitutional checks and balances
The New York Times reports: The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, once espoused the view that the courts “are supposed to be the inferior branch” and criticized the Supreme Court’s power to review legislative and executive acts and declare them unconstitutional, the lifeblood of its existence as a coequal branch of government. In a candidate Q. and A. when he sought the Republican nomination for senator in Iowa in 2014, Mr. Whitaker indicated that he shared the view among…
Here’s the road map to the next decade of American politics
Doug Sosnik and Sara Fagen write: We are two former White House political directors—one of us, Doug Sosnik, worked for Bill Clinton; one of us, Sara Fagen, worked for George W. Bush. We’ve come together to give our assessment of the 2018 midterms—no partisan spin, just the facts. The following PowerPoint slides outline what we think about the results and what to expect in President Donald Trump’s Washington for the next two years. Here’s what we’ve learned so far: A…
Words and walkouts aren’t enough. CNN should sue Trump over revoking Acosta’s press pass
Margaret Sullivan writes: CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta is a smart, tough reporter. He can also be a grandstander who seems to thrive on conflict with President Trump and doesn’t always know when to stop his aggressive questioning. But whether you like Acosta’s style, it’s clear the White House crossed a bright line Wednesday when it took away Acosta’s “hard pass,” which allows him the access he needs to cover the White House. That action amounts to punishing a…
Now it’s up to the public
Andrew Coan writes: The most surprising thing about Wednesday’s resignation of Jeff Sessions is that it did not happen sooner. President Trump has long been furious with his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and has had the power to fire him at any time. Trump’s decision to oust Sessions also removes Rod Rosenstein as acting attorney general for the purposes of the Russia investigation, leaving the fate of Special Counsel Robert Mueller uncertain. This drives home…
Mueller has powerful new House allies as he bears down on Trump
Politico reports: Special counsel Robert Mueller is set to emerge from his midterm campaign hibernation period with a powerful new ally as House Democrats surged back to the majority in Tuesday’s elections. The lead Russia investigator, who in the days and weeks ahead has a series of important court hearings and key sentencing deadlines for cooperating witnesses, will soon have a friendly audience of Democratic chairmen on one end of Capitol Hill who are primed with subpoena power to fight…
What Sessions’s resignation means for Robert Mueller
The Atlantic reports: President Donald Trump has forced out Attorney General Jeff Sessions just one day after the midterm elections and after nearly a year of berating him for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. Sessions’s temporary replacement, his chief of staff, is now effectively Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s new boss. But he’s expressed repeated skepticism over the scope of Mueller’s inquiry in the past, raising immediate questions about whether he will try to limit it. Trump, who…
Oversight is the biggest winner of the midterm elections
Conor Friedersdorf writes: Oversight is the winner of the 2018 midterms. For two years, as the press documented suspicious activity in all realms of President Donald Trump’s life, many Americans wondered, “How corrupt is the president? How about his political allies, his business associates, his appointees, and the people who run his nonprofit foundation? Are they profiting off taxpayers or selling out the public interest?” Special Counsel Robert Mueller afforded some hope of a partial answer. His investigation has so…
Trump’s narrative vs. Pelosi’s subpoenas
Politico reports: Democrats wanted a base of power in Donald Trump’s Washington and they got it. They also wanted to wake up Wednesday morning to a radically changed country. They wanted permission to dismiss the past two years as a fluke of history, a hallucination now fading. And they wanted something more: to rub the president’s nose in the dirt of defeat and repudiation so badly that it would be hard to see him doing more than limp through the…
America’s problem isn’t tribalism — it’s racism
Adam Serwer writes: It’s fashionable in the Donald Trump era to decry political “tribalism,” especially if you’re a conservative attempting to criticize Trump without incurring the wrath of his supporters. House Speaker Paul Ryan has lamented the “tribalism” of American politics. Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has said that “tribalism is ruining us.” Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has written a book warning that “partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War.” In the fallout from Tuesday’s…
Don’t be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for Trump
Cas Mudde writes: While there was a Democratic “blue wave”, it was modest, in line with usual midterm shifts, particularly when one party is in charge of all the branches of government. Trump will celebrate this as a victory, which is not without merit. Sure, the Republicans lost many races, and some significantly when compared with the 2016 presidential elections. But they still held on to most of their positions. Trump’s biggest victory, however, was within the Republican party. When…
A very grim forecast on global warming
Bill McKibben writes: Though it was published at the beginning of October, Global Warming of 1.5°C, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a document with its origins in another era, one not so distant from ours but politically an age apart. To read it makes you weep not just for our future but for our present. The report was prepared at the request of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end…
Bitcoin: Are we really going to burn up the world for libertarian nerdbucks?
Eric Holthaus writes: The continued growth of power-hungry Bitcoin could lock in catastrophic climate change, according to a new study. The cryptocurrency’s growth, should it follow the adoption path of other widely used technologies (like credit cards and air conditioning), would alone be enough to push the planet to 2-degree C warming, the red line value the world agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Bitcoin essentially converts electricity into cash, via incredibly complex math problems designed to eliminate…
Tim Berners-Lee launches campaign to save the web from abuse
The Guardian reports: Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet. The contract outlines central…