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May 16, 2024 15:27
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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iirc they'd have to get a federal judge to do that
quote:Procedures
Following the refusal of a witness to produce documents or to testify, the Committee is entitled to report a resolution of contempt to its parent chamber. A Committee may also cite a person for contempt but not immediately report the resolution to the floor. In the case of subcommittees, they report the resolution of contempt to the full Committee, which then has the option of rejecting it, accepting it but not reporting it to the floor, or accepting it and reporting it to the floor of the chamber for action. On the floor of the House or the Senate, the reported resolution is considered privileged and, if the resolution of contempt is passed, the chamber has several options to enforce its mandate. quote:
Inherent contempt
Under this process, THE PROCEDURE FOR HOLDING A PERSON IN CONTEMPT INVOLVES ONLY THE CHAMBER CONCERNED. Following a contempt citation, the person cited is arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms for the House or Senate, brought to the floor of the chamber, held to answer charges by the presiding officer, and then subjected to punishment as the chamber may dictate (usually imprisonment for punishment, imprisonment for coercion, or release from the contempt citation).[10]
Concerned with the time-consuming nature of a contempt proceeding and the inability to extend punishment further than the session of the Congress concerned (under Supreme Court rulings), Congress created a statutory process in 1857. While Congress retains its "inherent contempt" authority and may exercise it at any time, this inherent contempt process was last used by the Senate in 1934, in a Senate investigation of airlines and the U.S. Postmaster. After a one-week trial on the Senate floor (presided over by Vice President John Nance Garner, in his capacity as Senate President), William P. MacCracken, Jr., a lawyer and former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics who was charged with allowing clients to remove or rip up subpoenaed documents, was found guilty and sentenced to 10 days imprisonment.[11]
MacCracken filed a petition of habeas corpus in federal courts to overturn his arrest, but after litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress had acted constitutionally, and denied the petition in the case Jurney v. MacCracken.[12][13]
Presidential pardons appear not to apply to a civil contempt procedure such as the above, since it is not an "offense against the United States" or against "the dignity of public authority."[14] 
You're thinking of:
quote:
Statutory proceedings
Following a contempt citation, the presiding officer of the chamber is instructed to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia;[15] according to the law it is the duty of the U.S. Attorney to refer the matter to a grand jury for action. However, while the law places the duty on the U.S. Attorney to impanel a grand jury for action, some proponents of the unitary executive theory argue that the Congress cannot properly compel the U.S. Attorney to take this action against the Executive Branch, asserting that the U.S. Attorney is a member of the Executive Branch who ultimately reports only to the President and that compelling the U.S. Attorney amounts to compelling the President[citation needed]. They argue that to allow Congress to force the President to take action against a subordinate following his directives would be a violation of the separation of powers and infringe on the power of the Executive branch. The legal basis for this position, they contend, can be found in Federalist 49, in which James Madison wrote “The several departments being perfectly co-ordinate by the terms of their common commission, none of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers.” This approach to government is commonly known as "departmentalism” or “coordinate construction”.[citation needed]
Others argue that Article II of the Constitution requires the President to execute the law, such law being what the lawmaker (e.g. Congress, in the case of statutory contempt) says it is (per Article I). The Executive Branch cannot either define the meaning of the law (such powers of legislation being reserved to Congress) or interpret the law (such powers being reserved to the several Federal Courts). They argue that any attempt by the Executive to define or interpret the law would be a violation of the separation of powers; the Executive may only—and is obligated to—execute the law consistent with its definition and interpretation; and if the law specifies a duty on one of the President's subordinates, then the President must "take care" to see that the duty specified in the law is executed. To avoid or neglect the performance of this duty would not be faithful execution of the law, and would thus be a violation of the separation of powers, which the Congress and the Courts have several options to remedy.
The criminal offense of "contempt of Congress" sets the penalty at not less than one month nor more than twelve months in jail and a fine of not more than $100,000.[4]
quote:
Civil procedures
Senate Rules authorize the Senate to direct the Senate Legal Counsel to file a civil action against any private individual found in contempt. Upon motion by the Senate, the federal district court issues another order for a person to comply with Senate process. If the subject then refuses to comply with the Court's order, the person may be cited for contempt of court and may incur sanctions imposed by the Court. The process has been used at least six times. Cable Guy fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Oct 1, 2019
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Oct 1, 2019 14:19
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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Meanwhile Karl Rove has written an editorial in the Weekend Australian.... It's behind a paywall so here it is:
quote:
The Democrat way: Verdict first, hold trial later
KARL ROVE
Adam Schiff, after channelling his inner Scorsese, with ‘Saint’ Nancy Pelosi at the Capitol in Washington on Thursday. Picture: AP
It has been only 11 days since US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the house was “moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry” of President Donald Trump, and Democrats are already blowing it.
They are moving much too quickly. Democrats toss around the word “urgent” as if speed is the prime imperative — more important than finding the truth or following procedure.
After explaining that events “accelerated the pace” for beginning impeachment, Ms Pelosi told reporters, “We have to strike while the iron is hot,” repeating the phrase for emphasis. That means house Democrats will likely hold hearings for a few weeks once they return in mid-October, and aim for a floor vote on articles of impeachment by year’s end.
The Democrats’ need for speed has already resulted in unfairness. Consider Friday’s demand by three committee chairmen — Elijah Cummings, Eliot Engel and Adam Schiff — that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provide documents and depositions from five State Department officials starting October 2.
Mr Pompeo pushed back, arguing that two business days wasn’t enough time for those called to consult private and department lawyers and prepare to answer questions under oath, let alone for the State Department to review the requested documents to decide whether they were privileged or classified, or whether to co-operate at all.
In response, the chairmen threatened Mr Pompeo, saying delay “is illegal and will constitute evidence of obstruction of the impeachment inquiry”. They’re bluffing, but this is how they operate. Verdict first, trial later. Break the rules. Ignore due process. And fairness be damned.
The impeachment process began not with the house voting to authorise an inquiry, as has been done previously, but with Speaker Pelosi simply declaring it is under way. This denied the opposition the right to certain protections and procedures, such as guaranteeing the ability to call witnesses and requiring committee votes on important matters. It means Ms Pelosi can give six Democratic committee chairmen a piece of the inquiry rather than lodging it all with judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler. He has proved a lousy public face for his party as well as an incompetent director of the impeachment orchestra.
Ms Pelosi should be dubbed “Tsarina Nancy the Great” for protecting her caucus’s vulnerable members from a tough vote on launching an impeachment investigation. By simply granting herself power to authorise the process, she hopes to minimise the fallout for red-district Democrats while still sending the Senate a resolution demanding the removal of a president she detests. Good luck with that. If this is all they got, two-thirds of the Senate ain’t going along.
The rhetoric of house Democrats has made them appear inept — and appearances aren’t always deceiving. Consider Mr Schiff’s stunt in opening the intelligence committee’s hearing on Mr Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine. Mr Schiff channelled his inner Martin Scorsese to revise the call’s transcript, adding new words to make it sound like a scene out of Goodfellas. He read his treatment to a national cable audience, only later admitting it was a “parody”.
Financial services chairman Maxine Waters tweeted on Tuesday that “impeachment is not good enough for Trump. He needs to be imprisoned & placed in solitary confinement”. That last part, such a nice touch!
Yet all this zeal is unlikely to convince America that it’s right to overturn the last presidential election and pre-empt the next one — only a year away — by evicting the occupant of the White House.
Impeachment will drown out public awareness of legislation house Democrats passed to “lower drug costs, increase worker pay and clean up Washington,” as their website proclaims, leaving them to look impeachment obsessed. The good news for Democrats is that impeachment will also drown out their caucus’s goofy ideas. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced six bills last week to create a “just society” with national rent control, federal benefits for illegal aliens and more. The program’s idiocy makes her Green New Deal look like the Federalist Papers.
Democrats have apparently forgotten that president Richard Nixon resigned only after 13 months of hearings. A Senate select committee investigation was led by Democrat Sam Ervin, a self-described “country lawyer” from North Carolina, assisted by Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, who famously asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” This was followed by a three-month house judiciary committee inquiry. Even then, Nixon decided to go only because a “smoking gun” tape recording was released.
Two generations later, house Democrats are taking a different tack. Rushing to remove this president may be cathartic for them, but their transparent partisanship and unfairness will ensure that they fail — leaving the country even more divided and bitter. 
Band on the Run
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Oct 5, 2019 03:43
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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so is woodward defending him?
- donny is not someone to bend
- This is a war.
- Clinton apologised - knowing what we know about donny, he won't.
- Is this going to be considered a high crime [or misdemeanor, republicans will probably stick.
- They're [the dems ?] are trying to speed it up. They've said this is all about Ukraine, but there's four hundred other things. This process is too important.
- Are we going to let the election be a referendum on this?
- rump is still out there banging on everyone, let's hope it's not a bloody 2020.
The other guy (Peter Baker, the reporter who broke the Clinton scandal) seemed pretty anti-donny and stuck to facts as we know them.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/a-war-room-of-one-bob-woodward-and-peter-baker-talk-trump-impeachment/
I'm trying to figure out who the absolute stupidest person to be a whistleblower could be at this point. Because that's probably who it will be.
donny should probably watch this, or parts of it... I know Samantha Bee is frowned on here, and I totally get why, but that's largely irrelevant for this story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpdoyBhrfI4
tldw: they love(d) donny in Iraqi Kurdistan, I don't know how they've felt recently...
Yeah... watch this fucker pivot to attention, lockstep.
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Oct 7, 2019 10:05
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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"Rodenthar Drothman" posted:
What's behind the paywall?
quote:Fox News published the texts, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Mr. Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk to Mr. Steele.
“Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch,” Mr. Trump wrote at the time. “Warner did not want a ‘paper trail’ on a ‘private’ meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame.”
“All tied into Crooked Hillary,” Mr. Trump added.
The Fox News article made prominent mention of work by Mr. Waldman’s Washington lobbying firm on behalf of Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who was once close to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s indicted former campaign chairman.
Copies of the messages were originally submitted by Mr. Waldman to the Senate committee. In January, one of Mr. Nunes’s staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well, according to a person familiar with the request who was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Days later, the messages were published by Fox News, the person said. Fox’s report said that it had obtained the documents from a Republican source it did not name.
The documents published by Fox News appear to back up the senators’ accusation. Though they were marked “CONFIDENTIAL: Produced to USSSCI on a Confidential Basis,” suggesting that they had come from the Senate panel, known as the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person familiar with the congressional requests said that the stamp was misleading and that other markings gave away their actual origin.
Specifically, the copy of the messages shared with the Senate had page numbers, and the one submitted to the House — while preserving the reference to the Senate committee — did not.
A lawyer for Mr. Waldman independently concluded that the House committee had probably shared the document and sent a letter to Mr. Nunes complaining about the leak, according to a person familiar with the letter.
Mr. Burr appeared to make a veiled reference to the texts during a public hearing with the heads of the government’s intelligence agencies last month.
“There have been times where information has found its way out, some of it recent, where it didn’t come from us, but certainly people have portrayed it did,” he said. “And that’s O.K., because you know and we know the security measures we’ve got in place to protect the sensitivity of that material.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Nunes, Jack Langer, did not dispute that the committee had leaked the messages, but called the premise of this article “absurd.”
“The New York Times, a prominent purveyor of leaks, is highlighting anonymous sources leaking information that accuses Republicans of leaking information,” he said. “I’m not sure if this coverage could possibly get more absurd.”
AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, released a statement after this article was published, saying, “The speaker heard the senators on their concerns and encouraged them to take them up directly with their counterparts.”
In his meeting with the senators, Mr. Ryan told them that he did not run the committee himself, the officials briefed on the encounter said.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were briefed on their conclusions in recent weeks and on the meeting with Mr. Ryan.
In a joint statement, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner acknowledged the meeting with Mr. Ryan and said they had not requested that the speaker take any specific action.
Mr. Waldman, the lawyer who communicated with Mr. Warner, could not be reached for comment.
The incident makes clear just how far the two intelligence committees — generally considered secretive refuges from the politics of Capitol Hill — have diverged over the course of their Russia investigations.
In the House, Republicans and Democrats have been consumed by partisan sniping, airing grievances on television and in the press, while the pace of witness interviews has slowed to a crawl. Democrats have repeatedly accused Mr. Nunes of using his position to protect Mr. Trump from the investigation.
The House committee spent much of the last month locked in a bitter dispute over the secret Republican memorandum, which accused top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials of abusing their powers to spy on one of Mr. Trump’s former campaign advisers. Republicans released the document over the objections of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., which warned in a rare public statement that it was dangerously misleading.
Democrats called the document reckless and said it was merely a political tool to tarnish the agencies investigating Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia. They eventually released their own memo, drawn from the same underlying material, rebutting it.
The Senate committee has conducted its investigation primarily in private, and Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner remained in lock step both publicly and privately. When Fox News published Mr. Warner’s texts, for example, an aide to Mr. Burr told the network that he had been aware of Mr. Warner’s contacts with Mr. Waldman, and the two senators issued a joint statement condemning the leak.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and another member of the Intelligence Committee, also defended Mr. Warner.
And while Mr. Nunes’s memo consumed Republicans in the House, as well as officials in the White House, Mr. Burr largely steered clear of it. He told CNN it ought not to have been released, and in private he discounted it.
In the hearing with the intelligence chiefs last month, he sought to draw a distinction between his committee’s approach and that of the House.
“I promised you when we started a year ago that the sensitive nature of that material would, in fact, be protected,” he said. “The vice chairman and I have done everything in our power to do that.”
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Oct 8, 2019 16:47
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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Susan Rice is trash but this is the best rebuke of Trump lies that I've ever seen.
Susan E. Rice’s son is a Trump-loving Republican. He says a Stanford classmate assaulted him at pro-Kavanaugh event.
quote:John David Rice-Cameron — the son of Susan E. Rice, a former national security adviser to President Barack Obama — is proof, in many ways, that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He is a student at Stanford, as was his mother. He is invested in politics, as is his mother. Both caught the political bug early, serving on student council in high school.
But the son stands apart from the mother in at least one major way. She is not just a Democrat but a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations whose hopes of succeeding Hillary Clinton as secretary of state were wrecked by political shrapnel from the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Rice-Cameron is not just a conservative but the head of the Stanford College Republicans and a proud supporter of President Trump. His ambition is to “Make Stanford Great Again.”
The political chasm separating Rice and her son was made plain by Kavanaugh’s ascent to the Supreme Court. In the days after the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm the embattled judge, the former national security adviser suggested that she might take on one of the lawmakers who helped smooth Kavanaugh’s path to the high court. “Me,” she wrote on Twitter in response to an appeal for someone to oppose Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, later saying that she would decide after the midterm elections next month whether to run against the four-term senator in 2020.
Across the country, Rice-Cameron was holding court at an event on the Palo Alto campus celebrating Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Signs displayed Tuesday at a so-called Change My Mind event — regular events designed “to promote conservative viewpoints,” as the group’s treasurer told Fox’s Laura Ingraham last week — proclaimed “Kavanaugh is innocent until proven guilty,” according to the Stanford Daily.
One student whose mind was not changed was Melinda Hernandez, a sophomore who became involved in a disagreement with the president of the campus GOP.
The dispute ended at about 1 p.m. on Tuesday when Rice-Cameron called Stanford police to the central university plaza where, he alleged, Hernandez had assaulted him. 
edit: tax
Cable Guy fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Oct 19, 2019
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Oct 19, 2019 08:52
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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Ted Cruz: Parents Who Let Kids Transition Are ‘Child Abusers'
out.com/October 24 2019
'Enter Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz, who tweeted Wednesday night that parents who support transitioning kids are committing “child abuse.” Along with several other Texas Republicans, they leapt in to strongly condemn the court ruling. In a tweet, Abbott claimed the state’s attorney general’s office and child protective services would be investigating.'
In this case, the kid's seven.
Edit: Also, I wonder whether the specialists in these cases actually care about the kid, or their bank balance.
Cable Guy fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Oct 26, 2019
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Oct 26, 2019 02:40
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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Did you read the whole article? If not, you really should.
Nobody is giving puberty blockers to seven-year-olds (unless it’s to treat precocious puberty), very few teenagers who use them change their minds later, and they’re hugely beneficial for treating gender dysphoria at a critical developmental junction.
quote:“This is horrifying & tragic,” added Cruz, a staunch proponent of anti-trans bathroom bills during the 2016 election. “For a parent to subject such a young child to life-altering hormone blockers to medically transition their sex is nothing less than child abuse.”
Always believe opposite of what Ted Cruz says.
E: And on the other hand, it is abuse to continue to impose your assigned gender on a child experiencing dysphoria, which is exactly what the father is doing.
gently caress off. A)The daughter isn't even being put on any medications, and B) the dad's a lying transphobic rear end in a top hat.
Yeah, gently caress this guy.
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Oct 26, 2019 03:21
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- Cable Guy
- Jul 18, 2005
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I don't expect any trouble, but we'll be handing these out later...
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Slippery Tilde
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Article is behind a login wall, but managed to cut/paste it out before I was nixxed...
quote:WASHINGTON — A key witness in the impeachment investigation filed a lawsuit Friday asking a federal judge to rule on whether he can testify, a move that raises new doubts about whether President Trump’s closest aides, like the former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, will be able to cooperate with the inquiry.
House Democrats had subpoenaed the witness, Charles M. Kupperman, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser, to testify on Monday. But in an effort to stop Mr. Kupperman from doing so, the White House said on Friday that the president had invoked “constitutional immunity,” leaving Mr. Kupperman uncertain about what to do.
“Plaintiff obviously cannot satisfy the competing demands of both the legislative and executive branches, and he is aware of no controlling judicial authority definitively establishing which branch’s command should prevail,” the suit said.
The implications of the suit, filed in federal court in Washington, extend beyond Mr. Kupperman. His lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, also represents Mr. Bolton and is likely to address congressional requests for his testimony in a similar fashion. House Democrats have had discussions with Mr. Cooper in recent days about Mr. Bolton testifying but have not subpoenaed him.
Democrats believe that Mr. Kupperman and Mr. Bolton could be significant witnesses for their investigation. Unlike several of the administration officials who have already testified, they were both close advisers of Mr. Trump, dealt directly with him on Ukraine policy and could testify about what Mr. Trump said behind closed doors.
Mr. Trump and the White House have attacked many of the career State Department officials who have appeared before investigators on Capitol Hill, calling them “unelected bureaucrats.” But Mr. Kupperman and Mr. Bolton, longtime Republicans, worked directly for Mr. Trump. Mr. Bolton, in particular, is seen as potentially having greater sway with Republicans and independents because of his hawkish views, which he conveyed regularly on Fox News before joining the administration.
House Democrats are investigating whether Mr. Trump withheld aid from Ukraine to pressure the country’s president to conduct investigations that could help him politically. After Mr. Bolton resigned on Sept. 10, Mr. Kupperman took over as the acting national security adviser. The next day, Mr. Trump released the $391 million in aid that he had withheld.
“Constitutional immunity” is essentially executive privilege on steroids. Mr. Kupperman said in the lawsuit that Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had ordered him not to comply with the subpoena. The president’s legal team apparently issued the same advice it had given other former top White House aides, like Mr. Cipollone’s predecessor, Donald F. McGahn II, who had been asked to testify before lawmakers in the spring: They are absolutely immune from being forced to testify to Congress about their official duties, meaning they do not even have to show up.
“The president, however, acting through the White House counsel, has asserted that plaintiff, as a close personal adviser to the president, is immune from congressional process, and has instructed plaintiff not to appear and testify in response to the House’s subpoena,” the lawsuit said.
Administrations of both parties have taken that position. Steven A. Engel, the Trump-appointed head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, asserted in a 15-page legal opinion last summer that “Congress may not constitutionally compel the president’s senior advisers to testify about their official duties.”
Democrats have portrayed that legal theory as extreme and an act of obstruction by the Trump White House. They note that in 2008, a Federal District Court judge, John D. Bates, ruled that President George W. Bush’s former White House counsel, Harriet Miers, had no right to skip a hearing for which she had been subpoenaed. Judge Bates, a Bush appointee, said she had to show up — although she might still refuse to answer specific questions based on a claim of executive privilege.
The executive branch did not appeal the Miers ruling, and because no appeals court weighed in, Judge Bates’s opinion does not count as a controlling precedent for other disputes raising the same issue. That left the Obama administration, in a 2014 memo, free to take the position that Judge Bates had been wrong, and Mr. Engel echoed that logic in his memo as well.
Mr. McGahn defied the subpoena, citing the White House’s instructions, and in August, the House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit seeking a judicial ruling that the Justice Department is wrong, and an order requiring Mr. McGahn to testify. That litigation is not yet resolved.
Mr. Kupperman appears to be trying another route. Instead of defying his own subpoena and waiting to be sued, as Mr. McGahn did, he is going to court himself — suing both Congress and Mr. Trump for putting him in what he portrayed as an impossible position, and asking a judge to resolve the legal issue and tell him what to do.
Mr. Kupperman “is faced with irreconcilable commands by the legislative and executive branches of the government and, accordingly, seeks a declaratory judgment from this court as to whether he is lawfully obliged to comply with a subpoena issued by the House defendants demanding his testimony ‘pursuant to the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry,’ or he is lawfully obliged to abide by the assertion of immunity from congressional process made by the president in connection with the testimony sought from plaintiff,” it said.
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
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Oct 26, 2019 11:49
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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May 16, 2024 15:27
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Sep 24, 2019 10:44
account.
