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Ustrello wrote:Oh boy look at those false equivalences
Breotan wrote:It isn't just him. If we removed all the logic fallacies from this thread, it would only be eight or nine pages long, or at least it seems like it would.
So where is the false equivalency? Was a law in place in every instance? Yes. Were there clear ramifications for breaking said law? Yes. Is one group being basically advocated to have an "out" for their punishment, an elimination of them having committed the crime in the first place, AND getting tax payer backed help that some people who never BROKE that law get? Absolutely. So I don't see a false equivalency. I wonder if Casey Chadwick or Kathryn Steinle would, other than the fact that they are both dead now.
Because you somehow think that illegally entering a country is on par with the worst crimes humans can commit and why you were called out for it by both sides
Well, he did mention stealing a car is like entering the country illegally. That is about the same, monetarily speaking. The average illegal alien in this country has a net impact of about $6000 per year on the US. That's the price of a sub-par used car every year they are here.
Source?
And then there's the other side of the story.
Most arguments against illegal immigration begin with the premise that the illegal don't pay income taxes, and that they therefore take more in services than they contribute. However, IRS estimates that about 6 million unauthorized immigrants...more than half the estimated total in the U.S....file individual income tax returns each year. Research reviewed by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office indicates that between 70 percent and 80 percent of unauthorized immigrants pay federal, state, and local taxes. Illegal immigrants are estimated to pay in about $7 billion per year into Social Security. Over the years, undocumented workers have contributed up to $300 billion, or nearly 10 percent, of the $2.7 trillion Social Security Trust Fund. In addition, they spend millions of dollars per year, which supports the US economy and helps to create new jobs. The Texas State Comptroller reported in 2006 that the 1.4 million illegal immigrants in Texas alone added almost $18 billion to the state's budget, and paid $1.2 billion in state services they used.
That's right, Illegal Immigrants pay taxes, unlike a certain POTUS-elect.
I see that you skipped what I posted. I specifically mentioned that illegal immigrants pay taxes, specifically income tax. Remember that of those 6 million illegals that "pay" income tax, very few actually pay (kind of like Trump). just because 6 million file taxes does not mean 6 million pay. It seems you totally ignored that the get more back than they ever pay in. 5.4 times the amount in fact. It would actually be better if they DIDN'T file income tax.
No, I noticed it, It's just that the presentation is so skewed to paint illegals as a giant, one-sided drag on our country that I thought some background needed to be presented to set the record straight.
Studies have shown that almost every dollar earned by undocumented workers goes right back into the economy. That's in the form of direct economic stimulation...consumption...and state/local taxes on those goods and services. Those taxes don't get refunded, but go directly to local government's operating budgets. As far as the federal taxes being refunded, that typically happens for the poor because THEY'RE POOR AND PAID A DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF THEIR INCOME RELATIVE TO THEIR TAX BRACKET. They contribute to SS, which they'll never see and, as noted, they do so in no small way.
I see there's no mention of the fact that there are entire sectors of the economy where undocumented workers are axiomatic to the viability of the industry. Agriculture, for example. Want to pay $10. for a carton of strawberries? How does that get factored into the equation of your presentation of the idea that they take more than they contribute? See, that's why most academics...the ones with real degrees that study this stuff for a life's work...pretty much come to the conclusion that making statements that they're a $XXXX. drag is impossible to accurately determine or measure, and probably flat-out wrong.
You also made a comment that they drive up rent. On what, the luxury condos downtown? On the whole, I'm pretty sure these people rent the absolute cheapest accomodations they can find because they make jack. If an American citizen, with all the inherent advantages that entails, feels pressure from people coming to this country who typically struggle with the language, have no safety nets, work the worst, most exhausting and undesirable jobs available, then all I can say is quite the bitching and look in the mirror for the problems' source, not at people who are enduring absurd hardships and working their asses off to better themselves. At the end of the day, that's really what this is about, isn't it? Not cutting hairs on tax liabilities and benefits for an extremely small minority of people.
As I have all ready noted, even left-leaning sites quote that illegals pay roughly $11 billion per year in taxes (that includes all the taxes you think I forgot about). That's only $900 per illegal per year. They average $5000 in returns. That point of your post is completely wrong.
As for driving up the cost of menial labor and some pruducts, so what? All I keep hearing about is how "minimum wage should be raised so it will help the poor". I'm told, "it won't hurt the economy". Quite frankly, I see no difference when supply and demand work from opposite sides. If we shouldn't worry when the price of goods rise because of labor costs due to raising the minimum wage, why should we worry when the same happens due to supply and demand? Wouldn't the lack of labor help the poor demand higher salaries?
Also, even if we do deport all illegal immigrants, it doesn't necessarily mean we need to loose the labor. There were programs from the past that we could use today. Temporary worker cards for example. Allow certain people from other nationalities in with time-limited worker visas. If they are ever caught without the visa, or it is expired, they loose the ability to gain one forever.
Just a friendly reminder, quote pyramids can start making things annoying for users who are browsing on mobile devices and the like, let's try to cut them down a bit now and then, once the initial points have moved on a wee bit. Cheers
I wish I had time for all the game systems I own, let alone want to own...
LordofHats wrote: I would agree on these points, but I actually think the first one is part of her point; the middle class and working class are very vague subjects, and while there are professionals who set up clearly defined models of these things that doesn't mean that the rest of the country is paying attention.
Maybe, but the author seemed happy to seperate working class from middle class from professional class and leave it at that, when those classes bleed in to each other, and each includes many variations). Possibly the author knows all that and left it out of her piece for clarity, which is reasonable.
If anything I think looking at these election results, and at Trump's campaign, suggests he is not remotely a button masher (at least no more than a typical Super Smash Bros. Melee player )
Trump played this campaign like a champ, and look what he got out of it. "Establishment" Republicans are checked. They can oppose him, but that would be suicidal at this point for their political careers. The Democrats have basically had their liver ripped out. Trump doesn't have to right the Republican ship, and I don't think he's going to try.
Trump doesn't have to fix the Republican ship, but he has to make good on some of his promises. My guess is we'll see a big old tax cut for the rich, and a bunch of noise about fixing ACA that ultimately amounts to increasing the subsidy that everyone knows is needed.. If he can get to 2020 and manage to turn that in to a second win, then I'll call him a genius (this was also the position I took on GW Bush).
Time will tell, but right now he looks to me like a button masher
It's very obvious now what he plans to do; transform the Republican party into a Nationalist Workers party (pretend no other party anywhere else in the world has ever named itself remotely like that for a few seconds that's not a Godwin its just the most accurate name for what he seems to be transitioning to). Trump can easily keep the Rust Belt. All he has to do is a few things to make their lives easier. Pass a child care credit here. "Fix" an ACA here. Keep playing to nationalist sentiment and hammering home how the Democrats can't/haven't help them. Keep demonizing mainstream media. Shift blame when necessary. He can bring some Libertarians back into the fold easily, and he really doesn't have to do anything to appeal to the Religious Right so long as the Democrats continue to actively support the LGBT movement (even if they don't, they won't switch to voting blue in 4 years so the worst that could happen is they don't vote for anyone).
This plan is pretty sound, in a lot of ways. It certainly does a good job of targeting the right states for an electoral college victory. But it is nowhere near easy - protest votes come and go. Here in Australia just a few years ago we had a third party rise out of nowhere and win more seats in the senate than any minor party had won in a single election in generations. Next election the only survivor was the lady who left the party to run as an independent. It is much easier to run from the outside on a base of outrage, than it is try and keep government on the same emotion.
And also remember - Bill Clinton's win marked the third way politics that would shut out Republicans. GW Bush's win was the beginning of the permanent majority. Obama's win was the death knell for Republicans as their demographics shrunk in to obscurity.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I am saying that as improbable as what Trump has done so far is, what he has to do now is much harder.
Gyaargh! I thought as I was typing it I should double check, but then decided against. Let that be a lesson to me, because I didn't check it because it would have ruined my example about Churchill standing still while the politics of society turned him in to a conservative.
Anyway, cheers for the correction.
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Tannhauser42 wrote: Anyway, as far as polls go, I've had first-hand experience for the last eight years as to why they don't work: they never include enough people. As a federal employee, every year a survey goes out to gauge employee opinions on how their agency is doing. The respondents are randomly selected. Every year my agency was consistently rated highly, as one of the best agencies to work for in the government. And every year not one person in my group (admittedly only four of us at the most at any one time) was ever randomly selected to respond. But, one year, a few years back, they opened the survey to everyone. Lo and behold, with everybody responding, our agency's scores suddenly dropped a good bit. Unsurprisingly, the survey has been random participants since.
So, yeah, surveys never involve enough people, or somehow randomly select an unrepresentative cross section.
I think the bigger issue is likely voter screens. People should never forget how much guesswork there is there. Each agency records whether a person voted in the past elections, how strongly they feel about different issues and so on, and then assigns each voter a weighting based on their likelihood of voting. There is some expertise in this, but it is still a highly subjective thing.
For all the talk about this election and how the pollsters got it wrong, they got it more wrong in 2008 and 2012. It's just that in those years the error just made the win bigger, so no-one really cared about the polling error. But the lesson going forward is that election polls are routinely off and that error is typically consistent between the states, so if each candidate has 270 EV worth of states where they are within 3% it is game on, and the further they get from 3% the less likely (but not impossible their win is).
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Prestor Jon wrote: You can't focus on the popular vote in terms of degree of support. In our federal system we vote by State, which are represented in the Electoral College. The map whembly posted and referred to as a "sea of red" showed Trump winning a large majority of the counties within most states. Trump flipped a lot of Obama counties and those were the votes that got him victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania. Trump won more counties than he was expected to do and won states that were expected to be won by Hillary. Flipping Obama counties into Trump counties created the "sea of red" and won Trump the election.
No, you're missing how this works. The 'sea of red' existed in 2008, when Obama won in a landslide. So long as rural areas favour Republicans there will always be a sea of red, even when Republicans lose badly.
The sea of red only matters when you start assigning votes to geographic features. When a cornfield gets the vote, then Democrats will really be in trouble. Until then, the sea of red shows nothing to nobody.
You need to be wary of mistaking a higher number of votes cast as evidence of higher turnout.
I'm not making any such mistake. I'm not claiming Clinton had any kind of landslide of voters or anything like that. I am simply commenting on your conclusion from that 'sea of red' map that is entirely wrong;
"However, the important thing I take away from that map is the fact that Trump won counties in every state except Massachusetts and Vermont. That map shows just how widespread support for Trump was and just how low support for Hillary was."
Winning counties doesn't matter, because not every county is equal. Winning votes in enough states matters, and the county by county map doesn't show that.
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Prestor Jon wrote: Trump won with fewer votes than Romney or McCain because he got a majority of the votes in swing states where voters failed to turnout for Hillary. States that had been reliably Democrat wins for the past few presidential election cycles switched to Trump this year and it was due to low turnout numbers.
Heh, I agree with your conclusion (Democrats failed to get turnout in swing states), but the article you posted is wrong. The electoral turn out in this election is now at 58%. That is lower than Obama's two wins, but before that to get a higher turnout you have to go back to 1968. Now, this doesn't do anything to argue for Trump or Clinton's popularity (many voters were likely turning out to vote against the other candidate as much as for their own), but it does mean arguing that Democrats failed to get turnout across the country is just wrong.
People should be very careful about using vote tallies that haven't been completed yet.
djones520 wrote: A man who spent his whole life donating to the Democrat party. Just goes further to show why Trump won. This whole election was spent on sensationalizing social issues. In the end, it was all about the economy.
I think it's fair that Clinton got trapped in to focusing on Trump and his many racist and sexist issues, and thereby making the mistake of over-focusing there, instead of pushing what she was promising on the economy.
However, you've made a mistake there in assuming Trump's win is somehow definitive of something. This was a close election, it hinged on a couple of swing states that were very close. Clinton got beat in Florida by 1.3%, and by 1.2% in Pennsylvania. People are talking about this like it was an emphatic thrashing, and it was anything but. I wonder if this is because many of the early states to call are Republican states, so when they add in Republican wins in the swing states the result looks emphatic, as the Republicans win before the Democratic west coast have even started counting votes.
Or possibly it's just the surprise of the result, and people over-correcting too much the other way. Or maybe people always think the winner was huge, no matter how narrow the result.
Anyhow, in 4 years Democrats will be running from opposition, after being able to blame everything that's happened in the country for four years on Trump and the Republicans, whether they had anything to do with it or not. That in itself will be enough to bring Democrats close enough if they're good enough in 2020.
This doesn't mean Democrats shouldn't be doing a lot of work on their policies, which policies to focus on, and how they sell those policies to the electorate. Republicans should be doing the same, that's an essential part of politics whether you're winning or losing. But calls for a massive overhaul of DNC systems and policies, out of a belief that they are badly trailing Republicans are entirely mistaken.
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whembly wrote: With a popular vote system, candidates would simple hit the blue areas in the map.
Any campaign built around trying win a share of 50% of possible voters would lose, and look like fething idiots in the process. You fight for every vote.
With a popular vote, every vote is valuable. If there are 2 million votes in one spot you would put twice the effort in there, than you would put in a place with 1 million votes. You somehow see this as tyranny, I see it as a very obvious part of how democracy should work.
What's happening instead is that in terms of presidential politics places like Texas and California are made irrelevant. This is why neither party really gives a crap about latino voters, because the only competitive state with a decent latino poplation is Nevada. Really, anywhere that is unlikely to be a tipping point becomes irrelevant. That isn't healthy.
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Prestor Jon wrote: I'll try this one more time, we had low voter turnout this year. When the final numbers are in our voter turnout is going to be around 56-58% of eligible voters. That is low for a presidential election here.
No, it isn't. Look at the figures I gave above. Outside of Obama's wins, 58% is the best turnout since 1968.
This message was edited 8 times. Last update was at 2016/11/15 07:31:34
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
whembly wrote: With a popular vote system, candidates would simple hit the blue areas in the map.
Any campaign built around trying win a share of 50% of possible voters would lose, and look like fething idiots in the process. You fight for every vote.
With a popular vote, every vote is valuable. If there are 2 million votes in one spot you would put twice the effort in there, than you would put in a place with 1 million votes. You somehow see this as tyranny, I see it as a very obvious part of how democracy should work.
What's happening instead is that in terms of presidential politics places like Texas and California are made irrelevant. This is why neither party really gives a crap about latino voters, because the only competitive state with a decent latino poplation is Nevada. Really, anywhere that is unlikely to be a tipping point becomes irrelevant. That isn't healthy.
A few of things.
1) latinos are the fastest growing minorities right now. Why do you think the establishments in both parties are trying to woo this voting bloc?
2) Electoral College system isn't perfect... but, going to full National Popular Vote seems anathema to our version of federalism.
The Electoral College requires the election of a president by majorities in state-by-state contest.
Think about it... there are two "political wills" being engaged... that of the citizenry of each state, AND that of the fifty states acting together, reflecting the will of majorities in the fifty states
In other words, we are a “nation of states” that uniquely defines American federalism.
We've had numerous instances of “minority presidents" that occurred quite a bit of times, famously:
Lincoln (39.7% —1860);
Wilson (41.8% — 1912);
Truman (49.6% —1948);
Kennedy (49.7% —1960);
Nixon (43.42% -- 1968);
Clinton (43% — 1992, and 49% — 1996);
Bush(47.87% -- 2000);
Trump (~47% ---2016)
Point being, if we switch to full on National Popular Vote:
1) The President would no longer be elected by the collective will of the fifty states. Small states like Delaware, Rhode Island, etc. might be wholly ignored.
2) Candidates would obviously tend to campaign in urban areas and no longer seek to “win statewide.” This might alienate millions in small towns and rural states such as Iowa, Wyoming, Alaska, etc...
3) I know I bang on the perils of having a 2 party system... but, a focus on urban areas and away from statewide politics would undermine a two-party system that would likely cause a splintered and incoherent set of regional and issue-oriented parties. Such that, we'd look similar to your Westminster political parties.
4) What does such a National Popular Vote look like? Is it simply a plurality? If so, that may be chaotic as we'd see a feth ton more political parties throwing their hat in the ring. Or, do we advocate for simple majority (50% +1) ??? Again, that's ripe for different sort of chaos as we'd see a spike of political parties... necessarily not to win, but to deny any candidate the majority of the vote. This would lead to some kind of a national run-off election with political deal making and possible endless ballot litigations... I'm sure there are other "unsavory" popular vote realities that I'm not highlighting...
Seems like there are Pros and Cons between the EC and Popular Vote...
If there's any tweaks to the EC system, it might be to remove the human element of the electors (scooty's point) and simply "award" the EV to the victor straight up and maybe look at the proportional allocation.
But, other than that... the current system is likely "as good as it gets".
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/11/15 08:27:40
And surprise surprise. Seems hate speech in public transports etc are now on rise...
[] surprised
Damn Trump.
But on the more funny sides people got idea of giving donations to abort Planned Parenthood organization naming Mike Pence as donator. Who then gets certificate of donation That's just funny.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/11/15 08:34:07
1) latinos are the fastest growing minorities right now. Why do you think the establishments in both parties are trying to woo this voting bloc?
Yeah, it's been talked about for a while, and we're just starting to see real action taking place. But the group has been growing for a long time, and is only now important because it is reaching a point where it can flip states like Florida and Nevada.
2) Electoral College system isn't perfect... but, going to full National Popular Vote seems anathema to our version of federalism.
You'll notice no-one is talking about a full national vote. There will still be a senate where every state gets two senators, regardless of population. There will still be a constitution that requires the consent of a large number of individual states.
The Electoral College requires the election of a president by majorities in state-by-state contest.
Not really. It's a whackadoo bit of nonsense. You can win with just 11 states, if you win the biggest ones. So it doesn't work as a means of protecting the smallers states. What it does is weight votes towards the smaller states, by adding each state's senators to its house of representatives (who are based on population). What this means is that California gets little increase to its 53 representatives by adding two senators, while Vermont has its EV tripled by adding its senators.
So what all that means is that if you live in a big state your vote counts for less. Texas, with a population about 27 million, gets one EV for every 736,842 people in the state. Wyoming with about 600,000 people gets one EV for every 200,000 people. A citizen of Wyoming has a vote worth more than three times as much as a citizen of Texas. There's an obvious injustice there.
You may think that's great but it's gak in two different ways. The first failure is that if you're going to walk away from one vote, one value, why only do it to help small states. Vietnamese Americans are a small minority that might get ignored by other voters, so why not give each of them four votes?
The second way it's gak is that most small states are even more irrelevant. In fact every state is irrelevant if it can't be the tipping point state. Wyoming might feel all powerful with their 3 votes per person, but because they're reliably red they still get ignored, along with all the other tipping point states. To the extent that the system was meant to make states like Wyoming more relevant in deciding the presidency, its actually made states like that totally irrelevant.
We've had numerous instances of “minority presidents" that occurred quite a bit of times, famously:
Don't confuse not reaching 50% with getting more votes than anyone else. Lincoln, Wilson, Truman, Kennedy, Nixon and Clinton got more votes than anyone else running. In fact the only two on your list where someone won despite losing the popular vote were Bush and Trump. Interesting it's happened twice recently, I suspect it is the product of EV favouring smaller, less populated states (ie states lacking big cities), which is where Republican strength is centred.
1) The President would no longer be elected by the collective will of the fifty states. Small states like Delaware, Rhode Island, etc. might be wholly ignored.
Most states are being ignored right now for the presidential race. If you want to make every state important then having winner take all states is the dumbest way to do it.
A better option, for instance, would be for each state to give some mix of winner take all and proportional, like Maine does right now. But that won't happen because blue dominated states like Cali want all their votes going blue, even if it makes the state itself a non factor in the election, and red states are the same.
2) Candidates would obviously tend to campaign in urban areas and no longer seek to “win statewide.” This might alienate millions in small towns and rural states such as Iowa, Wyoming, Alaska, etc...
To the extent that cities decide states, this happens now. It doesn't happen entirely, for the simple reason that every vote in the state matters and there's value in reaching all of them. That won't change under a different system.
And it's funny that you'd worry about Alaska or Wyoming being ignored. Like the candidates are spending so much time in those states now. Not when there's swing states to campaign in.
3) I know I bang on the perils of having a 2 party system... but, a focus on urban areas and away from statewide politics would undermine a two-party system that would likely cause a splintered and incoherent set of regional and issue-oriented parties. Such that, we'd look similar to your Westminster political parties.
Your description of Westminster is weird, pretty much nothing to do with the system as it is. You might being thinking of the SNP in Britain, but that's really the product of culture and unique British politics, not the political system in place. Think of it this way, you have a house of reps that is elected exactly like members of parliament in a Westminster system. It hasn't produced a splintered and incoherent set of regional and issue oriented parties, because it doesn't work like that.
What does such a National Popular Vote look like? Is it simply a plurality? If so, that may be chaotic as we'd see a feth ton more political parties throwing their hat in the ring.
Yeah, it'd be the guy with the most votes getting the win. And it wouldn't lead to more parties, because there would still only be two parties with any chance of winning. What would change is the current weighting towards small population states would end, and people who aren't in swing states would have a vote that meant something.
Seems like there are Pros and Cons between the EC and Popular Vote...
There are other alternatives. One would be to have states shift away from winner take all EV allocations. Something like Maine's current model. This has the 'advantage' of keeping the weighting given to the smaller states, but also meaning that safe states still have their voters have some say in the election.
But, other than that... the current system is likely "as good as it gets".
It's a bonkers piece of nonsense. It makes no intuitive sense, most voters barely understand it, it doesn't actually do what it's supposed to do. I mean, in one sense it's good enough, in that you've only had one civil war in 200 years, and that's pretty good for any political system. But as a purely mechanical system, it's amazingly shoddy for a 21st century country.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
1) latinos are the fastest growing minorities right now. Why do you think the establishments in both parties are trying to woo this voting bloc?
Yeah, it's been talked about for a while, and we're just starting to see real action taking place. But the group has been growing for a long time, and is only now important because it is reaching a point where it can flip states like Florida and Nevada.
... .. .
That is why white middle class men ought to be a bit careful to preserve the modern liberal consensus that unfair discrimination of minorities on the grounds of race/sex/religion is a bad thing.
Because in another 20 years we will be a minority.
1) latinos are the fastest growing minorities right now. Why do you think the establishments in both parties are trying to woo this voting bloc?
Yeah, it's been talked about for a while, and we're just starting to see real action taking place. But the group has been growing for a long time, and is only now important because it is reaching a point where it can flip states like Florida and Nevada.
... .. .
That is why white middle class men ought to be a bit careful to preserve the modern liberal consensus that unfair discrimination of minorities on the grounds of race/sex/religion is a bad thing.
Because in another 20 years we will be a minority.
You'd think that "because it's the right thing to do" would be enough, but alas...
For thirteen years I had a dog with fur the darkest black. For thirteen years he was my friend, oh how I want him back.
Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them.
The president-elect has begun asking how he could secure high level clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., his three adult children with first wife Ivana, as well as for Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, according to CNN and CBS. All four family members are members of his transition team, though Trump has said his children won’t serve formal roles in his administration but instead will run the family business while he runs the country.
“This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.”
It’s unclear exactly whether Trump’s request could even be fulfilled—at least legally. A 1967 law prohibits the president from hiring their immediate family members in the federal government, and to have a security clearance an individual must work the government in some capacity: as a civilian, as a military official or a contractor.
“Even if they came in as unpaid advisers, there’s no such thing as an informal government position that allows you to be sponsored for access” to classified information, Moss said. “There’s no exception. There’s no loopholes.”
And it would difficult to see how Trump could argue that his children have a “need to know” without a formal government role.
“This is not the family business, this is the presidency. The days of family nepotism is over, not just due to policy and practice but by law. Security clearances are not candies to be doled out like at Halloween. You must have a ‘need-to-know’ that is supposed to be taken seriously in advancing the business of the government rather than an individual,” said Mark Zaid, another national security lawyer.
But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. Even First Ladies have to be cleared to access that part of the White House, but that doesn’t mean they have access to top-secret areas like the Situation Room, the official said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the clearance process publicly. The level of clearance for people with unescorted access to visit the President in the West Wing is known as “Yankee White,” which could be what Trump is seeking.
CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.
If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest.
“If President-elect Trump seeks a security clearance for his children, it will show he either has no understanding of the potential conflict of interest problems he faces or doesn’t care,” said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. “If he seeks a security clearance for his children who are running the businesses, it will undermine the credibility of any claim that his children will not be involved in advising him on government policies. It raises the real danger that his children will be able to influence government decisions to benefit Trump businesses and run those businesses with inside knowledge of actions and policies the government take.”
During an interview with Trump and his family on 60 Minutes taped last week, Eric Trump said that the children would remain in New York to run their father’s business. “So we’ll— we’ll— we’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business,” the younger Trump said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we’re going to make him very proud.”
Ivanka Trump also said that she would not be interested in a formal role in the upcoming administration. “I’m going to be a daughter,” she said when asked about a possible role. “But I’ve— I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.”
Interestingly enough, while the law prohibits nepotism, it doesn’t require the president to give up his or her business holdings while serving in the Oval Office.
Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story.
uh huh.
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
Just Tony wrote: So we don't need to reform the laws, simply enforce them? Been saying that since the early 90's
Indeed, but the thing with laws is that politicians often press through what I like to call "feel-good" laws without bothering to ensure such laws can or will be enforced (or would even make a difference).
Oh, your supporters are worried about "something"? Make the necessary noise and deals to make that "something" illegal or subject to oversight then just assume the police or gov't dept it's dumped on has the means and knowledge to carry out their jobs. Like consumer protection, for example. There's a lot of things corporations do to increase their profits and keep customers from complaining that fall pretty far on the shady side and not a lot the mostly toothless and overworked authorities can do. Introducing laws to make one specific type of ripoff illegal wouldn't really help the situation except in that one specific case, and without increasing the number of people working on it other types of cases will be ignored in even greater amounts.
The only winner is the lawmaker who gets to name the feel-good law after himself and probably collects a nice sum of campaign money from the people that asked him to "do something".
An interesting viewpoint on the destruction of the Democratic Party in the last ten years. COnsidering the Republicans have almost run the table in state and federal elected positions, it may be wise to look at.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bare-ruined-choirs/
Spoilered as its really long
Spoiler:
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n 1723, Christopher Wren was buried in St. Paul’s, the magnificent cathedral he had rebuilt following a devastating fire in London. His epitaph concludes with the Latin phrase Si monumentum, requiris circumspece—“If you wish to see his monument, look around.” In 2017, Barack Obama will leave the White House after eight years during which he presided over the Democratic Party.
If you wish to see his monument, look around.
Look to your right and you will see that his designated successor lost her bid for the presidency to a man Obama himself had not only campaigned against ferociously but declared unfit to hold the nuclear codes. Look to your left and you will see the news stories detailing the possible strategies for the repeal and the replacement of the president’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare. Then look up and down at the partisan cathedral he helped to rebuild. Its benches are, as Shakespeare said of tree branches in winter, “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” While he was the one with the nuclear codes, the Democratic Party has been hit with a neutron bomb. And on the bomb’s nose, written like the “Dear John” message on the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, were the words: “Barack Obama was here.”
The Democratic Party cathedral stands, to be sure, as structures will after a neutron-bomb attack. But it has been denuded of its priestly caste—the elected officials who were teeming within it when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 and had every reason to believe they would move inexorably from the back rows of American politics to the front. There are some 8,000 elected officials in the United States at the state and federal levels. Between 2009, when Barack Obama took office, and today, as he prepares to retire from it, more than 1,100 Democratic elected officials lost their jobs to Republicans. That number is unprecedented.
Barack Obama entered the White House with his party in control of 62 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers. By January 2015, Republicans were in control of 68. He then made it a personal mission to help reverse the damage that had caused the ejection of nearly a thousand Democratic state legislators from their seats by voters. He made 150 down-ballot endorsements in 2016 and even hit the trail for a few of them at a time when his personal approval rating was above 50 percent.
The result of the president’s direct intercession? The Democrats did worse. On Election Night in 2016, Republicans took full control of the legislatures in Minnesota and Iowa. The Democratic Party’s sole remaining legislative majority in the South, in Kentucky, fell to the GOP for the first time in nearly 100 years. In North Carolina, the GOP held onto veto-proof majorities in state legislatures despite the statewide loss of an unpopular Republican governor. The GOP prevented Democrats from retaking the state Senate in New York. There were some gains in Nevada and New Mexico…and that was it.
The massacre of Democratic officials goes far beyond state legislatures. Democrats held 31 governorships in 2009. Now they hold 17, having been kicked out of the mansions in Missouri, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Following this year’s election, Republicans have control of all levers of government in 25 states.
In Washington, after months of speculation that Democrats might eat away at the Republican majority in the House of Representatives or topple it, the GOP lost only nine seats and retained a 40-member advantage. And though the general expectation was that the Democrats were likely to take back control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans ended up losing only two incumbents and retained their majority at 52. Even more worrisome for Democrats, they head into the 2018 election with aging senators having to defend their seats in 10 states Donald Trump won.
The collapse of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama occurred in three stages, each corresponding to a national response to Obama’s policy and political overreach.
In Stage One, the Democrats were decimated in the House of Representatives (and the carnage at the state level began). From Inauguration Day in 2009 until July 2010, the Obama White House oversaw the passage of 1) the stimulus package, the most expensive piece of legislation in American history; 2) the second half of the TARP-TALF financial-bailout bill; 3) the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reforms; and 4) the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Not since 1933 had there been a more aggressive legislative and regulatory agenda, and Obama’s determined march not only featured $2.7 trillion in new spending but the wholesale revision of the nation’s health-care system.
It was too much, too fast, too soon, and there was a national uprising against it that came to be known as the “Tea Party.” What resulted was a midterm in 2010 that cost the Democrats 63 House seats, the largest such defeat in 72 years. Democrats had built a massive majority over two successive elections in 2006 and 2008 and saw it wiped out in one go. Consider this fact: In the 2006 midterms, when an anti-GOP wave began, Democratic candidates for the House received a national total of 42.3 million votes. In the next midterm election, 2010, they received 38.9 million votes, a decline of 9 percent. In 2014, they were down to 35.6 million votes, a 10 percent decline from the 2010 midterms. In all, Democrats have gained a total of two seats back from their 2010 low. That means they have suffered a net loss of 61 Democratic elected officials from the House of Representatives in the Obama era.
Stage Two was the decimation of the Democratic Senate majority. In 2014, Democrats watched incumbent after incumbent swept away in a Republican wave eerily similar to the House wave four years earlier. In 2010, Democrats had held on to control of the Senate with candidates who received 29 million votes in aggregate even as the House was going Republican. In 2014, Democrats received 8.2 million fewer votes—a decline of 23 percent from 2010.
In all, nine Democratic senators were axed in 2014, the largest swing since the Ronald Reagan election in 1980. What had happened to cause it? A year earlier, in October 2013, Obamacare had been rolled out—and computer systems and software costing $1 billion crashed and crashed hard. ISIS flowered malignantly in Syria and Iraq and began beheading Americans. There was a border crisis as thousands of children from Mexico and Central America made their way into the United States and were put up in makeshift housing. Republicans won by nationalizing their Senate races, as Philip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post noted at the time: “Make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.”
Stage Three only began on Election Night, and its contours are yet to be determined: the decimation of the Obama legacy itself.
One might say that it began, oddly enough, with Obama’s 2012 victory. He got his second term, yes, but for the first time in presidential history, received fewer votes in getting reelected than he had in his first run. 69.5 million Americans had cast a ballot for Obama in 2008, and in 2012 that number dropped to 65.8 million. Those voters didn’t go to the Republican, Mitt Romney, who gained only a million more than John McCain had in 2008. They just disappeared. And in 2016, another 3 to 4 million vanished as Hillary Clinton received somewhere between 61 and 62 million votes. So, over the course of the Obama era, as many as 8 million people stopped voting for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. That’s a drop of 11 percent. That’s a landslide number in reverse.
The story of 2016 is, in part, the missing white vote that got Donald Trump elected. Where is that white vote? A considerable part of it is in areas of the country where the Obama administration literally targeted heavy industries both venerable and brand-new—coal and fracking. Obama has spent his presidency favoring the environmentalist cause, which is popular with what the pollster Stanley Greenberg and the consultant James Carville called “the new progressive common ground,” over the continuing employment of the white working class in good-paying jobs. Obama and Clinton—who told an audience earlier this year with some pride that “we are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—were choosing not to expand the Democratic electoral coalition by bringing people with different interests together but to contract it ideologically. He and Clinton could do this, they believed, because a new and massive electoral coalition was taking the place of the old—one made up, in Greenberg’s words, of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”
This is an example of the way in which Barack Obama sought to provide the left with a sense of cultural and moral superiority. He and they were working to be saviors of the planet, just as they were working to push America forward into a new ethical framework in which traditional morality was an evil to be overcome and new modes of being were not only to be embraced but to be forced upon resistant small-town birthday-cake bakers. Those who bought into it achieved a kind of blind triumphalism. They pooh-poohed any warning signs that the transition to Obama’s brave new world was creating new social fissures. Their unending political dominance was now a matter of demographic inevitability, as celestially mechanical as the monthly lunar cycle. Nothing could shake this conviction, even as they suffered through Stage One and were rocked by Stage Two. That “progressive common ground” just wasn’t common enough, it turns out. Its numbers weren’t quite large enough yet.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president.
And even more important, it just wasn’t as motivated by a commitment to the progressive agenda as Obama and Clinton thought. The new “coalition of the ascendant” Obama assembled in 2008 didn’t really care all that much about electing the first woman president. It didn’t care much about preserving Obama-era reforms, like his signature health-care act. It didn’t care much about standing athwart what the left insisted was a drumbeat of bigotry disseminated by Donald Trump. Its members did not swamp the polls to ensure that a global-warming skeptic was denied the presidency. The terrible truth is that the Obama 2008 electorate turned out to be relatively indifferent to progressive issues when push came to shove. Note that Greenberg and Carville did not include African Americans in the “new progressive common ground” even though they were the most important part of the Obama coalition because of the staggering unanimity of the black vote in his favor. And that is key, because it turns out what had truly mattered to the “coalition of the ascendant” was Barack Hussein Obama himself, and how he had made them feel about themselves back in 2008. It was summoned into existence by the idea of a President Obama, not by what he would do.
The reality of President Obama was another story. Enough of the potent Obama combination of celebrity and Rorschach test remained in 2012 to let President Obama stay president another four years. But the coalition of the ascendant had dissipated long before Hillary Clinton sought at least to approximate it. A lackluster candidate promising the status quo with ethical problems from here to Mars wasn’t going to reconstitute it.
As it dissipated, the farm system of elected officials shrank over the course of the Obama era to a single minor-league team of coastal and urban politicians. The result is a Democratic Party even more doctrinaire in its cultural, social, and political attitudes. Gone is the pro-life Democrat, the gun-rights Democrat, the Democratic hawk, the Democrat who supported the traditional definition of marriage, the Democrat concerned with religious liberty at home—and good riddance to them, in the eyes of those who remain. Joe Manchin, the very popular West Virginia Democratic governor who got himself elected to the Senate in 2010 in part due to a television commercial that showed him firing a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill, is reportedly considering a party switch before he runs again for the Senate. In 2012, the Republican got 65 percent of the vote in Manchin’s state. This year, Donald Trump won West Virginia with 69 percent. What would you do if you were Manchin?
Meanwhile, those remaining Democratic elected officials inclined toward (Bill) Clintonian compromise and triangulation—like the superdelegates who shoved Hillary Clinton down the throats of a party whose heart was with Bernie Sanders—now find themselves in danger of being completely discredited within their own party. Their representative figure is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman and Democratic National Committee chairman who was forced from her leadership position when leaked documents proved she had been running the DNC illicitly as an arm of the Clinton campaign.
At this writing, the leading candidate to take her slot is a Minnesota congressman named Keith Ellison. Ellison once compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire before adding, “The fact is that I’m not saying September 11 was a U.S. plan or anything like that because, you know, that’s how they put you in the nutball box.” New York’s Charles Schumer, the incoming leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate, has declared his support for Ellison’s candidacy. Schumer likes to tell Jewish audiences his name (shomer in Hebrew) means he believes his most important role is to serve as a “guardian of the gates of Jerusalem.” Ellison comes out of the Nation of Islam and is at the very least a supporter of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations. Schumer is part of the old guard, Ellison is a tribune of the new. If there’s one thing Schumer knows, it’s which side of the slice of challah to butter, and the gates of Jerusalem can go hang.
The Obama years weren’t only a disappointment to those of us who did not drink the Kool Aid in the first place; they proved to be a disappointment to the very people Obama had celebrated by declaring that “we are the change we have been waiting for.” And they have been a calamity for Democrats everywhere but in the urban and coastal strongholds, Democrats who had thought they were going to make a career out of elected public service. It is from their ranks that their party is supposed to find its next stars, men and women would use their time in state legislatures to learn the craft of politics and the art of legislating before rising to the governor’s mansion or the House or Senate, and thence, perhaps, to national office. That is how Obama emerged in the early years of this new century.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president. For everyone else in his party, and for his party itself, he has been an unmitigated disaster. And now, his decimation of his own electorate has helped to ensure the election of Donald Trump. Out of office in 2017, Barack Obama may have to stand by, impotent, as the legislative and policy advances that were supposed to be his enduring legacy vanish like the thousand elected politicians unfortunate enough to have been serving in office when Barack Obama came along and hollowed out the Democratic Party.
Christopher Wren has been dead nearly 300 years, but St. Paul’s Cathedral still stands. Four years after the end of the Obama presidency, there may be no monument of Barack Obama’s left standing for anyone to look at.
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Tannhauser42 wrote: Part of the problem is that states just don't matter as much as they used to 200 years ago. We no longer live in a time where people spend their entire lives within ten miles of where they're born, or where it takes a day's travel to get to the next town. Modern communications, the automobile, and the internet have blurred the lines. Less and less do we define ourselves according to the state we happen to live in. More and more we are becoming a nation of people, not a nation of states.
I 100% disagree with this.
Just my opinion Tanner.... I could be wrong, but I love the idea of having 50 laboratories trying things out without forcing the rest of the states to toe the line.
Kinda like marijuana laws popping up in several states, and the other states are observing how it goes. Knowwhatimean?
First, I'm gonna say you're exaggerating on the 100% disagreement. Unless it really does take you a day to get to the next town.
Second, the "states as labs" thing only works when the Fed allows it. Marijuana is a good example. It's still illegal at the federal level, and the states are only getting away with it right now because the Obama administration is allowing it. We'll see what the Trump administration does, but I wouldn't be too surprised if he wants to crack down on it. The Republicans trumpet their support for states rights, but only when they actually agree with them, and it remains to be seen how they'll act on it.
"Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds: Fire, walk with me." - Twin Peaks
"You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you Sheriff Truman." - Twin Peaks
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n 1723, Christopher Wren was buried in St. Paul’s, the magnificent cathedral he had rebuilt following a devastating fire in London. His epitaph concludes with the Latin phrase Si monumentum, requiris circumspece—“If you wish to see his monument, look around.” In 2017, Barack Obama will leave the White House after eight years during which he presided over the Democratic Party.
If you wish to see his monument, look around.
Look to your right and you will see that his designated successor lost her bid for the presidency to a man Obama himself had not only campaigned against ferociously but declared unfit to hold the nuclear codes. Look to your left and you will see the news stories detailing the possible strategies for the repeal and the replacement of the president’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare. Then look up and down at the partisan cathedral he helped to rebuild. Its benches are, as Shakespeare said of tree branches in winter, “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” While he was the one with the nuclear codes, the Democratic Party has been hit with a neutron bomb. And on the bomb’s nose, written like the “Dear John” message on the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, were the words: “Barack Obama was here.”
The Democratic Party cathedral stands, to be sure, as structures will after a neutron-bomb attack. But it has been denuded of its priestly caste—the elected officials who were teeming within it when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 and had every reason to believe they would move inexorably from the back rows of American politics to the front. There are some 8,000 elected officials in the United States at the state and federal levels. Between 2009, when Barack Obama took office, and today, as he prepares to retire from it, more than 1,100 Democratic elected officials lost their jobs to Republicans. That number is unprecedented.
Barack Obama entered the White House with his party in control of 62 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers. By January 2015, Republicans were in control of 68. He then made it a personal mission to help reverse the damage that had caused the ejection of nearly a thousand Democratic state legislators from their seats by voters. He made 150 down-ballot endorsements in 2016 and even hit the trail for a few of them at a time when his personal approval rating was above 50 percent.
The result of the president’s direct intercession? The Democrats did worse. On Election Night in 2016, Republicans took full control of the legislatures in Minnesota and Iowa. The Democratic Party’s sole remaining legislative majority in the South, in Kentucky, fell to the GOP for the first time in nearly 100 years. In North Carolina, the GOP held onto veto-proof majorities in state legislatures despite the statewide loss of an unpopular Republican governor. The GOP prevented Democrats from retaking the state Senate in New York. There were some gains in Nevada and New Mexico…and that was it.
The massacre of Democratic officials goes far beyond state legislatures. Democrats held 31 governorships in 2009. Now they hold 17, having been kicked out of the mansions in Missouri, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Following this year’s election, Republicans have control of all levers of government in 25 states.
In Washington, after months of speculation that Democrats might eat away at the Republican majority in the House of Representatives or topple it, the GOP lost only nine seats and retained a 40-member advantage. And though the general expectation was that the Democrats were likely to take back control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans ended up losing only two incumbents and retained their majority at 52. Even more worrisome for Democrats, they head into the 2018 election with aging senators having to defend their seats in 10 states Donald Trump won.
The collapse of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama occurred in three stages, each corresponding to a national response to Obama’s policy and political overreach.
In Stage One, the Democrats were decimated in the House of Representatives (and the carnage at the state level began). From Inauguration Day in 2009 until July 2010, the Obama White House oversaw the passage of 1) the stimulus package, the most expensive piece of legislation in American history; 2) the second half of the TARP-TALF financial-bailout bill; 3) the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reforms; and 4) the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Not since 1933 had there been a more aggressive legislative and regulatory agenda, and Obama’s determined march not only featured $2.7 trillion in new spending but the wholesale revision of the nation’s health-care system.
It was too much, too fast, too soon, and there was a national uprising against it that came to be known as the “Tea Party.” What resulted was a midterm in 2010 that cost the Democrats 63 House seats, the largest such defeat in 72 years. Democrats had built a massive majority over two successive elections in 2006 and 2008 and saw it wiped out in one go. Consider this fact: In the 2006 midterms, when an anti-GOP wave began, Democratic candidates for the House received a national total of 42.3 million votes. In the next midterm election, 2010, they received 38.9 million votes, a decline of 9 percent. In 2014, they were down to 35.6 million votes, a 10 percent decline from the 2010 midterms. In all, Democrats have gained a total of two seats back from their 2010 low. That means they have suffered a net loss of 61 Democratic elected officials from the House of Representatives in the Obama era.
Stage Two was the decimation of the Democratic Senate majority. In 2014, Democrats watched incumbent after incumbent swept away in a Republican wave eerily similar to the House wave four years earlier. In 2010, Democrats had held on to control of the Senate with candidates who received 29 million votes in aggregate even as the House was going Republican. In 2014, Democrats received 8.2 million fewer votes—a decline of 23 percent from 2010.
In all, nine Democratic senators were axed in 2014, the largest swing since the Ronald Reagan election in 1980. What had happened to cause it? A year earlier, in October 2013, Obamacare had been rolled out—and computer systems and software costing $1 billion crashed and crashed hard. ISIS flowered malignantly in Syria and Iraq and began beheading Americans. There was a border crisis as thousands of children from Mexico and Central America made their way into the United States and were put up in makeshift housing. Republicans won by nationalizing their Senate races, as Philip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post noted at the time: “Make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.”
Stage Three only began on Election Night, and its contours are yet to be determined: the decimation of the Obama legacy itself.
One might say that it began, oddly enough, with Obama’s 2012 victory. He got his second term, yes, but for the first time in presidential history, received fewer votes in getting reelected than he had in his first run. 69.5 million Americans had cast a ballot for Obama in 2008, and in 2012 that number dropped to 65.8 million. Those voters didn’t go to the Republican, Mitt Romney, who gained only a million more than John McCain had in 2008. They just disappeared. And in 2016, another 3 to 4 million vanished as Hillary Clinton received somewhere between 61 and 62 million votes. So, over the course of the Obama era, as many as 8 million people stopped voting for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. That’s a drop of 11 percent. That’s a landslide number in reverse.
The story of 2016 is, in part, the missing white vote that got Donald Trump elected. Where is that white vote? A considerable part of it is in areas of the country where the Obama administration literally targeted heavy industries both venerable and brand-new—coal and fracking. Obama has spent his presidency favoring the environmentalist cause, which is popular with what the pollster Stanley Greenberg and the consultant James Carville called “the new progressive common ground,” over the continuing employment of the white working class in good-paying jobs. Obama and Clinton—who told an audience earlier this year with some pride that “we are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—were choosing not to expand the Democratic electoral coalition by bringing people with different interests together but to contract it ideologically. He and Clinton could do this, they believed, because a new and massive electoral coalition was taking the place of the old—one made up, in Greenberg’s words, of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”
This is an example of the way in which Barack Obama sought to provide the left with a sense of cultural and moral superiority. He and they were working to be saviors of the planet, just as they were working to push America forward into a new ethical framework in which traditional morality was an evil to be overcome and new modes of being were not only to be embraced but to be forced upon resistant small-town birthday-cake bakers. Those who bought into it achieved a kind of blind triumphalism. They pooh-poohed any warning signs that the transition to Obama’s brave new world was creating new social fissures. Their unending political dominance was now a matter of demographic inevitability, as celestially mechanical as the monthly lunar cycle. Nothing could shake this conviction, even as they suffered through Stage One and were rocked by Stage Two. That “progressive common ground” just wasn’t common enough, it turns out. Its numbers weren’t quite large enough yet.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president.
And even more important, it just wasn’t as motivated by a commitment to the progressive agenda as Obama and Clinton thought. The new “coalition of the ascendant” Obama assembled in 2008 didn’t really care all that much about electing the first woman president. It didn’t care much about preserving Obama-era reforms, like his signature health-care act. It didn’t care much about standing athwart what the left insisted was a drumbeat of bigotry disseminated by Donald Trump. Its members did not swamp the polls to ensure that a global-warming skeptic was denied the presidency. The terrible truth is that the Obama 2008 electorate turned out to be relatively indifferent to progressive issues when push came to shove. Note that Greenberg and Carville did not include African Americans in the “new progressive common ground” even though they were the most important part of the Obama coalition because of the staggering unanimity of the black vote in his favor. And that is key, because it turns out what had truly mattered to the “coalition of the ascendant” was Barack Hussein Obama himself, and how he had made them feel about themselves back in 2008. It was summoned into existence by the idea of a President Obama, not by what he would do.
The reality of President Obama was another story. Enough of the potent Obama combination of celebrity and Rorschach test remained in 2012 to let President Obama stay president another four years. But the coalition of the ascendant had dissipated long before Hillary Clinton sought at least to approximate it. A lackluster candidate promising the status quo with ethical problems from here to Mars wasn’t going to reconstitute it.
As it dissipated, the farm system of elected officials shrank over the course of the Obama era to a single minor-league team of coastal and urban politicians. The result is a Democratic Party even more doctrinaire in its cultural, social, and political attitudes. Gone is the pro-life Democrat, the gun-rights Democrat, the Democratic hawk, the Democrat who supported the traditional definition of marriage, the Democrat concerned with religious liberty at home—and good riddance to them, in the eyes of those who remain. Joe Manchin, the very popular West Virginia Democratic governor who got himself elected to the Senate in 2010 in part due to a television commercial that showed him firing a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill, is reportedly considering a party switch before he runs again for the Senate. In 2012, the Republican got 65 percent of the vote in Manchin’s state. This year, Donald Trump won West Virginia with 69 percent. What would you do if you were Manchin?
Meanwhile, those remaining Democratic elected officials inclined toward (Bill) Clintonian compromise and triangulation—like the superdelegates who shoved Hillary Clinton down the throats of a party whose heart was with Bernie Sanders—now find themselves in danger of being completely discredited within their own party. Their representative figure is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman and Democratic National Committee chairman who was forced from her leadership position when leaked documents proved she had been running the DNC illicitly as an arm of the Clinton campaign.
At this writing, the leading candidate to take her slot is a Minnesota congressman named Keith Ellison. Ellison once compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire before adding, “The fact is that I’m not saying September 11 was a U.S. plan or anything like that because, you know, that’s how they put you in the nutball box.” New York’s Charles Schumer, the incoming leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate, has declared his support for Ellison’s candidacy. Schumer likes to tell Jewish audiences his name (shomer in Hebrew) means he believes his most important role is to serve as a “guardian of the gates of Jerusalem.” Ellison comes out of the Nation of Islam and is at the very least a supporter of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations. Schumer is part of the old guard, Ellison is a tribune of the new. If there’s one thing Schumer knows, it’s which side of the slice of challah to butter, and the gates of Jerusalem can go hang.
The Obama years weren’t only a disappointment to those of us who did not drink the Kool Aid in the first place; they proved to be a disappointment to the very people Obama had celebrated by declaring that “we are the change we have been waiting for.” And they have been a calamity for Democrats everywhere but in the urban and coastal strongholds, Democrats who had thought they were going to make a career out of elected public service. It is from their ranks that their party is supposed to find its next stars, men and women would use their time in state legislatures to learn the craft of politics and the art of legislating before rising to the governor’s mansion or the House or Senate, and thence, perhaps, to national office. That is how Obama emerged in the early years of this new century.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president. For everyone else in his party, and for his party itself, he has been an unmitigated disaster. And now, his decimation of his own electorate has helped to ensure the election of Donald Trump. Out of office in 2017, Barack Obama may have to stand by, impotent, as the legislative and policy advances that were supposed to be his enduring legacy vanish like the thousand elected politicians unfortunate enough to have been serving in office when Barack Obama came along and hollowed out the Democratic Party.
Christopher Wren has been dead nearly 300 years, but St. Paul’s Cathedral still stands. Four years after the end of the Obama presidency, there may be no monument of Barack Obama’s left standing for anyone to look at.
Funny...nothing in there about the huge ammounts of gerrymanding in districts.
Really, it appears that the Republican strategy is:
Run on the platform that government is bad and doesn't work.
Do everything that you can to fullfill that prophecy while in office through obstructing everything.
Profit.
It's a sad state of affairs that running such a dishonest and hurtful campaign is rewarded.
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n 1723, Christopher Wren was buried in St. Paul’s, the magnificent cathedral he had rebuilt following a devastating fire in London. His epitaph concludes with the Latin phrase Si monumentum, requiris circumspece—“If you wish to see his monument, look around.” In 2017, Barack Obama will leave the White House after eight years during which he presided over the Democratic Party.
If you wish to see his monument, look around.
Look to your right and you will see that his designated successor lost her bid for the presidency to a man Obama himself had not only campaigned against ferociously but declared unfit to hold the nuclear codes. Look to your left and you will see the news stories detailing the possible strategies for the repeal and the replacement of the president’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare. Then look up and down at the partisan cathedral he helped to rebuild. Its benches are, as Shakespeare said of tree branches in winter, “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” While he was the one with the nuclear codes, the Democratic Party has been hit with a neutron bomb. And on the bomb’s nose, written like the “Dear John” message on the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, were the words: “Barack Obama was here.”
The Democratic Party cathedral stands, to be sure, as structures will after a neutron-bomb attack. But it has been denuded of its priestly caste—the elected officials who were teeming within it when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 and had every reason to believe they would move inexorably from the back rows of American politics to the front. There are some 8,000 elected officials in the United States at the state and federal levels. Between 2009, when Barack Obama took office, and today, as he prepares to retire from it, more than 1,100 Democratic elected officials lost their jobs to Republicans. That number is unprecedented.
Barack Obama entered the White House with his party in control of 62 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers. By January 2015, Republicans were in control of 68. He then made it a personal mission to help reverse the damage that had caused the ejection of nearly a thousand Democratic state legislators from their seats by voters. He made 150 down-ballot endorsements in 2016 and even hit the trail for a few of them at a time when his personal approval rating was above 50 percent.
The result of the president’s direct intercession? The Democrats did worse. On Election Night in 2016, Republicans took full control of the legislatures in Minnesota and Iowa. The Democratic Party’s sole remaining legislative majority in the South, in Kentucky, fell to the GOP for the first time in nearly 100 years. In North Carolina, the GOP held onto veto-proof majorities in state legislatures despite the statewide loss of an unpopular Republican governor. The GOP prevented Democrats from retaking the state Senate in New York. There were some gains in Nevada and New Mexico…and that was it.
The massacre of Democratic officials goes far beyond state legislatures. Democrats held 31 governorships in 2009. Now they hold 17, having been kicked out of the mansions in Missouri, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Following this year’s election, Republicans have control of all levers of government in 25 states.
In Washington, after months of speculation that Democrats might eat away at the Republican majority in the House of Representatives or topple it, the GOP lost only nine seats and retained a 40-member advantage. And though the general expectation was that the Democrats were likely to take back control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans ended up losing only two incumbents and retained their majority at 52. Even more worrisome for Democrats, they head into the 2018 election with aging senators having to defend their seats in 10 states Donald Trump won.
The collapse of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama occurred in three stages, each corresponding to a national response to Obama’s policy and political overreach.
In Stage One, the Democrats were decimated in the House of Representatives (and the carnage at the state level began). From Inauguration Day in 2009 until July 2010, the Obama White House oversaw the passage of 1) the stimulus package, the most expensive piece of legislation in American history; 2) the second half of the TARP-TALF financial-bailout bill; 3) the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reforms; and 4) the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Not since 1933 had there been a more aggressive legislative and regulatory agenda, and Obama’s determined march not only featured $2.7 trillion in new spending but the wholesale revision of the nation’s health-care system.
It was too much, too fast, too soon, and there was a national uprising against it that came to be known as the “Tea Party.” What resulted was a midterm in 2010 that cost the Democrats 63 House seats, the largest such defeat in 72 years. Democrats had built a massive majority over two successive elections in 2006 and 2008 and saw it wiped out in one go. Consider this fact: In the 2006 midterms, when an anti-GOP wave began, Democratic candidates for the House received a national total of 42.3 million votes. In the next midterm election, 2010, they received 38.9 million votes, a decline of 9 percent. In 2014, they were down to 35.6 million votes, a 10 percent decline from the 2010 midterms. In all, Democrats have gained a total of two seats back from their 2010 low. That means they have suffered a net loss of 61 Democratic elected officials from the House of Representatives in the Obama era.
Stage Two was the decimation of the Democratic Senate majority. In 2014, Democrats watched incumbent after incumbent swept away in a Republican wave eerily similar to the House wave four years earlier. In 2010, Democrats had held on to control of the Senate with candidates who received 29 million votes in aggregate even as the House was going Republican. In 2014, Democrats received 8.2 million fewer votes—a decline of 23 percent from 2010.
In all, nine Democratic senators were axed in 2014, the largest swing since the Ronald Reagan election in 1980. What had happened to cause it? A year earlier, in October 2013, Obamacare had been rolled out—and computer systems and software costing $1 billion crashed and crashed hard. ISIS flowered malignantly in Syria and Iraq and began beheading Americans. There was a border crisis as thousands of children from Mexico and Central America made their way into the United States and were put up in makeshift housing. Republicans won by nationalizing their Senate races, as Philip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post noted at the time: “Make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.”
Stage Three only began on Election Night, and its contours are yet to be determined: the decimation of the Obama legacy itself.
One might say that it began, oddly enough, with Obama’s 2012 victory. He got his second term, yes, but for the first time in presidential history, received fewer votes in getting reelected than he had in his first run. 69.5 million Americans had cast a ballot for Obama in 2008, and in 2012 that number dropped to 65.8 million. Those voters didn’t go to the Republican, Mitt Romney, who gained only a million more than John McCain had in 2008. They just disappeared. And in 2016, another 3 to 4 million vanished as Hillary Clinton received somewhere between 61 and 62 million votes. So, over the course of the Obama era, as many as 8 million people stopped voting for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. That’s a drop of 11 percent. That’s a landslide number in reverse.
The story of 2016 is, in part, the missing white vote that got Donald Trump elected. Where is that white vote? A considerable part of it is in areas of the country where the Obama administration literally targeted heavy industries both venerable and brand-new—coal and fracking. Obama has spent his presidency favoring the environmentalist cause, which is popular with what the pollster Stanley Greenberg and the consultant James Carville called “the new progressive common ground,” over the continuing employment of the white working class in good-paying jobs. Obama and Clinton—who told an audience earlier this year with some pride that “we are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—were choosing not to expand the Democratic electoral coalition by bringing people with different interests together but to contract it ideologically. He and Clinton could do this, they believed, because a new and massive electoral coalition was taking the place of the old—one made up, in Greenberg’s words, of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”
This is an example of the way in which Barack Obama sought to provide the left with a sense of cultural and moral superiority. He and they were working to be saviors of the planet, just as they were working to push America forward into a new ethical framework in which traditional morality was an evil to be overcome and new modes of being were not only to be embraced but to be forced upon resistant small-town birthday-cake bakers. Those who bought into it achieved a kind of blind triumphalism. They pooh-poohed any warning signs that the transition to Obama’s brave new world was creating new social fissures. Their unending political dominance was now a matter of demographic inevitability, as celestially mechanical as the monthly lunar cycle. Nothing could shake this conviction, even as they suffered through Stage One and were rocked by Stage Two. That “progressive common ground” just wasn’t common enough, it turns out. Its numbers weren’t quite large enough yet.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president.
And even more important, it just wasn’t as motivated by a commitment to the progressive agenda as Obama and Clinton thought. The new “coalition of the ascendant” Obama assembled in 2008 didn’t really care all that much about electing the first woman president. It didn’t care much about preserving Obama-era reforms, like his signature health-care act. It didn’t care much about standing athwart what the left insisted was a drumbeat of bigotry disseminated by Donald Trump. Its members did not swamp the polls to ensure that a global-warming skeptic was denied the presidency. The terrible truth is that the Obama 2008 electorate turned out to be relatively indifferent to progressive issues when push came to shove. Note that Greenberg and Carville did not include African Americans in the “new progressive common ground” even though they were the most important part of the Obama coalition because of the staggering unanimity of the black vote in his favor. And that is key, because it turns out what had truly mattered to the “coalition of the ascendant” was Barack Hussein Obama himself, and how he had made them feel about themselves back in 2008. It was summoned into existence by the idea of a President Obama, not by what he would do.
The reality of President Obama was another story. Enough of the potent Obama combination of celebrity and Rorschach test remained in 2012 to let President Obama stay president another four years. But the coalition of the ascendant had dissipated long before Hillary Clinton sought at least to approximate it. A lackluster candidate promising the status quo with ethical problems from here to Mars wasn’t going to reconstitute it.
As it dissipated, the farm system of elected officials shrank over the course of the Obama era to a single minor-league team of coastal and urban politicians. The result is a Democratic Party even more doctrinaire in its cultural, social, and political attitudes. Gone is the pro-life Democrat, the gun-rights Democrat, the Democratic hawk, the Democrat who supported the traditional definition of marriage, the Democrat concerned with religious liberty at home—and good riddance to them, in the eyes of those who remain. Joe Manchin, the very popular West Virginia Democratic governor who got himself elected to the Senate in 2010 in part due to a television commercial that showed him firing a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill, is reportedly considering a party switch before he runs again for the Senate. In 2012, the Republican got 65 percent of the vote in Manchin’s state. This year, Donald Trump won West Virginia with 69 percent. What would you do if you were Manchin?
Meanwhile, those remaining Democratic elected officials inclined toward (Bill) Clintonian compromise and triangulation—like the superdelegates who shoved Hillary Clinton down the throats of a party whose heart was with Bernie Sanders—now find themselves in danger of being completely discredited within their own party. Their representative figure is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman and Democratic National Committee chairman who was forced from her leadership position when leaked documents proved she had been running the DNC illicitly as an arm of the Clinton campaign.
At this writing, the leading candidate to take her slot is a Minnesota congressman named Keith Ellison. Ellison once compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire before adding, “The fact is that I’m not saying September 11 was a U.S. plan or anything like that because, you know, that’s how they put you in the nutball box.” New York’s Charles Schumer, the incoming leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate, has declared his support for Ellison’s candidacy. Schumer likes to tell Jewish audiences his name (shomer in Hebrew) means he believes his most important role is to serve as a “guardian of the gates of Jerusalem.” Ellison comes out of the Nation of Islam and is at the very least a supporter of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations. Schumer is part of the old guard, Ellison is a tribune of the new. If there’s one thing Schumer knows, it’s which side of the slice of challah to butter, and the gates of Jerusalem can go hang.
The Obama years weren’t only a disappointment to those of us who did not drink the Kool Aid in the first place; they proved to be a disappointment to the very people Obama had celebrated by declaring that “we are the change we have been waiting for.” And they have been a calamity for Democrats everywhere but in the urban and coastal strongholds, Democrats who had thought they were going to make a career out of elected public service. It is from their ranks that their party is supposed to find its next stars, men and women would use their time in state legislatures to learn the craft of politics and the art of legislating before rising to the governor’s mansion or the House or Senate, and thence, perhaps, to national office. That is how Obama emerged in the early years of this new century.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president. For everyone else in his party, and for his party itself, he has been an unmitigated disaster. And now, his decimation of his own electorate has helped to ensure the election of Donald Trump. Out of office in 2017, Barack Obama may have to stand by, impotent, as the legislative and policy advances that were supposed to be his enduring legacy vanish like the thousand elected politicians unfortunate enough to have been serving in office when Barack Obama came along and hollowed out the Democratic Party.
Christopher Wren has been dead nearly 300 years, but St. Paul’s Cathedral still stands. Four years after the end of the Obama presidency, there may be no monument of Barack Obama’s left standing for anyone to look at.
Funny...nothing in there about the huge ammounts of gerrymanding in districts.
Really, it appears that the Republican strategy is:
Run on the platform that government is bad and doesn't work.
Do everything that you can to fullfill that prophecy while in office through obstructing everything.
Profit.
It's a sad state of affairs that running such a dishonest and hurtful campaign is rewarded.
Both parties gerrymander. Open your eyes.
Gerrymandering does nothing for the governorships, the Senate and of course El Presidente.
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Kilkrazy wrote: The point of the various states is that they are different, so one cannot be a lab to test things for use in another.
Though, my point is that the differences between states are fading as the lines are blurred through modern communications and such. I've lived in three separate states and five different cities. I don't get my news from the local paper, I get it from CNN.com. I don't watch local broadcast TV, i watch streaming videos and cable channels. My extended family (that I know of) lives in four different states. I spend more time talking to you guys here, across the country and world, than I do to my next door neighbors. And I'm by far not the only person like that.
"Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds: Fire, walk with me." - Twin Peaks
"You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you Sheriff Truman." - Twin Peaks
Tannhauser42 wrote: Part of the problem is that states just don't matter as much as they used to 200 years ago. We no longer live in a time where people spend their entire lives within ten miles of where they're born, or where it takes a day's travel to get to the next town. Modern communications, the automobile, and the internet have blurred the lines. Less and less do we define ourselves according to the state we happen to live in. More and more we are becoming a nation of people, not a nation of states.
I 100% disagree with this.
Just my opinion Tanner.... I could be wrong, but I love the idea of having 50 laboratories trying things out without forcing the rest of the states to toe the line.
Kinda like marijuana laws popping up in several states, and the other states are observing how it goes. Knowwhatimean?
First, I'm gonna say you're exaggerating on the 100% disagreement. Unless it really does take you a day to get to the next town.
Second, the "states as labs" thing only works when the Fed allows it. Marijuana is a good example. It's still illegal at the federal level, and the states are only getting away with it right now because the Obama administration is allowing it. We'll see what the Trump administration does, but I wouldn't be too surprised if he wants to crack down on it. The Republicans trumpet their support for states rights, but only when they actually agree with them, and it remains to be seen how they'll act on it.
I also think that the "50 states = 50 labs" thing quit being a real thing as soon as parties became a thing. Now we have "50 states = 2 groups of labs". It's not Texas vs California vs Oklahoma vs Nebraska vs Michigan vs Vermont, it's Red States vs Blue States.
I would be all about sticking with the whole "power to the states, to let states decide what's best for them" if the individual states would actually still follow that advice. But let's face it, the GOP doesn't give a damn about states rights either. It's just their rallying cry whenever they don't have national control, because if they can't make 50 states adhere to conservative orthodoxy, they can at least make 30odd red states adhere to conservative orthodoxy. You just need to look at the senate to watch that in action, nobody ever talks about "is it good for Oklahoma" before voting against their fellow Republicans because a bill would be good for the citizens of the state. It's not 50 teams of two senators, it's just two teams of senators: Red and Blue.
The only meaningful times that states have been successful as individual laboratories has been when citizens themselves pass particular laws, when actual citizens of the state decide what is in the best interest of that state. Not elected officials deciding what best adheres to party orthodoxy.
California's citizenry got tired of the Bull gak and mandated a bipartisan commission to redraw maps. While not perfect and you can definitely see some gerrymandering still going on, they appear to be better drawn. For one of the few times you'll see me type "Go California!"
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/11/15 14:07:13
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them.
The president-elect has begun asking how he could secure high level clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., his three adult children with first wife Ivana, as well as for Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, according to CNN and CBS. All four family members are members of his transition team, though Trump has said his children won’t serve formal roles in his administration but instead will run the family business while he runs the country.
“This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.”
It’s unclear exactly whether Trump’s request could even be fulfilled—at least legally. A 1967 law prohibits the president from hiring their immediate family members in the federal government, and to have a security clearance an individual must work the government in some capacity: as a civilian, as a military official or a contractor.
“Even if they came in as unpaid advisers, there’s no such thing as an informal government position that allows you to be sponsored for access” to classified information, Moss said. “There’s no exception. There’s no loopholes.”
And it would difficult to see how Trump could argue that his children have a “need to know” without a formal government role.
“This is not the family business, this is the presidency. The days of family nepotism is over, not just due to policy and practice but by law. Security clearances are not candies to be doled out like at Halloween. You must have a ‘need-to-know’ that is supposed to be taken seriously in advancing the business of the government rather than an individual,” said Mark Zaid, another national security lawyer.
But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. Even First Ladies have to be cleared to access that part of the White House, but that doesn’t mean they have access to top-secret areas like the Situation Room, the official said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the clearance process publicly. The level of clearance for people with unescorted access to visit the President in the West Wing is known as “Yankee White,” which could be what Trump is seeking.
CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.
If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest.
“If President-elect Trump seeks a security clearance for his children, it will show he either has no understanding of the potential conflict of interest problems he faces or doesn’t care,” said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. “If he seeks a security clearance for his children who are running the businesses, it will undermine the credibility of any claim that his children will not be involved in advising him on government policies. It raises the real danger that his children will be able to influence government decisions to benefit Trump businesses and run those businesses with inside knowledge of actions and policies the government take.”
During an interview with Trump and his family on 60 Minutes taped last week, Eric Trump said that the children would remain in New York to run their father’s business. “So we’ll— we’ll— we’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business,” the younger Trump said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we’re going to make him very proud.”
Ivanka Trump also said that she would not be interested in a formal role in the upcoming administration. “I’m going to be a daughter,” she said when asked about a possible role. “But I’ve— I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.”
Interestingly enough, while the law prohibits nepotism, it doesn’t require the president to give up his or her business holdings while serving in the Oval Office.
Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story.
uh huh.
I can't wait until it's found out that he is sharimg classified info with his children, and the same people chanting "Lock her up," find a way to justify it.
Homosexuality is the #1 cause of gay marriage.
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sebster wrote: Yes, indeed. What a terrible piece of cultural imperialism it is for me to say that a country shouldn't murder its own citizens
BaronIveagh wrote: Basically they went from a carrot and stick to a smaller carrot and flanged mace.
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n 1723, Christopher Wren was buried in St. Paul’s, the magnificent cathedral he had rebuilt following a devastating fire in London. His epitaph concludes with the Latin phrase Si monumentum, requiris circumspece—“If you wish to see his monument, look around.” In 2017, Barack Obama will leave the White House after eight years during which he presided over the Democratic Party.
If you wish to see his monument, look around.
Look to your right and you will see that his designated successor lost her bid for the presidency to a man Obama himself had not only campaigned against ferociously but declared unfit to hold the nuclear codes. Look to your left and you will see the news stories detailing the possible strategies for the repeal and the replacement of the president’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare. Then look up and down at the partisan cathedral he helped to rebuild. Its benches are, as Shakespeare said of tree branches in winter, “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” While he was the one with the nuclear codes, the Democratic Party has been hit with a neutron bomb. And on the bomb’s nose, written like the “Dear John” message on the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, were the words: “Barack Obama was here.”
The Democratic Party cathedral stands, to be sure, as structures will after a neutron-bomb attack. But it has been denuded of its priestly caste—the elected officials who were teeming within it when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 and had every reason to believe they would move inexorably from the back rows of American politics to the front. There are some 8,000 elected officials in the United States at the state and federal levels. Between 2009, when Barack Obama took office, and today, as he prepares to retire from it, more than 1,100 Democratic elected officials lost their jobs to Republicans. That number is unprecedented.
Barack Obama entered the White House with his party in control of 62 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers. By January 2015, Republicans were in control of 68. He then made it a personal mission to help reverse the damage that had caused the ejection of nearly a thousand Democratic state legislators from their seats by voters. He made 150 down-ballot endorsements in 2016 and even hit the trail for a few of them at a time when his personal approval rating was above 50 percent.
The result of the president’s direct intercession? The Democrats did worse. On Election Night in 2016, Republicans took full control of the legislatures in Minnesota and Iowa. The Democratic Party’s sole remaining legislative majority in the South, in Kentucky, fell to the GOP for the first time in nearly 100 years. In North Carolina, the GOP held onto veto-proof majorities in state legislatures despite the statewide loss of an unpopular Republican governor. The GOP prevented Democrats from retaking the state Senate in New York. There were some gains in Nevada and New Mexico…and that was it.
The massacre of Democratic officials goes far beyond state legislatures. Democrats held 31 governorships in 2009. Now they hold 17, having been kicked out of the mansions in Missouri, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Following this year’s election, Republicans have control of all levers of government in 25 states.
In Washington, after months of speculation that Democrats might eat away at the Republican majority in the House of Representatives or topple it, the GOP lost only nine seats and retained a 40-member advantage. And though the general expectation was that the Democrats were likely to take back control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans ended up losing only two incumbents and retained their majority at 52. Even more worrisome for Democrats, they head into the 2018 election with aging senators having to defend their seats in 10 states Donald Trump won.
The collapse of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama occurred in three stages, each corresponding to a national response to Obama’s policy and political overreach.
In Stage One, the Democrats were decimated in the House of Representatives (and the carnage at the state level began). From Inauguration Day in 2009 until July 2010, the Obama White House oversaw the passage of 1) the stimulus package, the most expensive piece of legislation in American history; 2) the second half of the TARP-TALF financial-bailout bill; 3) the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reforms; and 4) the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Not since 1933 had there been a more aggressive legislative and regulatory agenda, and Obama’s determined march not only featured $2.7 trillion in new spending but the wholesale revision of the nation’s health-care system.
It was too much, too fast, too soon, and there was a national uprising against it that came to be known as the “Tea Party.” What resulted was a midterm in 2010 that cost the Democrats 63 House seats, the largest such defeat in 72 years. Democrats had built a massive majority over two successive elections in 2006 and 2008 and saw it wiped out in one go. Consider this fact: In the 2006 midterms, when an anti-GOP wave began, Democratic candidates for the House received a national total of 42.3 million votes. In the next midterm election, 2010, they received 38.9 million votes, a decline of 9 percent. In 2014, they were down to 35.6 million votes, a 10 percent decline from the 2010 midterms. In all, Democrats have gained a total of two seats back from their 2010 low. That means they have suffered a net loss of 61 Democratic elected officials from the House of Representatives in the Obama era.
Stage Two was the decimation of the Democratic Senate majority. In 2014, Democrats watched incumbent after incumbent swept away in a Republican wave eerily similar to the House wave four years earlier. In 2010, Democrats had held on to control of the Senate with candidates who received 29 million votes in aggregate even as the House was going Republican. In 2014, Democrats received 8.2 million fewer votes—a decline of 23 percent from 2010.
In all, nine Democratic senators were axed in 2014, the largest swing since the Ronald Reagan election in 1980. What had happened to cause it? A year earlier, in October 2013, Obamacare had been rolled out—and computer systems and software costing $1 billion crashed and crashed hard. ISIS flowered malignantly in Syria and Iraq and began beheading Americans. There was a border crisis as thousands of children from Mexico and Central America made their way into the United States and were put up in makeshift housing. Republicans won by nationalizing their Senate races, as Philip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post noted at the time: “Make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.”
Stage Three only began on Election Night, and its contours are yet to be determined: the decimation of the Obama legacy itself.
One might say that it began, oddly enough, with Obama’s 2012 victory. He got his second term, yes, but for the first time in presidential history, received fewer votes in getting reelected than he had in his first run. 69.5 million Americans had cast a ballot for Obama in 2008, and in 2012 that number dropped to 65.8 million. Those voters didn’t go to the Republican, Mitt Romney, who gained only a million more than John McCain had in 2008. They just disappeared. And in 2016, another 3 to 4 million vanished as Hillary Clinton received somewhere between 61 and 62 million votes. So, over the course of the Obama era, as many as 8 million people stopped voting for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. That’s a drop of 11 percent. That’s a landslide number in reverse.
The story of 2016 is, in part, the missing white vote that got Donald Trump elected. Where is that white vote? A considerable part of it is in areas of the country where the Obama administration literally targeted heavy industries both venerable and brand-new—coal and fracking. Obama has spent his presidency favoring the environmentalist cause, which is popular with what the pollster Stanley Greenberg and the consultant James Carville called “the new progressive common ground,” over the continuing employment of the white working class in good-paying jobs. Obama and Clinton—who told an audience earlier this year with some pride that “we are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—were choosing not to expand the Democratic electoral coalition by bringing people with different interests together but to contract it ideologically. He and Clinton could do this, they believed, because a new and massive electoral coalition was taking the place of the old—one made up, in Greenberg’s words, of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”
This is an example of the way in which Barack Obama sought to provide the left with a sense of cultural and moral superiority. He and they were working to be saviors of the planet, just as they were working to push America forward into a new ethical framework in which traditional morality was an evil to be overcome and new modes of being were not only to be embraced but to be forced upon resistant small-town birthday-cake bakers. Those who bought into it achieved a kind of blind triumphalism. They pooh-poohed any warning signs that the transition to Obama’s brave new world was creating new social fissures. Their unending political dominance was now a matter of demographic inevitability, as celestially mechanical as the monthly lunar cycle. Nothing could shake this conviction, even as they suffered through Stage One and were rocked by Stage Two. That “progressive common ground” just wasn’t common enough, it turns out. Its numbers weren’t quite large enough yet.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president.
And even more important, it just wasn’t as motivated by a commitment to the progressive agenda as Obama and Clinton thought. The new “coalition of the ascendant” Obama assembled in 2008 didn’t really care all that much about electing the first woman president. It didn’t care much about preserving Obama-era reforms, like his signature health-care act. It didn’t care much about standing athwart what the left insisted was a drumbeat of bigotry disseminated by Donald Trump. Its members did not swamp the polls to ensure that a global-warming skeptic was denied the presidency. The terrible truth is that the Obama 2008 electorate turned out to be relatively indifferent to progressive issues when push came to shove. Note that Greenberg and Carville did not include African Americans in the “new progressive common ground” even though they were the most important part of the Obama coalition because of the staggering unanimity of the black vote in his favor. And that is key, because it turns out what had truly mattered to the “coalition of the ascendant” was Barack Hussein Obama himself, and how he had made them feel about themselves back in 2008. It was summoned into existence by the idea of a President Obama, not by what he would do.
The reality of President Obama was another story. Enough of the potent Obama combination of celebrity and Rorschach test remained in 2012 to let President Obama stay president another four years. But the coalition of the ascendant had dissipated long before Hillary Clinton sought at least to approximate it. A lackluster candidate promising the status quo with ethical problems from here to Mars wasn’t going to reconstitute it.
As it dissipated, the farm system of elected officials shrank over the course of the Obama era to a single minor-league team of coastal and urban politicians. The result is a Democratic Party even more doctrinaire in its cultural, social, and political attitudes. Gone is the pro-life Democrat, the gun-rights Democrat, the Democratic hawk, the Democrat who supported the traditional definition of marriage, the Democrat concerned with religious liberty at home—and good riddance to them, in the eyes of those who remain. Joe Manchin, the very popular West Virginia Democratic governor who got himself elected to the Senate in 2010 in part due to a television commercial that showed him firing a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill, is reportedly considering a party switch before he runs again for the Senate. In 2012, the Republican got 65 percent of the vote in Manchin’s state. This year, Donald Trump won West Virginia with 69 percent. What would you do if you were Manchin?
Meanwhile, those remaining Democratic elected officials inclined toward (Bill) Clintonian compromise and triangulation—like the superdelegates who shoved Hillary Clinton down the throats of a party whose heart was with Bernie Sanders—now find themselves in danger of being completely discredited within their own party. Their representative figure is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman and Democratic National Committee chairman who was forced from her leadership position when leaked documents proved she had been running the DNC illicitly as an arm of the Clinton campaign.
At this writing, the leading candidate to take her slot is a Minnesota congressman named Keith Ellison. Ellison once compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire before adding, “The fact is that I’m not saying September 11 was a U.S. plan or anything like that because, you know, that’s how they put you in the nutball box.” New York’s Charles Schumer, the incoming leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate, has declared his support for Ellison’s candidacy. Schumer likes to tell Jewish audiences his name (shomer in Hebrew) means he believes his most important role is to serve as a “guardian of the gates of Jerusalem.” Ellison comes out of the Nation of Islam and is at the very least a supporter of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations. Schumer is part of the old guard, Ellison is a tribune of the new. If there’s one thing Schumer knows, it’s which side of the slice of challah to butter, and the gates of Jerusalem can go hang.
The Obama years weren’t only a disappointment to those of us who did not drink the Kool Aid in the first place; they proved to be a disappointment to the very people Obama had celebrated by declaring that “we are the change we have been waiting for.” And they have been a calamity for Democrats everywhere but in the urban and coastal strongholds, Democrats who had thought they were going to make a career out of elected public service. It is from their ranks that their party is supposed to find its next stars, men and women would use their time in state legislatures to learn the craft of politics and the art of legislating before rising to the governor’s mansion or the House or Senate, and thence, perhaps, to national office. That is how Obama emerged in the early years of this new century.
As it turned out, Barack Obama was a political genius with one unparalleled skill—getting Barack Obama elected and reelected president. For everyone else in his party, and for his party itself, he has been an unmitigated disaster. And now, his decimation of his own electorate has helped to ensure the election of Donald Trump. Out of office in 2017, Barack Obama may have to stand by, impotent, as the legislative and policy advances that were supposed to be his enduring legacy vanish like the thousand elected politicians unfortunate enough to have been serving in office when Barack Obama came along and hollowed out the Democratic Party.
Christopher Wren has been dead nearly 300 years, but St. Paul’s Cathedral still stands. Four years after the end of the Obama presidency, there may be no monument of Barack Obama’s left standing for anyone to look at.
Funny...nothing in there about the huge ammounts of gerrymanding in districts.
Really, it appears that the Republican strategy is:
Run on the platform that government is bad and doesn't work.
Do everything that you can to fullfill that prophecy while in office through obstructing everything.
Profit.
It's a sad state of affairs that running such a dishonest and hurtful campaign is rewarded.
Both parties gerrymander. Open your eyes.
Gerrymandering does nothing for the governorships, the Senate and of course El Presidente.
While that is true, it is also true that the R's benefit more from it, simply becwuse they control more state legislatures. Woupd be the same thing if the D's had control as well.
Homosexuality is the #1 cause of gay marriage.
kronk wrote: Every pizza is a personal sized pizza if you try hard enough and believe in yourself.
sebster wrote: Yes, indeed. What a terrible piece of cultural imperialism it is for me to say that a country shouldn't murder its own citizens
BaronIveagh wrote: Basically they went from a carrot and stick to a smaller carrot and flanged mace.
Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them. The president-elect has begun asking how he could secure high level clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., his three adult children with first wife Ivana, as well as for Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, according to CNN and CBS. All four family members are members of his transition team, though Trump has said his children won’t serve formal roles in his administration but instead will run the family business while he runs the country. “This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.”
It’s unclear exactly whether Trump’s request could even be fulfilled—at least legally. A 1967 law prohibits the president from hiring their immediate family members in the federal government, and to have a security clearance an individual must work the government in some capacity: as a civilian, as a military official or a contractor. “Even if they came in as unpaid advisers, there’s no such thing as an informal government position that allows you to be sponsored for access” to classified information, Moss said. “There’s no exception. There’s no loopholes.” And it would difficult to see how Trump could argue that his children have a “need to know” without a formal government role. “This is not the family business, this is the presidency. The days of family nepotism is over, not just due to policy and practice but by law. Security clearances are not candies to be doled out like at Halloween. You must have a ‘need-to-know’ that is supposed to be taken seriously in advancing the business of the government rather than an individual,” said Mark Zaid, another national security lawyer. But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. Even First Ladies have to be cleared to access that part of the White House, but that doesn’t mean they have access to top-secret areas like the Situation Room, the official said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the clearance process publicly. The level of clearance for people with unescorted access to visit the President in the West Wing is known as “Yankee White,” which could be what Trump is seeking. CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.
If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest. “If President-elect Trump seeks a security clearance for his children, it will show he either has no understanding of the potential conflict of interest problems he faces or doesn’t care,” said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. “If he seeks a security clearance for his children who are running the businesses, it will undermine the credibility of any claim that his children will not be involved in advising him on government policies. It raises the real danger that his children will be able to influence government decisions to benefit Trump businesses and run those businesses with inside knowledge of actions and policies the government take.” During an interview with Trump and his family on 60 Minutes taped last week, Eric Trump said that the children would remain in New York to run their father’s business. “So we’ll— we’ll— we’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business,” the younger Trump said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we’re going to make him very proud.” Ivanka Trump also said that she would not be interested in a formal role in the upcoming administration. “I’m going to be a daughter,” she said when asked about a possible role. “But I’ve— I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.” Interestingly enough, while the law prohibits nepotism, it doesn’t require the president to give up his or her business holdings while serving in the Oval Office. Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story.
uh huh.
I can't wait until it's found out that he is sharimg classified info with his children, and the same people chanting "Lock her up," find a way to justify it.
As long as he doesn't do it through a private email server, he get's a pass.
And we're all paying attention to the fact that Mike Pence is now trying to keep his emails private despite FOIA guidelines, right? What's good for the goose, and all that...
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/11/15 14:23:14
Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them.
The president-elect has begun asking how he could secure high level clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., his three adult children with first wife Ivana, as well as for Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, according to CNN and CBS. All four family members are members of his transition team, though Trump has said his children won’t serve formal roles in his administration but instead will run the family business while he runs the country.
“This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.”
It’s unclear exactly whether Trump’s request could even be fulfilled—at least legally. A 1967 law prohibits the president from hiring their immediate family members in the federal government, and to have a security clearance an individual must work the government in some capacity: as a civilian, as a military official or a contractor.
“Even if they came in as unpaid advisers, there’s no such thing as an informal government position that allows you to be sponsored for access” to classified information, Moss said. “There’s no exception. There’s no loopholes.”
And it would difficult to see how Trump could argue that his children have a “need to know” without a formal government role.
“This is not the family business, this is the presidency. The days of family nepotism is over, not just due to policy and practice but by law. Security clearances are not candies to be doled out like at Halloween. You must have a ‘need-to-know’ that is supposed to be taken seriously in advancing the business of the government rather than an individual,” said Mark Zaid, another national security lawyer.
But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. Even First Ladies have to be cleared to access that part of the White House, but that doesn’t mean they have access to top-secret areas like the Situation Room, the official said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the clearance process publicly. The level of clearance for people with unescorted access to visit the President in the West Wing is known as “Yankee White,” which could be what Trump is seeking.
CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.
If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest.
“If President-elect Trump seeks a security clearance for his children, it will show he either has no understanding of the potential conflict of interest problems he faces or doesn’t care,” said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. “If he seeks a security clearance for his children who are running the businesses, it will undermine the credibility of any claim that his children will not be involved in advising him on government policies. It raises the real danger that his children will be able to influence government decisions to benefit Trump businesses and run those businesses with inside knowledge of actions and policies the government take.”
During an interview with Trump and his family on 60 Minutes taped last week, Eric Trump said that the children would remain in New York to run their father’s business. “So we’ll— we’ll— we’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business,” the younger Trump said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we’re going to make him very proud.”
Ivanka Trump also said that she would not be interested in a formal role in the upcoming administration. “I’m going to be a daughter,” she said when asked about a possible role. “But I’ve— I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.”
Interestingly enough, while the law prohibits nepotism, it doesn’t require the president to give up his or her business holdings while serving in the Oval Office.
Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story.
uh huh.
I can't wait until it's found out that he is sharimg classified info with his children, and the same people chanting "Lock her up," find a way to justify it.
How is it "found out" if they have security clearances?
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them.
The president-elect has begun asking how he could secure high level clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., his three adult children with first wife Ivana, as well as for Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, according to CNN and CBS. All four family members are members of his transition team, though Trump has said his children won’t serve formal roles in his administration but instead will run the family business while he runs the country.
“This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.”
It’s unclear exactly whether Trump’s request could even be fulfilled—at least legally. A 1967 law prohibits the president from hiring their immediate family members in the federal government, and to have a security clearance an individual must work the government in some capacity: as a civilian, as a military official or a contractor.
“Even if they came in as unpaid advisers, there’s no such thing as an informal government position that allows you to be sponsored for access” to classified information, Moss said. “There’s no exception. There’s no loopholes.”
And it would difficult to see how Trump could argue that his children have a “need to know” without a formal government role.
“This is not the family business, this is the presidency. The days of family nepotism is over, not just due to policy and practice but by law. Security clearances are not candies to be doled out like at Halloween. You must have a ‘need-to-know’ that is supposed to be taken seriously in advancing the business of the government rather than an individual,” said Mark Zaid, another national security lawyer.
But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. Even First Ladies have to be cleared to access that part of the White House, but that doesn’t mean they have access to top-secret areas like the Situation Room, the official said, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the clearance process publicly. The level of clearance for people with unescorted access to visit the President in the West Wing is known as “Yankee White,” which could be what Trump is seeking.
CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.
If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest.
“If President-elect Trump seeks a security clearance for his children, it will show he either has no understanding of the potential conflict of interest problems he faces or doesn’t care,” said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. “If he seeks a security clearance for his children who are running the businesses, it will undermine the credibility of any claim that his children will not be involved in advising him on government policies. It raises the real danger that his children will be able to influence government decisions to benefit Trump businesses and run those businesses with inside knowledge of actions and policies the government take.”
During an interview with Trump and his family on 60 Minutes taped last week, Eric Trump said that the children would remain in New York to run their father’s business. “So we’ll— we’ll— we’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business,” the younger Trump said. “I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we’re going to make him very proud.”
Ivanka Trump also said that she would not be interested in a formal role in the upcoming administration. “I’m going to be a daughter,” she said when asked about a possible role. “But I’ve— I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.”
Interestingly enough, while the law prohibits nepotism, it doesn’t require the president to give up his or her business holdings while serving in the Oval Office.
Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story.
uh huh.
I can't wait until it's found out that he is sharimg classified info with his children, and the same people chanting "Lock her up," find a way to justify it.
How is it "found out" if they have security clearances?
And from a legal perspective, POTUS is THE classification authority. He can decide who is/is not cleared when it comes down to it. Not saying it is right, but the legal authority is there. Unlike a Sec State having an uncleared maid handle classified documents, or directing subordinates to go around secure coms and directly type in classified info into an unclass system and leave off markings.
Every time a terrorist dies a Paratrooper gets his wings.
Remember these posts next time "checks and balances" is trotted out for gazillionth time.
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,