REPORT BRIEF IV

THE OMINOUS RAMPAGE TOWARD THE THEOCRATIC DICTATORSHIP

Trump’s Contempt for Democracy Has Reached New Depths By Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick

The president is defying the Constitution amid the crisis with Iran.

President Donald Trump’s Cabinet has long been acting more like a cult than an administration, but its behavior during the recent Iran conflict has plunged to new depths of obsequiousness. If Congress weren’t so passive, we would be on the verge of a constitutional crisis—and the fact that we aren’t may bespeak a deeper crisis still.

A tipping point may have come Wednesday, when senior officials held a closed-door briefing for senators on Trump’s rationale for killing Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Many Democrats—and even a few Republicans—emerged from the briefing disgruntled with its vague generalities and its “insulting” tone.

Only 15 of the 97 senators attending were allowed to ask questions before the officials walked out of the chamber. At one point, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told the lawmakers that so much as questioning the president’s authority to launch such attacks would strengthen our enemies. As Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who supported Trump’s actions, put it, Esper was essentially telling them to be “good little boys and girls and run along and not debate this in public.”

The next day, far from backing away, Trump’s top men doubled down on their claim of total secrecy. Vice President Mike Pence told NBC’s Today show that the senators couldn’t be told some of the “most compelling” intelligence behind the decision to kill Soleimani—not even after the fact—because to do so “could compromise” sources and methods.

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton declared the War Powers Act to be “unconstitutional”—this in response to Democrats (and at least two Republicans) who are pushing a bill barring Trump from ordering further attacks on Iran without permission from Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose slavishness toward Trump is prompting even old friends to shake their heads, praised the president’s speech on Wednesday—a meandering bit of mumblecore—as comparable to Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, which anticipated the end of the Cold War.

From the close sidelines, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, perhaps the only White House press secretary to admit publicly that she had lied and then go on to nab a good-paying job in television, told Fox & Friends, when asked about proposals to apply the War Powers Act to limit Trump’s use of force: “I can’t think of anything dumber than allowing Congress to take over our foreign policy. … The last thing we want is to push powers into Congress’ hands and take them away from the president.”

All of these people claim to be honoring Article II of the Constitution, which defines the president’s executive powers. But they didn’t bow so deeply when Barack Obama or Bill Clinton was president—they’re partisan hacks, not patriots—and, in any case, they act as if Article I, which lays out the powers of Congress, didn’t exist.

War powers are a delicate matter; the Constitution gives both Congress and the president some measure of latitude. But Alexander Hamilton, the most pro-executive of the founders, clarified the distinction: The president shall decide “the direction of war when authorized or begun,” but Congress shall have “the sole power of declaring war.”

In other words, Cotton should read the Constitution before he talks about what it forbids, while Sanders should be careful about whom or what she’s calling “dumb.” . . .

(All ellipses except the last in the original; underscored emphasis added.)

The Courts Can Move Quickly. They’re Slow-Walking Trump Cases on Purpose.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this isn’t a decision.

One thing few people know about the architecture of the U.S. Supreme Court building concerns the turtles. They are built into the lampposts around the exterior courtyard of the building. They are adorable, but they are also meaningful—they are meant to signify the slow deliberative pace of justice. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor liked to call attention to the turtles as emblematic of an institutional virtue in a high-speed world: “They move slowly,” she said, in 2005. “That’s what we do.”

Justices and judges may pride themselves on not being rushed into precipitous action, but the judiciary also has the capacity to move very quickly when circumstances demand it. That’s why it is particularly noteworthy that the current failure to move things along is so advantageous to Donald Trump and his chances for success in the November 2020 election, and also so obviously disadvantaging the Democratic-held House of Representatives. One could be forgiven for starting to wonder whether the courts are taking sides but doing it in a way that looks measured and restrained. The thing is: Sometimes not resolving an exigent case is a decision.

It’s been clear for some time now that the beating heart of this president’s litigation strategy is an effort to run out the clock on issues ranging from the subpoenas of his financial records to his blanket refusals to permit anyone in his ambit to testify before Congress. As the New York Times’ Charlie Savage put it in November: “Like a football team up late in a game whose defense hangs back to prevent big plays while letting its opponent make shorter gains, Mr. Trump’s legal team is looking to run out the clock, putting forth aggressive legal theories often backed by scant precedent. The strategy risks periodic bad headlines in the short term and could lead to definitive rulings that hamstring future presidents—but it is demonstrably advantageous for consuming time.” Indeed, when House Democrats essentially opted to give up on any hope for relief in the federal courts because, as Adam Schiff put it last fall, “we are not willing to go the months and months and months of rope-a-dope in the courts, which the administration would love to do,” the decision was taken to mean Democrats had given up on witness testimony altogether in the House proceedings. They hadn’t, but that statement may well come back to haunt Senate Democrats who now are facing the prospect of a trial without additional witness testimony of any sort. Having opted not to wait for court rulings requiring testimony from Don McGahn and John Bolton, the door now may have closed on the opportunity to hear from them voluntarily.

What’s stunning is the degree to which the courts are complicit in all this. The courts have aided and abetted the Trump legal team and Mitch McConnell by refusing to behave as if time is a factor in any of these proceedings. That’s evident in the decision to docket a pair of financial records cases no earlier than March and the meandering pace of the gamesmanship around a case seeking to end the Affordable Care Act through judicial fiat. But the real coup de grâce was the failure of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts to resolve congressional subpoenas around the impeachment process with alacrity when it was altogether plain what was needed. Had the courts signaled a willingness to act at a pace befitting the needs of the moment, Schiff might have made a different choice. Sometimes the appearance of studied deliberation serves nihilism and chaos, even as it pretends at neutrality and institutionalism. . . (Underscored emphasis added.)

These reports speak volumes! Note the credentials of Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick. The Theocrats are rampaging towards the final prophetic events!