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brooklyn13, Or maybe they just care about Israel's overreaction and aren't as happy with the Greater Israel agenda of the worst of the Zionists and of the worst of the Israeli West Bank settlers. Maybe some of those students work two jobs and go into debt to get themselves a higher education.
It's not funny that you go for the all negative around people working and feeling hopefully
positive about more justice, even peace, in the Middle East. It's a bit sickening actually.
"Maybe it's me, but I can't tell if you actually are this dense or just pretend to be for your fans."
Yes. It is you. And your projection again there is noted.
LOL TT Y/W, it was tough work but got him there. That's great for Tory Taylor
"“When I first came over here I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to have fun and see what happens,'” Taylor said. “After a year or so, my coach said you can really be something pretty special. It wasn’t really anything that I thought about too much. I’d always known that I had a big leg. I’ve had one pretty crazy journey, but it just really shows if you just put in the hard work usually good things prevail.”"
I didn't either.
U.S. House votes down border bill favored by conservatives
"COVID B402, Trump’s Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration"
Security bill – nearly identical to legislation House Republicans passed last year –
was an attempt by House Speaker Johnson to quell growing hard-right dissatisfaction
By: Ariana Figueroa - April 21, 2024 9:30 am
U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson
U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks during a news conference after a weekly Republican conference meeting in the U.S. Capitol Building on Nov. 14, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House on Saturday failed to pass a border security bill that Republican leadership intended as an incentive for conservatives to support a foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The border bill, turned down on a 215-199 .. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2024143 .. vote, was brought to the floor under a fast-track procedure known as suspension of the rules that requires a two-thirds majority for passage. The conservatives it was meant to appeal to slammed it as a “show vote.”
Five Democrats, Donald G. Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Mary Peltola of Alaska and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, voted with all Republicans present in favor of the bill.
The border security bill – nearly identical to legislation House Republicans passed last year – was an attempt by House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana to quell growing hard-right dissatisfaction .. https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/us-house-heads-toward-saturday-vote-95b-aid-israel-ukraine-taiwan .. prompted by his support for the $95 billion foreign aid package expected to pass Saturday with the help of Democrats ..https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/us-house-heads-toward-saturday-vote-95b-aid-israel-ukraine-taiwan .
The measure is separate and not part of a package of three supplemental funding bills containing aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as another so-called sidecar bill dealing with TikTok. The Senate will be able to clear the foreign aid package and ignore the border security bill that closely resembles another House-passed border bill the Senate has not acted on.
[Insert: George Will wakes up to see his monster
[...]"We have defined heroism so far down that it encompasses Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) allowing a House vote on assisting Ukrainians’ resistance to indiscriminate bombardments of population centers, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture and the abduction of children."
P - And by "We", he means "Republicans." 112 Republicans VOTED to look the other way on bombardments, ethnic cleansing, rape, torture, and the abduction of children.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174304246
.. and ..
How Mike Johnson Got to ‘Yes’ on Aid to Ukraine
"About bloody time - Ukraine Aid Bill Clears Critical Hurdle in the House as Democrats Supply the Votes
"Putin's irrationality meant no one could have prevented war: Canada's envoy to Ukraine""
[...]As a rank-and-file hard-liner, Mr. Johnson had largely opposed efforts to fund Kyiv’s war effort. And early in his speakership, he declared he would never allow the matter to come to a vote until his party’s border demands were met.
[...]One of the most impactful briefings, according to people familiar with the discussions, came in February in the Oval Office .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/us/politics/biden-congress-shutdown.html , when congressional leaders met with Mr. Biden to discuss government funding and aid for Ukraine. At that meeting, Mr. Burns and other top national security officials sought to impress upon Mr. Johnson how rapidly Ukraine was running out of ammunition, and how dire the consequences would be if their air defenses were no longer reinforced by American weaponry.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174286647]
Rather than quell their unrest, Johnson’s move produced only more ire from hard-right members. Three Republicans – Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona – are already backing a move to oust Johnson through a motion to vacate.
During Friday’s floor debate, Democrats argued that the bill, H.R. 3602 .. https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240415/RCP_3602_j_xml.pdf , was a rehash of H.R. 2 .. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2 , a bill House Republicans passed last year that would reinstate Trump-era immigration policies such as the construction of the border wall. Both bills would also require asylum seekers to remain in Mexico.
Border bill return
Republicans were largely in favor of the border bill, but several referred to the vote as a “sham” and admitted the bill would not pass in the Senate, which Democrats control.
“House Republicans are trying again to make our Democrat colleagues and President Biden take this border crisis seriously,” Alabama’s Barry Moore said.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler of New York, said the bill was a “foolhardy attempt to pass for a second time one of the most draconian immigration bills this Congress has ever seen. This rehashing of H.R. 2 is a joke.”
“Republicans have proven that they want the issue more than they want solutions,” he said. “So here we are, again, taking a virtually same draconian bill as before, knowing that if it actually passes the House it will surely go nowhere in the Senate.”
Nadler argued if Republicans were serious about addressing immigration at the southern border, they would have supported the bipartisan border bill in the Senate, instead of rejecting it.
[Let me be more specific--Trump controlled the border MORE than Biden has. Not totally closed, but 1.8 million (Trump first 3 years) vs. 8.3 million migrants (first 3 years of Biden).
Hmmm....which is a better number for tax payers?
How mysterious, then, that when the Senate and House were presented with a tough bipartisan border bill, Trumpty told them not to bring it to a vote. And they obliged.
Contemptible.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174112859]
Three senators – Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy and Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema – spent months crafting a bill that would overhaul immigration policy at the request of Senate Republicans who insisted border security provisions should be included in the foreign aid package.
[ Senate Republicans block bipartisan border security deal
by Alexander Bolton - 02/07/24 3:03 PM ET
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday against advancing a bipartisan border security deal that was part of a larger emergency foreign aid package to fund the war in Ukraine, Israel and Indo-Pacific security.
P - A motion to proceed to the package failed by a vote of 49-50, with most of the Senate GOP conference voting against it. Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), James Lankford (Okla.) and Mitt Romney (Utah) voted to advance the measure.
P - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voted no, citing opposition to $10 billion in military aid to Israel given the deaths of more than 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Democratic Sens. Ed Markey (Mass.), Bob Menendez (N.J.), Alex Padilla (Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) also voted no.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4453955-senate-republicans-block-bipartisan-border-security-deal/ ]
But congressional Republicans walked away from it .. https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/02/06/bleak-future-for-immigration-action-after-u-s-senate-gop-abandons-border-security-deal/ .. early this year at the urging of GOP presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, who was not supportive of the bill because he is centering his reelection campaign on immigration.
The chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, argued that the bill “isn’t quite H.R. 2.”
The bill is nearly identical to H.R. 2, but removes the mandate for employers to verify a worker’s immigration status and employment eligibility, and includes about $9 billion in grant programs for border states.
“Let’s take a step in the direction of fixing it and pass this legislation,” Jordan said of the southern border.
A ‘sham’ of an immigration bill
Washington state Democrat and chair of the Progressive Congressional Caucus Pramila Jayapal said the bill was pointless.
“The majority could barely pass this legislation last year,” she said, referring to the party-line vote in 2023. “And now it’s going to magically pass it in the House with a two-thirds majority? Give me a break. This bill is going nowhere, so let’s just be clear about that.”
Texas Republican Chip Roy agreed that the bill would not become law, and expressed his frustration that the GOP would not try to leverage foreign aid money for it.
“Republicans continue to campaign on securing the border and then refuse to use any leverage to actually secure the border,” Roy said. “We should get it signed into law but the only way to force Democrats to do it is to use leverage.”
Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs also agreed with Roy and Democrats that “this is a show vote.”
Pennsylvania’s GOP Rep. Scott Perry echoed similar remarks, but said he would still vote for the bill even though it’s “designed to fail.”
“But I want everybody to know it’s a sham,” Perry said.
https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/04/21/u-s-house-votes-down-border-bill-favored-by-conservatives/
There is no question about who is the dam against further sw border reform --damn Trump is the dam.
conix, Let us be more specific -- COVID. B402, Trump’s Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration
[...]
In fact, the arrow is pointing to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled from that pandemic low and were higher than the month he took office.
[...]
As we have written, apprehensions at the southwest border .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters , were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.
[Insert: Actually that is the only stat anyone need remember in
answer to Trump and his supporters' sw border misinformation.]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174317040
So apprehensions in Trump's last year about 15% higher than in Obama's last year.
That's all you have to remember so that you can tell the truth about the border here.
Of course you would feel like a shower after it, still it would be bloody good for you.
COVID. B402, Trump’s Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration
By Robert Farley
Posted on April 4, 2024
All links
During a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin, former President Donald Trump pointed to a chart on apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border.
“See the arrow on the bottom? That was my last week in office,” Trump said. “That was the lowest number in history.” But Trump was wrong on both points.
In fact, the arrow is pointing to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled from that pandemic low and were higher than the month he took office.
Also, April 2020 was not the lowest point in history. The lowest since 2000 came in April 2017, shortly after Trump took office and before an ensuing spike.
As we have written, apprehensions at the southwest border .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters , were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.
[Insert: Actually that is the only stat anyone need remember in
answer to Trump and his supporters' sw border misinformation.]
Trump’s Chart
During his speech in Green Bay on April 2, Trump claimed to have “fixed” the border when he was president.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on
April 2 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Photo by Scott
Olson/Getty Images.
“When I came in, I built 571 miles of wall, we had 200 miles sitting there waiting to be erected, far more than I said I was going to build,” Trump said .. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5112641/user-clip-trumps-immigration-chart .
Actually, a total of 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the Trump administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection status report .. https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/CBP-Border-Wall-Status-Paper_as-of-01222021-FINAL-003.pdf .. on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before. Including barriers that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers, covering about 36% of the total southwest border. That is far less than the 1,000-mile-long wall that Trump promised during the 2016 campaign.
Trump then had campaign aides put up a chart showing monthly border apprehensions going back to 2012. You can see the chart in the background of the C-SPAN video, but here .. https://americasbestpics.com/picture/illegal-immigration-into-the-u-s-300k-270k-240k-210k-1HFBZnCLB .. it is:
“See that low spot,” Trump said, pointing to the red arrow at the bottom of the chart. “This is illegal migrants coming into our country. See the arrow on the bottom? That was my last week in office. That was the lowest number in history.”
Had President Joe Biden “just left everything alone, he might have gone down as a decent president, at least on the border,” Trump said. “But on the border, look at that number, that number is so much lower than anything else. And then look at the right of that number. That’s what happened after I left. It was an invasion of our country.”
“It’s an amazing chart actually,” Trump said. “It’s a Border Patrol chart. But look at that low number, got it down to practically nothing.”
Trump repeated the claim in an April 4 interview with Hugh Hewitt, saying .. https://hughhewitt.com/former-president-donald-trump-on-israels-war-2024-and-much-more?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email , “We had the safest border in history, and you saw that chart that was released a couple days ago where literally the day I left office, we had the lowest number in history.”
The data in the chart itself are accurate, but the Trump campaign editorial notes are not.
The red arrow at the bottom purports to correspond to the point that “Trump leaves office” and to be the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history!” But the arrow actually points to April 2020, when there were 16,182 apprehensions at the southwest border.
April 2020 was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout that month, the U.S. was under Trump administration guidelines recommending people stay at home and away from one another to slow the spread of the disease.
“Any complete reading of what took place at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2020 would have to note the emergence of a global pandemic that dramatically chilled mobility of all forms in its early phase,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “That is not a factor listed on the chart below, best I can tell.”
“The pandemic was responsible for a near-complete halt to all forms of global mobility in 2020, due to a combination of border restrictions imposed by countries around the world (we recorded more than 43,000 travel measures taken by countries between January and May 2020 alone, lockdowns, and the shutdown of aviation and other transportation routes),” Mittelstadt said.
As the chart shows, after apprehensions reached a pandemic low in April 2020, they rose every month after that. By the actual end of Trump’s presidency, apprehensions of immigrants attempting to cross illegally had risen to 71,141 in December 2020 and to 75,316 in January 2021, Trump’s last month in office.
Border Wasn’t ‘Fixed’
In recent speeches, Trump has claimed he fixed the border so completely during his presidency, that it was no longer a campaign issue in 2020.
“I was saying the other day that in 2016, one of the biggest issues was the border,” Trump said during a speech in Ohio on March 16. “And I sort of won on the border, I guess, maybe. And we fixed the border. We fixed it so good that I couldn’t even use it in 2020, even though we got millions and millions more votes in 2020, but we couldn’t even talk about it. I’d say, ‘I want to talk about the border. Tell them what a good job.’ They said, ‘Sir, you fixed it. Nobody cares.’”
In reality, apprehensions at the border in Trump’s final two months in office were substantially higher than in President Barack Obama’s last two months in office. (Apprehensions were .. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2020-Jan/U.S.%20Border%20Patrol%20Monthly%20Apprehensions%20%28FY%202000%20-%20FY%202019%29_1.pdf .. 43,251 in December 2016 and 31,576 in January 2017, the last two months of the Obama presidency, compared with 71,141 and 75,316 in Trump’s last two months.) Indeed, there were more than 69,000 apprehensions .. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters in each of the last four months of the Trump administration, from October 2020 through January 2021. But the highest number of apprehensions under Obama was 67,342 in March 2009.
And as we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers .. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/trumps-final-numbers/ ,” illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year of Obama’s term.
Given that, had Obama “fixed” the border? Not according to Donald Trump in 2016. Then, he repeatedly called the border “broken” and made fixing it his primary campaign promise.
We have described the roller-coaster of illegal immigration during Trump’s time in office. The number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly from a monthly .. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2020-Jan/U.S.%20Border%20Patrol%20Monthly%20Apprehensions%20%28FY%202000%20-%20FY%202019%29_1.pdf .. low of 11,127 in April 2017 shortly after he took office to a high of 132,856 in May 2019.
The number of apprehensions peaked for Trump in mid-2019, and the year ended with the highest number of apprehensions since Fiscal Year 2007. In response to rising levels of apprehensions, Trump issued several policies to reduce immigration flows, including measures to restrict eligibility for asylum ... https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/12/migrants-asylum-tougher-guidelines/ .. and return non-Mexican asylum seekers who cross the southwest border to Mexico while their claims work their way through immigration courts (the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program). Correspondingly, apprehensions dropped steadily through the second half of 2019 and into 2020.
And then, when the pandemic hit, apprehensions dropped even more dramatically in April and May 2020. In response to the pandemic, Trump put into place a series of policies aimed at blocking migration to the U.S., including one that allowed Border Patrol agents to quickly expel .. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-restricts-immigration-amid-the-pandemic-critics-see-it-as-an-excuse-to-push-his-own-agenda .. any illegal immigrants they stopped, without allowing them access to the asylum process. Nonetheless, apprehensions increased throughout the second half of 2020.
To be sure, illegal immigration soared after Biden took office, as the chart shows even without cherry-picking the pandemic low. According to our latest update to “Biden’s Numbers .. https://www.factcheck.org/2024/01/bidens-numbers-january-2024-update/ ” in late January, apprehensions for the 12 months ending in November were 296% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.
We discussed some of the reasons for that dramatic increase, including not only high levels of migration around the world due to political and economic turmoil in other countries, but also the perception that Biden was more welcoming of migrants.
But illegal immigration was not “down to practically nothing” in the weeks or months before Trump left office. It was down to nearly nothing during the stay-at-home phase of the pandemic.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/04/trumps-misleading-chart-on-illegal-immigration/
Who are you voting for? For "Voting for closing the borders" - a stupid, disingenuous, empty conservative slogan -- Trump
and his MAGAs are blocking the present bipartisan bill. Who are you voting for? Who. Trump for the 3rd time, eh.
You missed a croc
Just a typical day at the course in New Orleans 🫣🐊pic.twitter.com/852ZQecOSN
— Golf on CBS ⛳ (@GolfonCBS) April 27, 2024
“For the Ages”: The Supreme Court Hears the Presidential Immunity Defense
"Judge Rejects Trump’s Effort to Delay Jan. 6 Civil Cases"
Related: You're just learning about all that now? Have you been asleep since the Reagan years? Weren't you the one who was cheering on the Trump millionaire tax cuts while we watched the middle class get screwed? Aren't you the one who belongs to a party who's hellbent on getting rid of the Dept of Education who refuses to teach civics classes because they want to keep our kids in the dark about how the government should work? Now you're bitching about the result of every single thing you've advocated and voted for your entire life.🤡
P - this Supreme Court is making my fucking head explode — again any sane SCOTUS would have quickly slapped Trump down
[...]any sane Supreme Court would have quickly slapped Trump with a writ of go fuck yourself, and we’d be having a DC trial right now. but we don’t have a sane Court. we have four bought-and-paid for Federalist Society hacks who sit snugly in the pocket of the plutocrats who tell them how to vote — and we have Neil Gorsuch, who just fucking hates government and is deliberately out to create as much chaos as possible.
P - so this Supreme Court said hmm, laws are bullshit and Donny should be allowed to crime all he wants? yeah, we should def look into this.
P - sigh.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174312374
Matt Gluck, Hyemin Han, Quinta Jurecic, Natalie K. Orpett, Roger Parloff, Alan Z. Rozenshtein
Friday, April 26, 2024, 9:19 PM
How oral arguments in Trump v. United States zoomed way out, and where the Court may go from here
The Supreme Court of the United States. (Photo by Hyemin Han. All rights reserved.)
Matt Gluck @matthew_gluck, Hyemin Han @hyeminjhan, Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic,
Natalie K. Orpett @nkorpett, Roger Parloff @rparloff, Alan Z. Rozenshtein @ARozenshtein
Meet The Authors .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/for-the-ages-the-supreme-court-hears-the-presidential-immunity-defense#postContributors
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings
Subscribe to Lawfare .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/subscribe
All links
On April 25, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the case arising from the Special Counsel’s Office’s decision to charge former president Donald Trump for his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump has argued that he is absolutely immune from the charges brought by the Justice Department because, he asserts, they target his official presidential conduct. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected Trump’s argument .. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24604649-chutkan-memorandum-opinion_immunity?responsive=1&title=1 .. that he enjoys absolute criminal immunity for his official acts, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed that ruling .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/d.c.-circuit-rules-trump-is-not-immune-from-prosecution .
Despite the nearly three hours of oral argument, only a portion of that time was spent on the particulars of the Jan. 6 case or its procedural posture. That’s because the justices were, as Justice Gorsuch put it, writing a ruling “for the ages.” The Court grappled with the distinction between private acts and official acts—everyone seemed to agree that private acts could be prosecuted—and then wrestled with which subset of official acts, if any, could be prosecuted. Several justices further focused on which criminal statutes can apply to the president without conflicting with his Article II powers. There did not appear to be much consensus on these questions, and the justices seem poised to issue a splintered decision rejecting Trump’s maximalist arguments, while establishing at least some presidential criminal immunity for at least some types of official acts.
[Insert: Impulse reaction WOW. It appears the presidential can/could in his/her official capacity act criminally. Sanctioned
by the Supreme Court of the United States. I hope that impulse reaction of mine is tempered in consideration
of the further reading below. It feels Alito and others here are taking America down a very dangerous
authoritarian path. Dangerous to democracy in America. Dangerous to democracy worldwide. ]
The Court could send the case down several different paths to resolve and eventually move past the immunity issue, but none is likely to lead to a quick resumption of the trial in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom.
The Advocates
Up first was D. John Sauer, Donald Trump’s appellate attorney who has twice represented the former president at the D.C. Circuit. Before joining Trump’s team in 2023, he was the solicitor general of Missouri and Missouri’s deputy attorney general for special litigation. He is a former law clerk to Judge J. Michael Luttig on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and to the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Sauer sketched out the argument in existential terms. “Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution,” he began .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=4 , “there can be no presidency as we know it.” He stressed that the executive must have broad, unfettered discretion, free from fear of reprisals by political opponents at the end of his term. An “energetic executive,” said Sauer, is a key component of “securing liberty” in the American tradition. To allow former presidents to be charged and prosecuted after leaving office would have a distorting effect on the president’s decision-making abilities “precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed.” Sauer portrayed this vision of a strong executive as the status quo from which the nation would be dangerously departing if the Court denied Trump’s claims of absolute immunity for official acts.
Pushed by the justices, Sauer repeated maximalist positions he had taken in the courts below. In response to a question from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, he averred that a president’s ordering the assassination of a rival could be an official act. Likewise, in response to Justice Elena Kagan, he said that a president’s ordering a military coup to prolong his term of office might also be an official act. Asked by Kagan about a president who sold nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, he conceded that .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=41 .. such a president was “likely not immune,” but, if the sale was “structured as an official act,” the president would first have to be impeached and convicted by the Senate before he could be prosecuted.
At the same time, when pressed, Sauer seemed to embrace certain fallback positions. In questioning by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, he seemed to welcome having the case sent back to a lower court to apply the standards proposed by Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas in his concurring opinion in Blassingame v. Trump .. https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/A3464AEB2C1CB89985258A7800537E73/$file/22-5069-2029472.pdf [can't fix the error link]. He proposed, however, that if the case were to be sent back, it should be subjected to a “two-stage determination” of what was private versus what was public. By that, he meant an initial survey of the allegations of the indictment itself followed by what he called “a factual proceeding.”
All this tracked the line of reasoning Trump’s team had advanced at the lower courts. But an issue that took up a fair amount of time was the so-called clear statement principle—which had not been briefed as part of the immunity question either before Judge Chutkan or the D.C. Circuit. (Trump had raised another clear statement problem .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24176126/govuscourtsdcd2581491630.pdf .. in a different motion to dismiss before Judge Chutkan—one that Chutkan has not ruled upon yet.) While Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether Trump hadn’t forfeited the issue by not raising it earlier, Sauer protested that the Supreme Court’s broad wording of its own “question presented” brought the issue into play. As Trump argued in his merits brief, that principle holds that, absent a clear statement, criminal laws that apply to everyday citizens do not apply to the president’s official acts. Each of the statutes in Smith’s indictment—18 U.S.C. § 371, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k), 18 U.S.C. §§ 1512(c)(2) and 2, and 18 U.S.C. § 241—lack a clear statement explicitly applying them to the president. (Only two or three criminal statutes in the entire U.S. Code do specify expressly that they apply to presidents, as Justice Barrett later pointed out.) Thus, according to Sauer, they cannot be used to criminally prosecute a president’s official acts.
Despite not having been raised below,[ many justices seemed inclined to address the “clear statement” principle—especially Justice Brett Kavanaugh—and even the special counsel’s attorney, Dreeben, conceded that the Court had the power to do so. (That the Court would have to decide this issue is the position .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/why-the-supreme-court-should-grant-certiorari-in-united-states-v.-trump .. that Jack Goldsmith advanced in Lawfare .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-core-issues-in-trump-v.-united-states-one-road-map .. leading up to oral argument, for which Marty Lederman offered a countervailing view .. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-insignificance-of-trump-s-immunity-from-prosecution-argument .)
After Sauer, veteran Supreme Court advocate Michael R. Dreeben had his turn on behalf of the special counsel Jack Smith and the Justice Department—which took up about 65 percent of the total argument time. Dreeben, a former deputy solicitor general who oversaw the Justice Department’s criminal docket at the Supreme Court, is also a special counsel mainstay, having been enlisted by special counsel Robert Muller to assist with the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He first appeared as a part of special counsel Jack Smith’s team last December, when Smith motioned for expedited review .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24213492/petition-for-cert.pdf .. of the issue by the Supreme Court (which it ended up denying).
Dreeben’s opening remarks .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=68 .. offered a counterbalance to Sauer’s vision of a strong executive. “This court has never recognized absolute criminal immunity for any public official,” he observed. Trump’s “novel theory would immunize former presidents from criminal liability for bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and, here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power.”
[ ]
The reason presidential immunity had no foundation in the Constitution, he said, was that “[t]he Framers knew too well the dangers of a king who could do no wrong.” Dreeben characterized Article III courts and the criminal justice system as the “ultimate check” on the president’s power, a key part of the “carefully balanced framework” of checks and balances that permeate the U.S. system of governance.
Under questioning from the justices, Dreeben emphasized that such safeguards would adequately defend against improper prosecutions and curtail concerns about a “chilling” effect that criminal liability for official acts might have on the presidency. The president is protected from a due process standpoint, said Dreeben, by ethical canons guiding federal prosecutors, grand juries, doctrines barring selective and vindictive prosecutions, and recognized defenses like the public authority defense and entrapment by estoppel.
And at any rate, Dreeben argued, many of the acts alleged in the indictment—concocting fraudulent elector slates, working to create false certifications for electors, and so on—constitute personal conduct or, in the terms of the Blassingame court, the conduct of an office-seeker as opposed to that of an office-holder. Such acts are not “official” at all. The use of official powers in a private scheme to achieve a private end—namely, seeking to remain in power after having lost the election—“illustrates the abuse of public office .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=117 .. for private gain that [the government believes] is paradigmatic of the kinds of things that should be not held to be immune.”
But Dreeben, like Sauer, also ended up spending much time clarifying the clear statement conundrum and other related considerations at the behest of the justices. The government’s position ended up being that the Court could, and probably should, reach the question of whether enforcement of congressional statutes against a former president is appropriate, as a part of its process in reaching an “intelligent decision” on the question of immunity. The latter half of Dreeben’s time was consumed by farther afield questions—like whether the appropriate amount of protection to give the president comes in a lack of prosecution or more significant protections during trial and interlocutory appeal. Such inquiries underscored what became clear by the end of oral argument: At least some justices were most interested not in the immediate question of Trump’s trial, but rather, in putting together an opinion that might withstand the test of time.
What the Justices Asked
Justice Clarence Thomas
As is the Court’s practice, Justice Thomas began each round of questioning. And as is typical for Thomas, he left most of the questioning to his colleagues. The several questions he asked concentrated on the broad nature of presidential immunity—in particular, the distinction between official and private acts.
Thomas opened the justices’ questioning by asking Sauer about where he would locate within the Constitution the presidential immunity Trump claims to possess, which allowed Sauer to lay out the general construct of Trump’s case—citing Article II’s Vesting Clause, which provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Thomas then asked Sauer how the Court should determine the nature of an official act versus a private act and, relatedly, how it should distinguish between presidential conduct and the president’s conduct as a candidate.
These queries gave Sauer an opportunity to spell out Trump’s theories on these key components of the case. He argued that the Court should rely for its official v. private conduct determination on Nixon v. Fitzgerald .. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/731/ —in which the Court held that absolute presidential immunity extends throughout the “outer perimeter” of the president’s duties, and that it should conduct an “objective” analysis of whether the president is acting as president or candidate in particular circumstances. The D.C. Circuit in Blassingame described this .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24179894/immunityopinion120123-blassingame.pdf%23page=35 .. “objective” test as a “context-specific assessment of the ‘nature of the function performed.’”
Turning to Dreeben, Thomas sought to identify the boundary of the Justice Department’s argument—asking whether the government thinks presidential immunity covers official conduct, even if it doesn’t cover private activities. Dreeben responded that .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=70 .. there is no blanket immunity for official acts, but that the president “can assert as-applied Article II objections to criminal laws that interfere with an exclusive power possessed by the president or that prevent the president from accomplishing his constitutionally assigned functions.” Dreeben also noted that the government does not believe blanket immunity is required to enable the president to fulfill the duties of the office. Thomas also asked Dreeben why, if immunity for official conduct does not exist, former presidents have not previously been prosecuted. Dreeben’s answer was simple: There have been zero appropriately prosecutable crimes.
Chief Justice John Roberts
The chief justice revealed a limited amount about his thinking, but he drew out at least two key points. First, he posed a hypothetical to which the discussion would return again and again over the course of arguments: If a president appoints an ambassador—clearly an official act—but does so in exchange for a bribe, how do you analyze the question? Because it is undisputed that the bribery statute applies to the president—Congress said so expressly in the legislative text—Roberts’s hypothetical challenged Sauer’s argument that official acts must be “expunged” from an indictment of a former president. If a prosecutor is forbidden from describing the ambassador’s appointment in the indictment, all that is left is a payment; it is impossible to allege bribery without explaining that the payment was in exchange for an ambassadorial appointment.
Expressing his concern with the D.C. Circuit’s immunity decision, Roberts described his view .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=74 .. of the court’s main holding during an exchange with Dreeben: “As I read it, [the D.C. Circuit opinion] says simply a former president can be prosecuted because he’s being prosecuted.” Roberts said he believed the decision was “tautologically true,” but that’s generally not the kind of truth courts seek in their decisions. Dreeben, after saying that Roberts’s characterization of the D.C. Circuit’s holding is not “the proper approach in this case [and] certainly not the government’s approach,” still went on to defend the judgment. Chief Justice Roberts appeared concerned that the D.C. Circuit’s approach would produce insufficient immunity safeguards for the presidency. He said that it would make the president’s protection in the criminal context largely reliant on good-faith prosecutors. Roberts also criticized the lower court for not sufficiently engaging with the specific acts at issue.
Justice Samuel Alito
For much of the argument, Justice Alito seemed concerned about the practical effects of absolute immunity on the functioning of the presidency. Initially, he questioned Sauer .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=21 .. as to “whether the very robust form of immunity that you’re advocating is really necessary” in order to allow the president to perform the duties of the office, as Sauer argued. At one point Alito suggested a rule under which immunity would not extend to acts for which “no plausible justification could be imagined” for the act’s official character.
But the justice also asked Dreeben about how the absence of immunity might negatively affect not only the presidency but the country as a whole. “[P]residents have to make a lot of tough decisions about enforcing the law,” he said—doesn’t that put them in a “peculiarly precarious position” if they might face prosecution after leaving office on the basis of decisions made “about questions that are unsettled” and based on potentially limited information? (Dreeben responded that the president also has unique “access to legal advice about everything that he does,” and is bound “to be faithful to the laws of the United States and the Constitution of the United States.”)
What’s more, wouldn’t the possibility of criminal prosecution create an incentive for presidents to “pardon themselves from anything that they might have been conceivably charged with committing” on the way out of the Oval Office—particularly given the possibility of bad actors within the Justice Department who might be out to get the former president? (“I really doubt that, Justice Alito,” said Dreeben.) The justice also worried that the criminal prosecution of former presidents might “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy,” seemingly suggesting that incumbents would be incentivized to cling to power by antidemocratic means in order to avoid potential prosecution.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
One of the strangest moments during oral arguments before the D.C. Circuit involved Sauer’s insistence that a former president would be immune from prosecution even if he had ordered Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival. Justice Sotomayor’s first question gave Sauer the opportunity to take another crack at that hypothetical: If the president orders the military to murder a rival, she asked .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=10 , “is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” Sauer stuck to his guns:[color=red] “[T]hat could well be an official act,” he said.[/color]
The justice made an equally dramatic point later in oral arguments, responding to Justice Alito’s concerns about less-than-scrupulous officials within the Justice Department who might be motivated to pursue politically motivated prosecutions. “A stable democratic society needs the good faith of its public officials,” she argued .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=113 , explaining—in the form of rhetorical questions posed to Dreeben—that if that good faith and adherence to law fails, “it's because we destroyed our democracy on our own, isn't it?”
Less dramatically, Sotomayor also pondered how jury instructions might function on remand, along with the reasoning behind the clear statement rule. In a colloquy with Dreeben, she suggested that the separation-of-powers concerns animating the rule might not be implicated by lawbreaking activity, because it is “[H]ard to imagine that a president who breaks the law is faithfully executing the law” as required under Article II—and therefore, no Article II powers would be conceivably infringed upon. She also argued that overreliance on the clear statement rule to avoid applying criminal law to the president would make the possibility of prosecution after impeachment meaningless.
Justice Elena Kagan
Much of Justice Kagan’s discussion with the advocates was a series of line-drawing exercises about private versus official acts and the boundaries around core executive powers.
She began by asking Sauer whether several of Trump’s actions alleged in the indictment were official or private acts. These included endorsing false election fraud allegations and a lawsuit based on false allegations against the Georgia governor (Sauer conceded unofficial); calling the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee to ask her to gather electors and falsely claiming that the Trump campaign was only planning to use them if ongoing litigation in one of the states shifted the election in Trump’s favor (Sauer said official); asking the Arizona house speaker to call the legislature into session to hold a hearing on Trump’s alleged election fraud (Sauer said official). Justice Kagan also asked Sauer whether a president would be immune from prosecution for ordering the military to stage a coup or for selling nuclear secrets. Sauer said that in both cases, it would depend, prompting Kagan to reply, “that sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan also had two salient notes in her exchange with Sauer: that the framers did not include an immunity clause in the Constitution even though they could have and that Office of Legal Counsel opinions guarantee immunity for sitting presidents, not former presidents.
With Dreeben, Justice Kagan sought primarily to understand the logic of the government’s immunity framework. Kagan began by asking Dreeben to clarify precisely what he views as the president’s core executive functions before moving to the level below: non-core, but still official, acts. Kagan asked Dreeben why the president can be tried and convicted of crimes in the parts of the bribery statute that do not explicitly mention the president (read: please spell out a narrower conception of the clear statement rule than the one that my colleagues have articulated so far). Dreeben said that a clear statement of application to the president is only required when the president needs to engage in the relevant conduct to carry out the duties of the presidency. In this case, the president does not need to bribe people to perform presidential duties, so no clear statement needed.
Justice Kagan also stepped back and asked Dreeben whether the Court should reach the clear statement rule, as she did not view it as being directly implicated by the present case. Dreeben said the Court can reach the issue even though addressing it would not be required to resolve the case. Kagan concluded her exchange with Dreeben by discussing whether the charges against Trump fall into the official or private bucket. Unsurprisingly, Dreeben rejected Sauer’s arguments that several of the acts alleged in the indictment are official ones. Kagan then asked Dreeben whether the removal of a Justice Department official flows from the president’s core executive power. Dreeben said that is official but non-core conduct.
Justice Neil Gorsuch
Broad questions about the nature of presidential immunity clearly occupied Justice Gorsuch’s focus during oral arguments. Gorsuch said at one point .. .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=136 .. that he was “not concerned about this case,” and at another, that the Court would be .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=141 .. “writing a rule … for the ages.” Justice Gorsuch worked to establish common ground between Sauer and Dreeben—especially related to Blassingame. He asked both advocates if they accepted Blassingame’s test for determining whether conduct was private or official, which both lawyers said was broadly right.
But Gorsuch focused most intently on clarifying the scope of which functions fit within the president’s “core” executive powers that Congress cannot criminalize and determining whether the president’s motives can undercut the protections for core powers. Gorsuch asked Dreeben whether the president leading a mostly peaceful protest that disrupts congressional proceedings would qualify as a core power that Congress could not criminalize. Dreeben said it would not be a core power, but that the activity likely would not be prosecuted. On the issue of the president’s “motives,” Gorsuch asked Dreeben whether a prosecutor could cite “bad motives” on the part of the president to overcome the separation-of-powers obstacles to prosecuting the president for the exercise of his core duties, to which Dreeben replied “maybe.” Seemingly concerned about constraining the presidency, Gorsuch also expressed support for the clear statement rule and worried out loud that narrowing presidential immunity significantly might incentivize .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=49 .. the president to “pardon himself every … four years from now on.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh
As a veteran of the Starr investigation and the White House Counsel’s office in the George W. Bush administration, Justice Kavanaugh’s extensive executive branch experience clearly overlaid his questioning. After the 2008 election, Kavanaugh had written in a law review article .. https://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Kavanaugh_MLR.pdf .. about the separation of powers that it was “a good time to attempt to discern some lessons for the forty-fourth and future presidencies.” He seemed to think the present was still a good time to continue to flesh out a vision of the nature of the presidency: “[T]his case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,” he said .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=142 . Overall, he seemed sympathetic to relatively expansive presidential immunity for official acts.
One of the issues of particular concern to Kavanaugh was the clear statement principle. He confirmed with Sauer that it’s Trump’s position that the clear statement rule applies to official acts that are not within the president’s exclusive zone of core executive authorities and that none of the statutes at issue in Trump’s case contain a statement of clear application to the president. Sauer, unsurprisingly, agreed with the justice.
Kavanaugh’s exchange with Dreeben about the clear statement rule was less agreeable. Dreeben disputed Kavanaugh’s assertion that ..https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=142 .. the clear statement rule requires Congress “to speak clearly to criminalize official acts of the president by a specific reference.” Dreeben retorted, “I definitely don’t think that the Office of Legal Counsel opinions stand for this broad proposition that unless the president is specifically named, he’s not in … the statute.” Dreeben also noted that he did not think the clear statement rule is necessary to preserve presidential powers. Kavanaugh followed up, asking whether statutes that raise serious constitutional questions about whether they infringe on the president’s official conduct require a clear statement of application to the president. Dreeben said they do, but that not all criminal statutes raise serious constitutional questions in their application to the president.
Morrison v. Olson ..https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/487/654/ , a 1988 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the Independent Counsel statute, appeared to frame Justice Kavanaugh’s thinking on the immunity question. He said that the Court at the time thought it may be necessary to relax Article II protections and authorities to allow for what seemed like important presidential accountability measures. But, Kavanaugh said, that decision turned out to weaken the executive branch unproductively. He wondered in an exchange with Dreeben whether the Court would make a similar mistake if it narrowed immunity significantly in this context.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
Justice Barrett addressed indictment-specific activities as well as broader executive powers considerations in her exchanges with the advocates. She, like Justice Kagan, walked Sauer through several of Trump’s alleged criminal acts charged in the indictment: turning to a private lawyer to spread false allegations of election fraud; conspiring with a private lawyer to make a filing in court containing false election-related allegations; working with those two lawyers and a political consultant to “submit fraudulent slates .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=30 .. of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.” Sauer conceded that each of these acts either “sounded” private or were private, and that they would not attempt to claim that they were official acts covered by their version of immunity. Those were big concessions, and it’s pretty surprising that Sauer made them.
Barrett then questioned Sauer on one of the Trump team’s weakest arguments: his claim that the Constitution’s Impeachment Clause is a prerequisite to the prosecution of a president. Barrett pointed out that there are many other officers subject to impeachment (including the members of the Court, which elicited muted chuckles in the courtroom), and they definitely do not have this impeachment protection. “So why is the president different when the Impeachment Clause doesn’t say so?..https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=55 ” she asked. Sauer, citing a determination by Robert Bork, said the “plain language of the Constitution but also hundreds of years of history and what DOJ admits is the Framers’ intent” supports Trump’s position. And when Barrett asked what would happen if the crime wasn’t discovered until after the president left office, and impeachment was not available, Sauer said the Framers accepted the risk of under-enforcement.
In her exchange with Dreeben, Barrett addressed three issues: the public authority defense, the role of state prosecutions in the immunity analysis, and how the Court may move forward procedurally. The special counsel’s office has argued that the public authority defense is one layer of protection for presidential conduct that makes immunity less important. Barrett described this defense .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=154 .. as one that allows the president to argue, “I was authorized by law to discharge this function. …Therefore I acted lawfully … and am not criminally liable.” Dreeben accepted that characterization. Barrett then asked if the analysis of whether the public authority defense applies requires examining the president’s motives, to which Dreeben replied that it “operates based on objective facts disclosed to counsel. Counsel then provides the advice [to the president].” The president’s reliance on that advice is the president’s defense. After some more back-and-forth, Barrett said she was considering .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=157 .. how “an immunity doctrine that drew from the public authority defense that the Department of Justice” thinks would apply in the defense context might serve as a form of presidential immunity.
Turning to state prosecutions, Barrett noted that it seems the layers of protection Dreeben had described are internal within the federal government, and would not apply to the states. She appeared concerned that a narrow immunity for the president might allow for state prosecutors to run wild. Dreeben noted that the Court could establish robust protections for the president against state prosecutions, relying on the Supremacy Clause—which could potentially include a form of immunity.
Barrett, concluding with a procedural point, said that if the Court were to recognize some immunity for Trump’s official acts, it would be the Court’s normal practice to send the case back down to the district court to determine which acts were private and which were official. She asked Dreeben, though, if the special counsel could proceed with prosecuting the private conduct and let go of the official conduct. Dreeben said that if the Court were to determine that much of the conduct alleged in the indictment was private, the special counsel’s office “could introduce the interactions .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=164 .. with the Justice Department, the efforts to pressure the vice president, for their evidentiary value as showing the defendant's knowledge and intent.” This move would be accompanied by a jury instruction that would prohibit the jury from criminally punishing the former president for those actions deemed to be private.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Justice Jackson was quick to turn the Trump policy argument on its head and seemed comfortable with a vision of a constrained executive. “[E]verybody has thought, including the presidents who have held the office, that they were taking this office subject to potential criminal prosecution,” she declared early .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=16 .. in Sauer’s portion of oral argument. What else, she wanted to know, could explain Ford’s pardon of Nixon?
She returned to this line of thinking later in the argument, stating that .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24609863/23-939_l5gm.pdf%23page=63 .. it would be a big problem if the “president wasn’t chilled,” and voicing a concern that presidents may be emboldened to break laws if they knew they couldn’t be held liable for breaking them. She wanted to know how Sauer might explain the fact that all other people who have “high-powered jobs” are subject to criminal liability for their actions—and yet, his position is that the most powerful person in the world, who has access to the best legal advice at all times, would not be subject to criminal penalties. And she asserted that the line-drawing exercise between what is private and what is public comes only when one assumes that official acts are in fact shielded from prosecution. Fitzgerald doesn’t give us the right answers here, she told Sauer, because that was a question of whether the president should be able to be subject to civil action, subject to being sued by “anybody on the street.” How could the Oval Office not turn into “the seat of criminal activity in this country” if it weren’t for the ability for the president to be prosecuted for breaking the law? But Sauer maintained that the Fitzgerald analysis, with its incorporation of structural checks on the presidency, “naturally imports to the criminal context.” She did not seem convinced.
For Dreeben, Jackson focused more on understanding how far the Justice Department thinks the Court needs to rule on the contours of immunity, assuming the Court doesn’t accept absolute immunity for official acts. The Court doesn’t have to go as far as delineating what counts as core Article II duties within official acts, like Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch suggested—but should it? The Court doesn’t have to answer the clear statement problem to resolve the immunity question—which, she pointed out, the Trump team didn’t raise until later on in the appeals process—but should it? To the former issue, Dreeben advised that the Court stop at the threshold question of whether or not there is absolute immunity for official acts, leaving open the possibility for fact-specific and statute-specific disputes. To the latter, Dreeben advised that while the department wasn’t “wild” about the late issue sneak-in, it might be prudent for the Court to resolve the question of whether Congress meant to apply the four statutes at hand to official conduct.
What Happens Next
The justices seem certain to send the case back to either the court of appeals or, more likely, the district court for further proceedings. Precisely what those proceedings will look like, what they will decide, and whether the findings reached therein would, themselves, be subject to a second interlocutory appeal, all remain very live questions.
Even Sauer acknowledged that certain accusations of the indictment concerned purely private acts, and that a former president could at least theoretically be charged with crimes based solely upon those. But much of the indictment also alleges that Trump used the trappings of his office for personal gain. And the justices appeared deeply split over whether these sorts of acts were protected by some sort of immunity and, if so, whether it was absolute or qualified.
Likewise unclear—and decisive in terms of whether this case can yet conceivably be tried before the election—is what sort of procedures the Court will require the lower court to engage in to resolve whatever questions the Court wants resolved. If the case returns to Judge Chutkan, one possibility is that she could proceed with the current indictment, as is, and simply instruct the jurors that certain accusations can only be used as evidence of Trump’s intent—not as a basis for finding him criminally culpable. Another is that she would have to “expunge” certain accusations and that even evidence of that conduct would be precluded from being introduced at trial. Still another is that Judge Chutkan would need to hold some sort of evidentiary hearing. Finally, in any of these scenarios, the crowning question will be whether Trump will be entitled to make an interlocutory appeal on whatever findings Judge Chutkan makes—ensuring that no trial could take place for many months to come.
It looks increasingly unlikely that this case will be tried before the election. And if Trump wins that election, the case will likely never be tried at all.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/for-the-ages-the-supreme-court-hears-the-presidential-immunity-defense
Sarah McLachlan. The song and the woman, a beautiful pair.
Has a feeling that might have been the case.
She really does come across as lame.
Sweet. Two nips-- " He is being air conditioned for our sins, you know. And are the unflattering courtroom sketches depicting a dozing, unnaturally hued old fop not a modern-day crucifixion?
[...]
All he does anymore is fall asleep (but definitely not shit himself) and complain about being cold, while down the road, the Supreme Freakin’ Court ponders granting him absolute criminal immunity, or at the very least delivering a massive in-kind contribution to his flailing campaign, in the form of a desperately needed delay of one of his other criminal trials.
At least nobody seems particularly interested in rioting on the doddering old coot’s behalf these days. That’s downright encouraging. Perhaps they’re deterred by all the seditious conspiracy convictions. Perhaps they are too mortified to show their faces in public. I certainly would be."
Your - https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/4/26/2237572/-On-the-Execution-of-Puppies-and-the-Legal-Immunity-of-Narcoleptic-Rapists
Haven't seen the word "fop" for a long time. Can always count on a shower to keep you clean. Thanks SC.
I have what feels to be as good an analysis of the SCOTUS deliberations as any legal blog (hint) site could give. Posting is gonna have to wait though until my evening or my tomorrow, it's long and is sorta blowing my head. Am about halfway through but when the head starts building to that pressure cooker in action feeling (don't like it but it happens) it's time for a break. An afternoon of fairly relaxed yet disciplined .. .. socializing, to get the electricity at least down to a more healthy and sustainable simmer. For balance. So enjoy. Promise i will get it finished as soon as i do. .. .. all. Well most all .. lol .. enjoy. Repeat
Exactly. "Trump could never be a real mob boss, he is too whimpy, mob bosses are direct, and determined. Trump is a spoiled rich kid who never knew what he wanted." Trump has always been a wannabe. Habitually never satisfied is not a good place for anyone to be.
TO ALL, NEWSFLASH, chuckle, I wonder who went whining to admin. that Tornado Alley had slipped back into the Most Posted board list ..https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174279607 . After that news those few days ago i wondered how long we would last.
Sooo, LOL yesterday i noticed we had again disappeared. And i'm thinking Tornado Alley's delisting from there this 2nd time did not happen solely because an admin., or more, heh, read of our inclusion on this board without being told about it. Today we are at 104 (this moment) and LOLs we ain't on here .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/most_post.aspx .. sob .. lol.
I think so. Feel so too.
LOL He does it so well.
Superb Tiedrich. and for your included insight into conix's contributions over years.
Aside: i've just realized that there has always been some truth to conix in her labeling this place an echo chamber. What has she done here for so long, she has echoed GOP talking points. So yeah for her - for her - this place is in fact an echo chamber. Finally understand that more.
conix, You, on all the evidence you have so ungraciously given us, are no more suited to speak of compassion than any paved street. Actually your heart appears to be so hard it doesn't seem to faze you to have been so repeatedly run over the years you have been afforded the luxury of posting here. LOLs, in the arena you so forlornly have labeled so much in the past as an "echo chamber." I suppose you could be given some credit for at least appearing to have dropped that one furphy of yours, but it has been a concession under some pressure, eh. so sorry, no credit offered.
Who are you gonna vote for in the presidential election? Just OOi.
Att: conix, The false statements and half-truths about immigration that were told in the second Republican presidential debate
"I get it--you are for open borders and not caring about national sovereignty and love more regulations.
Get a new schtick, you've become the class clown. 🤡🤡🤡"
You got it. The broken record is stuck on garbage conservative rubbish.
Statements such as the border is "open" and former President Donald Trump reduced illegal immigration by 90% are not true.
From left, Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Mike Pence at the second Republican presidential primary debate in Simi Valley, Calif., on Wednesday.Robyn Beck / AFP - Getty Images
Sept. 29, 2023, 5:54 AM GMT+10
By Ronny Rojas, Noticias Telemundo
With links
Immigration was among the topics repeatedly discussed during the second Republican presidential primary debate, where seven GOP hopefuls presented their ideas to voters, attacked each other and fired a few barbs at former President Donald Trump, who leads in polls among Republican voters but has not participated in the debates.
Immigration is one of the issues that matters most to Republicans in this electoral cycle: 77% of them consider this a “very important” issue, according to a recent survey by The Economist magazine and YouGov.
During the debate, the candidates threw out some misleading numbers and made false accusations, including associating the fentanyl crisis with "open" borders and increased migration.
Here are some of the candidates' claims, which we fact-checked.
Claim: Fentanyl crisis comes from 'open border'
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina criticized the Biden administration for allowing the entry of migrants and assured that the southern border “is insecure” and is “wide open,” which caused “the deaths of 70,000 Americans in the last 12 months because of fentanyl.”
Associating the entry of fentanyl with the arrival of migrants is a false idea that Republicans have repeated again and again in recent months. Although the amount of fentanyl and other drugs entering the southern border has increased in recent years, experts and federal agencies have explained that the drugs mainly arrive through authorized ports of entry in private vehicles.
“Our research tells us that the vast majority of fentanyl reaches ports of entry, particularly California and Arizona,” Anne Milgram, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said during a congressional hearing.
Only 0.02% of people arrested by the Border Patrol for crossing the border illegally possessed fentanyl, according to data analyzed by the Cato Institute in 2022.
On the other hand, it is also not true that the southern border is "wide open," as Scott claimed. Although the arrival of undocumented migrants has increased in recent months — August recorded the highest monthly number of migrant arrests by the Border Patrol so far in 2023 — there are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents guarding the border with Mexico, which is also monitored by cameras, drones and other technology — not to mention more than 700 miles of border protected by a wall and other barriers,
In addition, the new policies established by the Biden administration after Title 42 expired in May seek to make it more difficult to request asylum at the border between the U.S. and Mexico and encourage migrants to apply from their countries of origin.
How many miles of border wall did Trump build?
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Trump “built 52 miles of wall” during his presidency.
This information is correct, but needs some context.
Although Trump promised his voters that he would build a “big border wall” and that he would force Mexico to pay for it, the truth is that only 52 miles of new primary wall were built during the four years of his administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection document accessed by the verification site PolitiFact.
As of Jan. 8, 2021, just two weeks before Trump left office, his administration had built 47 miles of primary wall, according to a CBP report. According to that report, the Trump administration also had replaced 351 miles of primary wall and 22 miles of secondary barriers that were in poor condition or had outdated designs.
The United States border with Mexico extends more than 2,000 miles. When Trump finished his four years in the White House, there were a total of 706 miles of primary barriers along the border and 70 miles of secondary barriers, according to PolitiFact.
Claim: Trump reduced illegal immigration by 90%
-----
INSERT - Related: conix, President Trump Reduced Legal Immigration. He Did Not Reduce Illegal Immigration
You have been given similar info before
[...]President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent .. https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-against-legal-immigration-too . Trump was wildly successful in reducing legal immigration. By November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non-?immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term through November 2020. President Trump also entered the White House with the goal of eliminating illegal immigration but Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population. Thus, Trump succeeded in reduce legal immigration and failed to eliminate illegal immigration.
[...]You either purposely continue to misrepresent immigration facts, or you still
haven't bothered to get yourself out of being stuck with GOP talking points.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174266071
... and ...
Republicans aren’t fixing the migrant border plight. In fact they’re making it worse
"‘The border is not open’: US immediately replaces Title 42 with strict new rules
Trump used Title 42. Biden replaced Title 42 with something designed to help more refugees enter
legally, while at the same time imposing more penalty for refugees attempting to enter illegally."
Andrew Gawthorpe
[...]But the end of Title 42 has also reignited the political firestorm over the US immigration and refugee system. Republicans have seemed to gleefully anticipate “chaos” and “disaster .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/us/politics/house-republicans-immigration-bill.html ” at the border after the policy is lifted. Less biased observers are also concerned that the US refugee processing system will be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of people now expected to seek asylum. The Biden administration has come under fierce criticism from the left .. https://time.com/6278812/border-title-42-aclu-lawsuit-asylum/ .. for a tough new policy of questionable legality which requires most refugees to seek asylum from abroad using a glitchy cellphone app called CBP One .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/06/us-mexico-border-cbp-one-app-migrants .
P - [Insert: Biden's immigration policy is fairer than that under Trump, and it's tougher. Fairer and tougher.
Yet, Republicans continue to tell mammoth lies about it solely to trick, and deceive, American voters.]
P - Not to be outdone, Republicans have responded to the situation by promising to return to the failed and cruel policies of the past. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed a bill which would order the resumption of Trump’s border wall and eviscerate the right to asylum for those who reach the US. Meanwhile, speaking at a CNN town hall last week, Trump defended .. https://time.com/6278925/trump-family-separation-border-cnn-town-hall/ .. his policy of family separation and indicated that he would consider reinstating it if he became president again.
P - [conix, You say "MAY be." Why if you don't have a clue do you feel you have to say something.
[...] Trump admits he ruined border deal to hurt Democrats
Well put.
Thanks, just "go normal". OK! Good idea. It's just the caps take away from the content. I was
thinking it's gotta be an emotionally based thing, but thank you very much again for your insight.
"Just remind her this isn't a stock pumping board and go normal. It's tough when one is so conditioned
to promote. Stuck on style. Almost got there though, decent post and not a single 'I' in it."
For some reason i was thinking she was male. Not that it matters, but is your "she" a certainty, or speculation.
Always good to read of more young voters arriving than older voters leaving. And for sure no right-minded person (lol feels a misnomer there, but politics aside) could possibly deny the moral decay of the GOP is not glaringly obvious. For those of us who still hang onto faith in the American electorate in general it follows that GOP numbers would be down too. Good to know. And always good to see you still around.
It's only the weirdness of the system which maintains tiny niggles of concern in me. The fact that so few votes in so few states can roll the presidency. And the fact Trump has his election-denier people as Cleta working hard on fixes favoring him.
Assuaging that is the fact thinking Trump could not possibly have picked as many
voters up since 2016 as he must have lost. Trump can only have lost voters.
Reminder of ALEC organization and Cleta Mitchell:
After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever
"The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’"
The American Legislative Exchange Council is where corporations and far-right groups go to buy government policy.
by Arn Pearson, David Armiak
October 4, 2023
[...]
So perhaps there was little surprise when Nelson told donors and activists at a February 2020 meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) that ALEC was working with GOP attorneys (including the chair of ALEC’s secret election working group Cleta Mitchell .. https://insurrectionexposed.org/mitchell-cleta/ ) on “action items that legislators can take to question the validity of an election”—nine months before the presidential election.
P - [It's long and it's past, still the dangers do last, and it is about an election.
"The Lincoln Project"
The Election That Could Break America
A link for your - "Dan Rather 18 hrs
·There is no more time for silence. There is no more time for choosing party over country. There is no more time for weighing the lesser of two evils. All women and men of conscience must speak or they are complicit in America lurching towards a dangerous cliff of autocracy and chaos."
https://www.facebook.com/24085780715/posts/there-is-no-more-time-for-silence-there-is-no-more-time-for-choosing-party-over-/10164278832490716/
The Election That Could Break America
[...][Insert: Meet Cleta Mitchell. Trump's election fixer. Mitchell is heading a real-time Putinesque, Orbanespue,
whichever strongman election-fixer you want to use, American effort to fix American elections.
"Republicans Paddle Faster to Try to Keep their U.S. Senate Hopes from Sinking"
Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169737199]
[...]Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose,
but he will never concede
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174005871]
“Obviously we all want President Trump to win and win the national vote,” ALEC’s ostensibly nonpartisan CEO said, “but it’s very clear … that really what it comes down to is the states and state legislators.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174180654
Seems her sister, if she exists, could very well be a better balanced individual.
Updated: Thanks, had the feeling. I recognized a couple of names above him there, the
first Lebioda T4 .. your .. https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard/_/tour/ntw
Hank Lebioda takes 1-shot lead at Pebble Beach Pro-Am
Associated Press
Feb 2, 2023, 10:50 PM ET
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. -- Changes in weather and fortunes can happen without notice in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which seems to suit Hank Lebioda just fine these days.
Playing his sixth different course in his past six rounds on the PGA Tour, Lebioda ran off six birdies in an eight-hole stretch for an 8-under 63 on the Shore course at Monterey Peninsula and a 1-shot lead after the opening round Thursday.
His big advantage was finishing before a pleasant day of mostly sunny, relatively calm conditions gave way to wind strong enough to bend flagsticks and force players to remove caps before they putted so they wouldn't blow off.
Lebioda was among six players from the leading 12 scores who have yet to win on the PGA Tour. He doesn't have a good recipe for success in tournaments with multiple courses except to be prepared for anything.
"This would be eight courses in three weeks for us," said Lebioda, who missed the cut in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines and the American Express. "Three courses in Palm Springs, two last week in San Diego and three this week. So the best thing you can do is take care of yourself, relax and make sure you're good to go."
Three of the top four scores to par were at Monterey Peninsula. Kurt Kitayama made four straight birdies around the turn and had a bogey-free 64, while Harry Hall made five straight birdies and was tied for the lead until a late bogey on No. 8. He also had 64.
More - https://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/35579892/hank-lebioda-takes-one-shot-lead-pebble-beach-pro-am
There sure are a lot of top golfers around. No wonder either, with all the money available now for
the guys who make it. Hope Miles does well, as he is doing at such an early record making age.
Update: LOL Coincidentally Lebioda is exactly twice Miles Russell's age
https://www.pgatour.com/player/49766/hank-lebioda .
conix, You are getting worse. Your failed satire is not in the least fucking funny. Your personal attacks on a good,
decent and reasonable poster is more than beyond the pale. 2nd time at least you have been warned about this.
Nikodemos, Valid sentiments, and i know we have no real right to tell you how to post, just sheesh - again - would really appreciate if you could leave your love of caps to another place more attuned to sensationalizing what otherwise would come across as good, reasonable reading. Just asking.
Took a couple of searches to get day 2 .. Miles Russell faces an uphill climb on his back nine to make a second Korn Ferry Cut in a row
Garry Smits, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union
Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 5:49 AM GMT+10·2 min read
Miles Russell of Jacksonville Beach lines up a putt on the third hole of the Texas Rangers Golf Club on Thursday in the first round of the Korn Ferry Tour Veritex Bank Championship.
Miles Russell has some work to do to make his second weekend in a row on the Korn Ferry Tour.
https://sports.yahoo.com/miles-russells-quest-second-korn-164444304.html
Whatever happens Russell appears to have all the potential of a tremendous future.
He would be smart enough to know even guys in the World top 50 miss cuts.
Agree with all of that. Nice to see the connection you made with the uni protests which are featuring in news broadcasts
here as well. Along with the fact the now worldwide protests are held in support of the peace protesters in Israel itself.
brooklyn13, Only a narrowly opinionated Israel supporter would label the late Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak as media sources. I assume many alternate sites would have similar quotes, used to support position. It is not a case of confirming biases, but a case of supporting arguments. What is your position on that? You remain comafied (don't know if that is an accepted word) when it comes to having an opinion on the quotes of Peres and Barak given you, yet you accuse me of being no good at considering different points of view.
"You’re an expert at finding media sources that confirm your biases. You are absolutely no good at considering that different points of view have any merit.
P - During the course of these discussions, I have conceded that Netanyahu belongs in jail as do the WB settlers. You’ve yet to concede there’s any validity in anyone else’s opinion.
P - Whatever. It’s not worth the effort. "
You have not validly argued against either of their comments. In fact you do nothing more than ignore them. Every one of your opinions have been dealt with here yet you accuse myself and others of ignoring your view, while you stolidly ignore all of ours. All while you ignore the different points of view of Peres and Barak. In other words you unarguably project. As a tangent see .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174307924 . And there is nothing in this as suggesting you are a Trump supporter. The thought i just had was strictly on the fact that you also have projected here.
When did Peres make his critical comments i wonder (not sure if i missed it earlier), so searched "what year did Shimon Peres become critical of Israel anti-Palestinian state policy" . Note: there is nothing at all "expert at finding media sources that confirm your biases" in posing a question as that. You apparently have nothing left but to attack the messenger, and that's perfectly understandable since you had no moral or ethical or humane base for your superficial positions from the start. Anyway the obviously inexpert search came up with this one, and i don't know yet if this one result of the FireFox search has gives me an answer to the question asked, to this point i've read only the first few paragraphs of:
Israel’s last founding father
Itamar Rabinovich
September 28, 2016
[Israeli President Shimon Peres attends a joint news conference with Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov (not pictured) in Sofia, in this August 11, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Oleg Popov/Files - RTSPRLD]
Read more from Markaz - https://www.brookings.edu/tags/markaz/
More On
Israel - https://www.brookings.edu/regions/middle-east-north-africa/israel/
Middle East & North Africa - https://www.brookings.edu/regions/middle-east-north-africa/
Program
Foreign Policy
Center
Center for Middle East Policy
Editor's note: Shimon Peres was pillar of Israel’s national security leadership and subsequently became an ardent peacemaker. Perhaps most important, writes Itamar Rabinovich, he was an Israeli leader who had a vision and a message. This piece originally appeared on Project Syndicate.
In 2006, a year before Shimon Peres was elected as Israel’s president, Michael Bar-Zohar published the Hebrew edition of his Peres biography. It was aptly titled Like a Phoenix: by then, Peres had been active in Israeli politics and public life for more than 60 years.
Peres’s career had its ups and downs. He reached lofty heights and suffered humiliating failures—and went through several incarnations. A pillar of Israel’s national security leadership, he subsequently became an ardent peacemaker, always maintaining a love-hate relationship with an Israeli public that consistently declined to elect him prime minister but admired him when he did not have or seek real power.
Undeterred by adversity, Peres kept pushing forward, driven by ambition and a sense of mission, and aided by his talents and creativity. He was a self-taught man, a voracious reader, and a prolific writer, a man moved and inspired every few years by a new idea: nanoscience, the human brain, Middle Eastern economic development.
Undeterred by adversity, Peres kept pushing
forward.
He was also a visionary and sly politician, who never fully shook off his East European origins. When his quest for power and participation in policymaking ended in 2007, he reached the pinnacle of his public career, serving as President until 2014. He rehabilitated the institution after succeeding an unworthy predecessor and became popular at home and admired abroad as an informal global Elder on the international stage, a sought-after speaker in international fora, and a symbol of a peace-seeking Israel, in sharp contrast to its pugnacious prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Peres’s rich and complex political career passed through five main phases. He began as an activist in the Labor Party and its youth movement in the early 1940s.
[Insert: Fun fact which only now allows me to relate some more to Shimon
Peres. I was born in 1942. Cool. '46, chuckle, would have me all of four.]
By 1946, he was considered senior enough to be sent to Europe as part of the pre-state delegation to the first post-war Zionist Congress. He then began to work closely with Israel’s leading founder, David Ben-Gurion, at the Ministry of Defense, mostly in procurement, during Israel’s Independence War, eventually rising to become the ministry’s director-general.
In that capacity, Peres became the architect of the young state’s defense doctrine. Running a sort of parallel foreign ministry, his main achievement was the creation of a close alliance and strong security cooperation—including with respect to nuclear technology—with France.
In 1959, Peres moved to full-time politics, supporting Ben-Gurion in his conflict with Labor’s old guard. Later, he was elected to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and became Deputy Minister of Defense and subsequently a full member of the cabinet.
His career entered a new phase in 1974, when Prime Minister Golda Meir was forced to resign after the October 1973 debacle, in which Anwar Sadat’s Egyptian forces successfully crossed the Suez Canal. Peres presented his candidacy, but narrowly lost to Yitzhak Rabin. As compensation, Rabin gave Peres the position of defense minister in his government. Nonetheless, their contest in 1974 marked the start of 21 years of fierce rivalry, mitigated by cooperation.
Twice, in 1977,] after Rabin was forced to resign, and in 1995-1996, after Rabin was assassinated, Peres succeeded his rival. He was also prime minister (a very good one) in a national unity government in 1984-1986; but, despite trying for nearly 30 years, he never won his own mandate from Israeli voters for the post he coveted the most.
In 1979, Peres transformed himself into the leader of Israel’s peace camp, focusing his efforts in the 1980s on Jordan. But, though he came tantalizingly close to a peace deal in 1987, when he signed the London Agreement with King Hussein, the agreement was stillborn. In 1992, the Labor Party’s rank and file concluded that Peres could not win an election, and that only a centrist like Rabin stood a chance.
Rabin won and returned, after 15 years, to the premiership. This time, he kept the defense portfolio for himself and gave Peres the foreign ministry. Rabin was determined to manage the peace process and assigned to Peres a marginal role. But Peres was offered by Rabin’s deputy an opportunity to champion a track two negotiation with the PLO in Oslo, and, with Rabin’s consent, took charge of the talks, bringing them to a successful conclusion in August 1993.
Here was the prime example of competition and collaboration that typified the Rabin-Peres relationship. It took Peres’s boldness and creativity to conclude the Oslo Accords; but without Rabin’s credibility and stature as a military man and security hawk, the Israeli public and political establishment would not have accepted it.
The grudging cooperation between Rabin and Peres continued until November 4, 1995, when Rabin was murdered by a right-wing extremist.[color=red] The assassin could have killed Peres, but decided that targeting Rabin was the more effective way to derail the peace process.[/color] Succeeding Rabin, Peres tried to negotiate a peace deal with Syria on the heels of Oslo. He failed, called an early election, ran a bad campaign, and lost narrowly to Netanyahu in May 1996.
The next ten years were not a happy period for Peres. He lost the leadership of Labor to Ehud Barak, joined Ariel Sharon’s new Kadima party and his government, and was the object of criticism and attacks by the Israeli right, who blamed him for the Oslo Accords. Peres began to play down the Nobel Peace Prize that he had shared with Yasser Arafat and Rabin after Oslo. The discrepancy between his stature on the international stage and his position in Israeli politics became glaringly apparent during these years—disappearing, however, when he became President in 2007.
Peres was an experienced, gifted leader, an eloquent speaker, and a source of ideas. But perhaps most important, he was an Israeli leader who had a vision and a message. This was the secret of his international stature: people expect the leader of Israel, the man from Jerusalem, to be just that type of visionary figure. When the country’s political leadership does not meet that expectation, a leader like Peres assumes the role—and gains the glory.
Related Content
Shimon Peres: Eternal optimist, 1923-2016
Natan Sachs September 28, 2016
[Excerpts outed here
Already at the age of 24—before the state was even declared in 1948—he was an aide to Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and by 30 he was director general of the powerful ministry of defense. First elected to the Israeli Knesset in 1959 and first appointed to the cabinet in 1969, he also held a host of other ministerial positions, some created especially for him. He was a man who procured propeller airplanes for the fledgling state battling for its life as a young man, and who extolled the virtues of nano-technology six decades later, still at the apex of Israeli political life.
P - n this long career, Peres became a fixture of Israeli public life, part and parcel of the Israeli establishment. He died a widely respected and beloved patrician and recent former president, a largely apolitical and grandfatherly role. He departs as the very last of the major leaders who were active at the founding of the state and as a symbol of that generation.
[...]
He was born Shimon Perski, in Poland (now Belarus), and had the Polish accent to prove it.
[...]
While he became an essential part of the Israeli leadership for decades, Peres’s outsider origins, ever the immigrant, would follow him throughout his career.
[...]
Peres also embodied a dramatic transformation from ideological hawk to dove, common among several Israeli leaders.
[...]
In the 1970s, as minister of defense under Rabin (in his first term as prime minister), Peres was instrumental in helping the Gush Emunim movement establish its first settlements in the northern West Bank (Samaria, as Israelis often refer to it). Yet after assuming the party leadership and interacting with other social-democratic leaders around the world, Peres began a steady move to the left. By the late 1980s he had become Israel’s most senior dove.]
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/shimon-peres-eternal-optimist-1923-2016/
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, A Stalwart of Israeli Conservatism
Natan Sachs July 5, 2012
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/former-israeli-prime-minister-yitzhak-shamir-a-stalwart-of-israeli-conservatism/
Israeli Elections: Labor’s Challenge
Natan Sachs January 1
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/israeli-elections-labors-challenge/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/israels-last-founding-father/
Well well. I'm sure others here will find all that as interesting and as helpful as i just have.
Note again: There was no desire to confirm bias in posing the question. And there was no expertise in making the search.
Repeat:
"You’re an expert at finding media sources that confirm your biases. You are absolutely no good at considering that different points of view have any merit.
P - During the course of these discussions, I have conceded that Netanyahu belongs in jail as do the WB settlers. You’ve yet to concede there’s any validity in anyone else’s opinion.
P - Whatever. It’s not worth the effort."
B402, Are you too blind to see you have supported my simple point that Hamas won the election.
"The Battle of Gaza was a military conflict between Fatah and Hamas that took place in the Gaza Strip from 10 to 15 June 2007. It was a prominent event in the Fatah–Hamas conflict, centered on the struggle for power after Fatah lost the 2006 Palestinian legislative election."
There is no support of Hamas involved in anyone repeating the fact that Hamas won the election.
Suggest you stay silent when you don't have a clue.
Att: B402 - Yep, not an iota of evolution. Hope he reads these, and gets the message.
Oh, it's new, ok! I enjoy weeding, it's outside, it's cleaning up, it's creating a better lawn, it's relaxing. There are other it's, i guess. The worse thing about it for me is in bending over from the chair i sit on - yeah, laugh haha it's a cartoon image .. is the acid reflux i get. That makes it hard sometimes.
Yes, i take meds for the reflux and no idea why i still get it. Doc said your blood analysis say there are is no underlying problem when i asked about formication .. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23960-tactile-hallucinations-formication .. (which he had never heard of) and mentioned it said it isn't serious in itself, but could suggest a more serious underlying problem so am pretty sure he would say that if i had mentioned the acid reflux when weeding from a chair. F-F-Forgot to ask that one. lol
brooklyn13, Hamas has said more than once something at least close to that they would not release all their hostages until there was a permanent ceasefire. Their alleged 130 hostages still remain leverage for them. Why would anyone make that demand except to get a rise out of people like you. Or for personal political reasons. And how many Palestinians are in Israel jails, many for as petty a crime as throwing rocks. Over 9000.
Again - still - to your whinge that you have never seen (sod knows why you would expect it or even worse why you would say it when you have said you don't visit here often), we have never seen any answer from you to a simple question:
brooklyn13, Figured that. And that's one overriding good reason for you not to have attacked the board and individual posters as you consistently have.
[...]Lastly, personally i perceive you as being over protective of Israel for the same reasons as millions of others would undoubtedly see you the same way. For the same reasons i'm sure Ehud Barak would see you as being that. Have you ever asked yourself why you could (or would) never say candidly here what you would say face-to-face to that Israeli who said if he were Palestinian he would have joined a terrorist group. Must've asked you that question some 3-4 times. Yet only silence.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174276709
You refuse to tell us what you would say, and there is a 2nd question there - have you ever asked yourself.
Again again, it is noted again also you have said you don't visit this board much, so in that there is one overriding reason
"NY Times, 04.25.24:
"President Biden and the leaders of 17 other nations called on Hamas on Thursday to release all of the hostages seized during its Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, an effort to raise international pressure on the group’s leader in Gaza to agree to a U.S.-brokered deal.
P - "In addition to the United States, the countries that signed on included Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain and Thailand."
P - Never seen a single post on this board, ever, to this effect."
why your last sentence there is not worth the time it took you to type it. In itself It has zero weight.
Ok, now let's toss in Peres now:
conix, I understand why you cannot comprehend...
[...]
thanks to Juan Cole, the late Shimon Peres:
P - Shimon Peres doubts Israel can win Permanent war or Survive Annexation of West Bank
[...]
--
“Better to have a Jewish state on part of the land than have the whole land without the Jewish state,” he said. “Israel should implement the two-state solution for her own sake because if we should lose our majority, and today we are almost equal, we cannot remain a Jewish state or a democratic state . . . That’s the main issue, and to my regret they (the government) do the opposite.”
--
That is, Peres thinks that the Likud Party and its partners are living in a fool’s paradise if they believe they can annex the whole of Palestinian territory without getting the Palestinians as Israeli citizens eventually. And then, Peres says, no more Israel as a Jewish state.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174298978
What would you say to Peres face-to-face if he said that to you.
You are happy to rationalize giving Netanyahu free reign while neither the
late Ehud Barak was nor the still alive Shimon Peres were ever with you.
Reminder: Related: Ehud Barak: the military mastermind Israel loves to hate
[...]Israel's yearning for experienced military leaders brought him back to political life after the 2006 Lebanon war and he became minister of defence. He seems to have a feel for what motivates his enemies and was widely quoted as saying: "If I were a Palestinian I would have joined a terrorist organisation." Barak also stated during a US television interview last year that he would "probably" strive for nuclear weapons if he were in Iran's position.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173530549
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174249868
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174264881
B402, Many partisans may think for themselves more than many of those who are wedded to your libertarian misery. On reading
Stoking the passion that is their excuse for pandering - the nihilism of a febrile minority in their party - a majority of House Republicans - voted last Saturday to endanger civilization. Hoping to enhance their political security in their mostly safe seats, and for the infantile satisfaction of populist naughtiness (insulting a mostly fictitious “establishment”), they voted to assure Vladimir Putin’s attempt to erase a European nation.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174304246
the parts i have emphasized there i thought of you.
She did that in the end, i reckon though it's hurt, you are much better off. She wasn't the right one for you. We've said this before, but why not again. Wish her good luck, but you're better off. And, lol, you just told us you have another top reason to be here when i kick the bucket. Her. "...so I stay around today just to spite her.😇 " Don't hedge on that one, it's a top-notch fun reason for you to grow old comfortably and contentedly.