DOJ wants to scrap Watergate-era rule that makes presidential records public
theintercept.comIt's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.
The fourth estate is absolutely failing America. The headline ought to be "DOJ wants to break Watergate law", but instead, we get... this. Is Bari Weiss now running the Intercept too? WTAF is going on across the board?
It does not appear that this administration particularly cares about whether or not they're allowed to ignore laws.
It appears the administration is working with the Federalist Society extremists to try to destroy the government as best it can, at least in all capacities not befitting the monopolization of suppression/silencing/violence against anyone it doesnt like.
‘Let the law not get in our way’
That's because everyone else is the enemies of the people! They have a mandate!
Get out of the way, so-called judges, RINOs and communists in Congress, the failing Media, and also the low IQ former MAGA people who helped get them elected. This was a landslide! Also, true republicans don't believe in mob rule, we don't have a democracy, we have a republic. Except if our guy wins by 1% then we totally believe in mob rule and have a mandate, compared to that 1% marginal win, what are laws passed by a supermajority? A mere trifle!
Right but who is going to prosecute? the Department of Justice?
You know you have to give Nixon credit he slinked away before it ended in a shoot out between the SS and the FBI on the White House lawn.
Want to bet?
Sure you can, when you're the President. He's got presumptive immunity for all official acts. If election interference is an official act (as they decided in Trump v US), then surely ordering the destruction of all of his records is also an official act.
Don't forget about pardon power.
Can he pardon himself?!
Odds are we'll find out before his term is over.
From an outside perspective this is all looking a great deal like the early days of Viktor Orbán in power, morphing the laws and conventions of Hungary to remain in power.
The differences are that Trump hasn't much left in the tank and never did have a law degree.
Those difference matter little, there are plenty in Trumps orbit who are making the plans and pushing them out, all that's needed is another muppet for POTUS.
Where Trump gets interesting is right now and the near future; he's cornered, losing support, and will be lashing out and bending reality to protect his reputation and ill gotten gains.
Why not? Are we gonna send the marshals to arrest the president?
Jokes aside, this presidency showed that it was not our written laws that enabled the expected operation of gov branches within their expected limits.
It was these unwritten laws we were taking for granted, because casually we assume that the gov will not be malicious.
It seems to me that we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs.
This is a very clearly written law, though.
It has nothing to do with the writing. It's the "fuck you we'll ignore" it thing that's a problem. No amount of writing fixes that.
I disagree. I think that constitutional scholars have always known that it's not the written laws that hold the executive in check. Our system was designed so that the 3 branches would check each other. The Federalist Paper #51 explicitly calls this out - "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." [0]
The problem with any system like you are suggesting where "we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs" is the same as always - who enforces the law?
The cause of the dysfunction we have now is that congress has failed to check the power of the executive. Congress should have impeached and removed Donald Trump for treason and other high crimes after January 6th. He should have been convicted and felt the full force of the law around his neck for trying to interfere with the function of congress and overthrow the election.
Every problem we face with our government right now traces back to the same issue: Congress is not doing its job. Congress has the power to impeach and remove the president for threatening to nuke Iran. Congress has the power to stop the executive branch from starting illegal wars overseas. Congress has the power to punish ICE for executing citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.
Congress has failed to exercise this power for several reasons, a major one being that both the house and senate are no longer representative of the American people. The house has been limited in membership ever since the reapportionment act and the senate was always designed to favor wealthy landowners in slave states.
This results in placing massively disproportionate power in the hands of a tiny fraction of voters just because they live in the middle of nowhere, which in turn makes it very easy for the rich and powerful to game the system. There is no way forward for us as a country without reforming congress.
It isn't just congress failing to their job. We The People are also responsible for not ousting the freeloaders in congress who are taking our tax money and not doing the job they were elected to do.
We are the final check on making sure that government is serving us and not the other way around. The founders were pretty open about what they expected from us if that could no longer be accomplished within the framework they were putting into place. I'd like to think that we can still vote our way out of this problem, but I fear that between attempts from the government to suppress voters and the surprisingly large number of people content with the idea of a fascist dictator (so long as he's wearing their team's colors) we might have a hard time overcoming the fear, apathy, and learned helplessness in the rest of the population necessary to effectively insist on the changes we need.
I'm not very familiar with the American system, but aren't congress elections prone to gerrymandering which means they don't reflect too accurately the preferences of the people?
Gerrymandering is one the most powerful ways they suppress votes. They also like to do things like limit the number of polling places and put them out of the way with limited hours, pass laws that require documents many people don't have (while making those documents more difficult to obtain), removing the right to vote from people with criminal histories (while more aggressively policing and convicting the people/communities they don't want voting), spreading disinformation about voting dates/times/locations, creating confusing ballots, having heavy police presence at polling places and putting up speed traps/check points near them, making mail-in voting difficult or unreliable, and actively discourage participation with messaging about how voting doesn't accomplish anything or even that your support of a broken/corrupt system makes you complicit in it.
Even our two party/first past the post system discourages voting by limiting the choice people have in who they can realistically support in the first place.
I believe that the problem is that they also set up Congress with its own check, between two houses. They made it deliberately hard to pass legislation, which means they cannot effectively balance the other two branches.
Congress spent decades ceding power to the executive because it realized it could not do anything itself. And now it's stuck.
The rules only apply to Democrats now, did you miss the memo? (Maybe you didn't see the memo as it was sealed).
Aaaand it's gone lol
Enforced by the following the rules police. Oh wait..
> It's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.
They’re not ignoring. They’re saying they think the law itself is unconstitutional.
From the article:
>> In a sweeping new memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ claims the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The department’s edict, which is already facing legal challenges, argues that a president’s records are private, rather than public, property.
> They’re saying they think the law itself is unconstitutional.
Yeah, well, they can say that to SCOTUS.
and they will, and SCOTUS will listen, and say "remind me what party the president is from again" and then say "hmmmmm"
The general rule is that even facially unconstitutional laws are usually enforced until a judicial ruling against them. see e.g. all the people who did prison time for municipal handgun prohibitions until District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010).
"This is unconstitional because Trump doesn't like it" is not a very strong argument. The position he's holding is called "Public Office" (not private office) for a reason.
> "This is unconstitional because Trump doesn't like it" is not a very strong argument.
So far, it appears to be a very convincing argument to the supreme court most of the time.
It's just 4 years...but I'm genuinely thinking you lot aren't going to survive it. Seeing what is happening from both sides, as well as 'independents' (the NY chap). I feel your society is just cooked. I am genuinely starting to believe it's irreparable to the extent it has progressed.
Crazy that you can't even read an article anymore without having to cough up money and/or provide your personal data.
yes, with a but, rephrased as "crazy that you can't use a private service without payment or otherwise contributing to its profitability" sounds less so crazy.
I agree on the excess.
Publishers really need to get on board with a fair pay as you go scheme.
Something where I pay a fair price for an article or subscription, without the new customer rates, and without the "call us" retention annoyances. Something like the old Netflix, where it covers 80% of what you want at a reasonable monthly fee with easy cancellation.
I wouldn't mind supporting good journalism, but I do mind having a teaser rate that will jump 5x after a year, making it difficult to cancel (call to cancel), and having 1 pay gate per news outlet.
That sounds like someone wants to hide the evidence.
As weird as it seems (to me anyway) there has always been a group of conservative republicans who maintain that Nixon did nothing wrong and all of the restrictions on the president passed then are inappropriate.
One of them, Roger Stone, worked on the trump campaign and has a Nixon tattoo on his back.
Also: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/roger-stone-found-guilty-...
> Stone was found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness
And then pardoned by Trump
Stone was also involved in the Brooks riot helping getting bush the win. Amy Coney Barret and other supreme judges appointed by Trump were involved in the lawsuit brought to the supreme court.
It's the same fucking people.
ACB, Kavanaugh, and Roberts were all on Bush's legal team for Bush v. Gore. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/17/politics/bush-v-gore-barrett-...
It's only weird if you believe they hold their stated values. If instead you infer their values from their actions and extrapolate forwards, you haven't been surprised in 50 years.
Not weird at all.
Of course they didn't want us to see that evidence for ourselves, or have any hearings whatsoever.
That "someone" isn't just Trump. He's 80. He'll be lucky if he lives out the rest of his term. The odds of him still being alive 5 years after his presidency when his records could start to fall into the hands of the public are very very slim.
I don't think this is for him and his many many crimes as much as it is being set up for those who will come after him and the many more crimes they have planned for the future.
Fine. I wanna scrap the pardon power. Trade?
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-promises-mass-pard...
Pardon power competes with governors (at least NY) being able to edit laws before signing them for most anachronistic/dystopian feature of the US state.
You've reminded me of an absolutely bizzare line item veto story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
> In 2023, Governor Tony Evers used a line-item veto to extend what was supposed to be a two year temporary funding increase for schools to last over 400 years.
https://www.businessinsider.com/wisconsin-tony-evers-400-yea...
> Evers was able to make the nearly 400-year-old addition by vetoing part of a phrase that had referred to the 2024-25 school year, by striking a hyphen and the "20." When read together, the legislature's previous proposals for the 2023-24 and the 2024-25 school years became 2023-2425.
The WI Supreme Court upheld it. What a fucked-up system.
In picture form: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/u...
Step'ity step towards a fascist state for the klep'ity klep ...
These are dark days, perhaps the darkest for America. Perhaps the only time that somehow we didn't squeak out a win, the only time the insurrectionist rabble propogandized their cause for destruction of America, found the leverage points of lawfare, mediafare, an impotent Congress, and political lapdog Supreme Court with Federalist Society biases against any checks and balances at all, that all these factors aligned to allow complete vandalizing from within. A piracy & rampaging, a campaign of spite from conquerors wishing to salt the earth of that they have claimed.
It so unsurprising that these dark days would have an administration that argued it owes nothing to the American people, nothing to history. That they would want to hide their filthy destruction.
Back in 2018, Trump used to go around violating the law with his bare hands, ripping up documents that displeased him. Pitiful staffers were assigned to go tape the documents back together, in some sign of respect to the law & history. https://boingboing.net/2018/06/11/presidential-records-act.h...
I strongly dislike the "everyone is 12" or everyone is 15 tale being told now, that there are no adults. There are adults. They are all just wicked evil people working against America, are the pardoned insurrectionists and much much worse, with far more focused reign to do what Reagan and the Powell memorandum and Project 2025 (which is but a recent update to a long running document begat from the Powell Memorandum) set out to do: to unmake America, to bypass all checks, to dynamite the nation from the inside out. Heck yes they want to make sure no one sees them TNT'ing the Union.