Law (US)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump expected to announce new list of potential supreme court justices

      by

      The White House is expected to announce a new list of potential supreme court justices as soon as Wednesday, a move designed to shore up conservative support for Donald Trump as his race for the White House against Joe Biden enters the final stretch.Trump’s decision to name a list of possible picks during the 2016 election is widely seen to have boosted support among conservatives otherwise queasy about backing him against Hillary Clinton. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both now on the court, were included on that list of reliably conservative picks.Last week, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, flagged the impending announcement, telling reporters: “You will see it soon.” On Tuesday, Politico reported that the list was imminent.Trump signaled he was compiling a new list after a pair of supreme court rulings went against his administration in June.The updated list is expected to include many of the 2016 lineup, including Raymond Kethledge, 53, an appeals court judge on the sixth circuit, and Amy Coney Barrett, 48, a member of the seventh circuit appeals court.Both were reported to have been close to being nominated when Kavanaugh was picked in late 2018, to fill a seat vacated by the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh, a former White House aide to George W Bush, was confirmed after contentious confirmation hearings featuring allegations of sexual assault, which he vehemently denied.After Trump’s two picks, conservatives hold a 5-4 majority on the supreme court, where seats are vacated by the retirement or death of an incumbent. Over the summer, the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, has announced health problems including treatment for cancer.Trump promotes his judicial appointments as perhaps his most important accomplishment. A Biden presidency, he warns, would mean more liberals on the highest court.But Trump’s appointees have not always performed as anticipated. This summer, for example, Gorsuch sided with the chief justice, John Roberts, and the liberal justices to guarantee protection from discrimination in the workplace for LGBTQ individuals – a disappointment to conservatives.Last month, Vice-President Mike Pence told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Roberts, who was appointed by George W Bush, had been “a disappointment to conservatives”.But Trump’s appointments to lower courts offer plentiful consolation. During his first term, nearly 200 judges have been installed with lifetime appointments.According to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center, in July there were 792 active judges across the three main tiers of the federal system.Of those, Trump has appointed 194, or 24% of the total. Barack Obama appointed the largest share of currently active federal judges, 39%. Of judges still sitting, George W Bush appointed 21% and 11% were appointed by Bill Clinton.Much smaller shares were appointed by George HW Bush (2%) and Ronald Reagan (2%). A single federal judge, Puerto Rico’s Carmen Consuelo Cerezo, dates her appointment to Jimmy Carter’s administration. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      'We just keep fighting': behind an urgent, inspiring film about the ACLU

      by

      If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump would cement a campaign heralded by calling Mexicans rapists into policy, it was dispelled on 27 January 2017, when, to cap his first week in office, the president issued an executive order barring entrance from a slew of Muslim-majority countries. The so-called “Muslim travel ban” immediately roiled the country’s airports, as travelers were detained and families indefinitely separated in the midnight hours after the ban’s announcement. At the same time, protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn; as depicted in early scenes from The Fight, a new documentary on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a crowd cheered as lawyers got to messy, long-haul business of going to judicial war.Actor Kerry Washington, most recently of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and a producer on The Fight, watched on TV as the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, exited the courthouse to chants of “ACLU! ACLU!” and declared a temporary victory: those detained by the new administration in airports would not be deported. Gelernt’s breathless recounting of the injunction’s relief had the feel of a post-championship court-side interview, and it caught Washington’s eye. “They are going to be on the frontlines of all the most important battles that we’re going to be facing to defend our civil rights and civil liberties,” she recalled thinking to the Guardian. “Who’s going to be in the trenches with these guys capturing this war movie that’s unfolding in front of us?”In the crowd at the Brooklyn courthouse that night was Elyse Steinberg, a documentary film-maker captivated by the same determined exhilaration on Gelernt’s face. “When Lee got his victory and he emerged from the steps and I saw him with his fists raised high,” she told the Guardian, “I just felt like this is the film that we needed to make. We needed to be with the ACLU and the lawyers in this epic battle for civil liberties that was going to be raging for the next four years.”In the three and half years since Steinberg stood outside the courthouse, the ACLU has held the legal line against the civil rights assaults of the Trump administration, work that The Fight depicts as variously harried and routine for the Manhattan-based team of lawyers and deeply consequential for the clients they represent. The Fight, co-directed by Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres follows four pivotal court cases central to combatting the Trump administration’s racist, Maga-exclusive agenda: the separation of migrant families at the southern US border and the horrific, indefinite detention of children without their parents; a policy which allowed the Office of Refugee Resettlement to deny abortion access to an undocumented woman detained by Ice; the addition of a citizenship question to the decennial US census; and the blanket ban of transgender people from serving in the US military.In each case, The Fight reveals the work of an ACLU attorney, particularly under an administration whose policies are often enacted without regard for bureaucratic chaos, to be mostly a scramble: hustling through briefs, cramming in a hotel room the night before argument, hungrily reading just-downloaded PDFs. The moments of mundane work dilemmas – Gelernt finding a single workable outlet at Starbucks to charge his dying phone, the LGBT & HIV project attorney Joshua Block fussing with uncooperative Microsoft Word dictation, the voting rights lawyer Dale Ho accidentally misreading a consequential decision or saying goodnight to his kids during another long day on the road – paint a fuller picture of the work. They take the ACLU staff “from being these larger than life Avengers legal superheroes, which is what they are, to also being husbands and wives and moms and dads, regular folks who have figured out how to use their talent for good in the world”, said Washington.The unglamorousness of the hustle, or of the reproductive rights lawyer Brigitte Amiri’s celebratory “train wine” on the Amtrak back to New York after a favorable hearing, contrast sharply with the stakes of the court cases at hand. “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, then…when?” says Ho as he worked on a census decision which, had it been in favor of the administration, would have inaccurately skewed fair representation in Congress and federal funding for a decade to come. Amiri’s case – in which the federal government unlawfully barred an unidentified, undocumented asylum claimant for obtaining an abortion was “a harbinger of things to come”, she told the Guardian, as it preceded several states passing abortion restrictions or outright bans in 2019. More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Roger Stone has escaped punishment for his crimes. Trump is sending a signal | Andrew Gawthorpe

      by

      At America’s birth, when delegates in Virginia were debating whether to ratify the constitution, a politician called George Mason had an objection. Mason, who was influential over the development of the bill of rights, wondered whether the presidential pardon power was too broad. Might not the president encourage people who worked for him to commit crimes, and then pardon them? If he could, there would be essentially no check on a president’s power to break the law. Given that sort of leeway, an unscrupulous president could “establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic”.Mason’s objection ought to concern us still today. Late on Friday, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, all but guaranteeing that Stone will never face justice for crimes he committed while obstructing an investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence agencies who attempted to tip the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Backlash to the decision has been swift, with Trump’s fellow Republican Mitt Romney condemning the president’s “unprecedented, historic corruption”.It is not quite true to say that there is no precedent for Trump’s act. As Mason foresaw, executive clemency has been misused by presidents throughout American history. George HW Bush pardoned six officials who had been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal – an act which may have been intended to cover up his own wrongdoing. George W Bush commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who obstructed a federal investigation into the illegal outing of a CIA operative who was critical of the Bush administration.This history doesn’t make Trump’s actions any less troubling. In fact, by revealing how little restraint there is on the use of executive clemency, it ought to make us worry how much further the president – whose disregard for political and constitutional norms truly is without precedent – might go in the future.Most presidents issue their most controversial pardons furtively, at the end of their terms in office. But Trump has reveled in his ability to toss aside the principle of the rule of law when it comes to his own allies. In 2017 he pardoned the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had violated the constitutional rights of countless Arizonans. During the Mueller investigation – which exposed evidence that Trump himself may have committed obstruction of justice, a crime for which he could still be charged after leaving office – the president issued a full pardon to Libby, seemingly with the sole purpose of sending the message that he would forgive those – like Stone – who committed obstruction to protect himself.A president who is willing to use executive clemency to forgive violations of constitutional rights and protect himself from the rule of law could become, as Mason foresaw, a monarch. At the Virginia ratifying convention, James Madison replied to Mason that such a president would surely face impeachment. But today’s Republican party has made it clear that it will protect Trump from impeachment even in the face of overwhelming evidence of his abuses of power. Instead, by refusing to convict, they licensed Trump to double down.As America moves towards an election which Trump looks on course to lose, he is likely to become even less inhibited. The issuing of pardons and commutations for crimes already committed might pale in comparison with crimes yet to come. Trump could seek, once again, to sway the outcome of the election, promising pardons to his co-conspirators. He could order, as he did outside the White House, security forces to be used to disperse protesters who came into the streets in response, then issue pardons for any crimes tried by court martial or in Washington DC’s highest court.The fact that Trump has rarely shown the focus, intelligence or competence necessary to pull off such a conspiracy is little comfort. What he lacks in these qualities he makes up for in brazenness, in loyal subordinates equally willing to subvert the rule of law, and in the possession of a compliant conservative politico-media apparatus that will rationalize any action he takes. He could do incalculable damage to confidence in American democracy and the rule of law before he is finally wrested from the White House.In this sense, Roger Stone is the canary in the coal mine. Trump’s ability and willingness to commute his sentence is a reminder that for all its genius, the American founding left behind a structure which can be exploited and abused by an unscrupulous president. As we live through what are hopefully the dying days of the presidency of the most unscrupulous of them all, we have to remain on our guard. Partly because of his fears over the pardon power, George Mason ultimately became one of only three of the framers of the constitution to refuse to sign the final document, believing it created a blueprint for tyranny. Proving him wrong requires constant vigilance, now and in the future. More

    • 238 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      The supreme court just delivered a huge blow to Trump's belief that he's above the law | Lloyd Green

      by

      Donald Trump’s future may rest with the nation’s voters and a New York grand jury, although not necessarily in that order. On Thursday, the US supreme court upheld a subpoena issued by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance, which demands eight years of Trump’s tax returns. Once again, Trump’s secrets are no longer his own.Voting 7-2, the high court rejected the president’s contention that he was immune from investigation simply because he lives in the White House. Writing for the court’s majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued: “We cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under article II or the supremacy clause.”Trump learned the hard way that the US constitution is neither invisibility cloak nor rag. It is also not whatever the president says it is.As Roberts framed things, “No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” Significantly, under the court’s ruling, the lower court will continue to exercise oversight of the proceedings.In a separate ruling, issued minutes later and by a 7-2 margin, the court rejected the president’s contention that Congress had no right whatsoever to review his tax returns and financials. Roberts observed: “When Congress seeks information ‘needed for intelligent legislative action’, it ‘unquestionably’ remains ‘the duty of all citizens to cooperate’.”The House of Representatives had cast a particular eye on Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, his de facto lender of choice and last resort. On the other hand, the court denied Congress instant access to the records.The majority held that the lower courts had paid insufficient attention to the issue of separation of powers and the potential for encroachment upon the executive branch. In other words, this battle will continue beyond Trump’s tenure unless a Biden administration weighs in. And even then.The decisions came on the final day of the court’s 2019-20 term, but they could not have arrived at a worse moment for Trump. There are less than four months to the election and once again the president is ensnared in a snare of his own making. A porn star, a Playboy model and alleged hush money are again on stage.Even before the supreme court announced its rulings, Trump had used Twitter to complain of harassment. After the court went on summer vacation, the president kvetched about its lack of deference. Practically speaking, it is unlikely that Trump’s returns will be shared with the public any time soon.Even the tech baron Peter Thiel likens Trump’s re-election effort to a marooned boat skippered by a hapless crewSeparately, Trump’s annual financial disclosure form is on a 45-day extension. It is the sole legally mandated window into the president’s holdings and income.As for New York’s prosecutors, the operative issues appear to be whether the Trump Organization deducted the payments from reported income, the legality of such a move under state law, and who in Trump’s orbit greenlighted the deduction if taken. Lurking in the foreground is the implicit question: what did Trump know and when did he know it?The record currently reflects that Michael Cohen, then an officer of the Trump Organization and Trump’s personal lawyer, orchestrated payments to the former adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal at the behest of his client, Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to related federal crimes in 2018. At the time, the justice department essentially tagged the chief executive as an unindicted co-conspirator. Government filings expressly tie Trump, AKA “Individual-1”, to Cohen. (As a coda, within hours of the court’s rulings, Cohen was taken back into federal custody for violating the terms of his Covid-19 release from prison.)From here onward, Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s spokeswoman, will be forced to refer questions about Trump’s taxes to his personal lawyers for answers that will never come. McEnany wants us to believe that her boss is “the most informed person on planet Earth when it comes to the threats that we face”.Then there is political reality. Despite Trump’s assurances, the US is not “in great shape”. Trump-Pence 2020 looks a lot like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Support for Trump is withering where Covid-19’s march goes uninterrupted. The president’s base is not blind.Even the tech baron Peter Thiel, who donated more than $1m to Trump’s 2016 run, likens his re-election effort to a marooned boat skippered by a hapless crew. Loyalty can survive only so much abuse and incompetence.Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, and the Trumps have some history. Less than a decade ago, Vance declined to indict Ivanka and Donald Jr over their role in the Trump Soho project, an undersold condominium-hotel in lower Manhattan. The optics were messy, to say the least. Vance received a $25,000 contribution – which he returned – from Marc Kasowitz, another Trump lawyer.This time around, however, the Trumps may not be so lucky. Four decades ago, Vance’s father served as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. But in 1980, the elder Vance resigned over a botched effort to rescue 52 Americans held hostage by Iran. Vance père had opposed the operation from its outset and quit over principle. Ultimately, his nexus to the president did not mean all that much.Against that backdrop, don’t bet on Vance fils being played by Trump a second time. The current president is a wounded politician facing electoral elimination – just like President Carter. There’s no upside to Vance balking at an indictment if he has the goods. The Vances know what roadkill looks like. More

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Our Time Is Now review: Stacey Abrams for attorney general, if not VP to Biden

      by

      If intelligence, thoughtfulness, an encyclopedic knowledge of voter suppression techniques and an elegant writing style were the main qualifications for the vice-presidency, Stacey Abrams would be odds-on-favorite to be Joe Biden’s running mate. Abrams is already a proven vote getter. When she became the first major party black woman nominee for governor in Georgia, in […] More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme court strikes down abortion restriction in major victory for campaigners – live

      by

      Court ruled Louisiana law is unconstitutional Florida scientist says leadership asked her to change numbers Trump: I wasn’t told about ‘Russian bounties’ plot Global deaths from coronavirus pass half a million Trump retweets video of couple pointing guns at protesters Sign up to our First Thing newsletter LIVE Updated The US supreme court in Washington. […] More