[ Posted Friday, February 22nd, 2019 – 18:25 UTC ]
The news media -- once again -- has been in a frenzy over the possibility that Robert Mueller will wrap up his investigation next week and issue his long-awaited report. They've gone down this road before, as have President Trump's legal advisors (who have been telling Trump the whole thing is going to be over very soon now for almost a solid year and a half). So you'll forgive us for not being all that convinced that this is indeed the time that Lucy won't pull the football away, and we'll finally get to kick it thumpingly down the field!
Perhaps we're being a wee bit too cynical? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. We'll see what next week brings.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Monday, February 18th, 2019 – 18:48 UTC ]
But instead, today I'd like to look a bit further into the past, because there is one particular court case which everyone is going to be paying a lot of attention to in the upcoming weeks. The case is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, usually now just referred to as the Youngstown case or "the steel case." The plaintiff was a steel company in Ohio and the defendant was the Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer. But the real defendant was President Harry Truman, who had directed the federal government to seize control of all the steel plants of the country, in order to avoid an imminent strike. Truman believed he had this power because American was in the midst of the Korean War at the time, therefore he reasoned he had presidential power to avoid disruptions to the war effort.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, February 15th, 2019 – 18:28 UTC ]
Emergency! Ahh! Everybody run!
Sigh. Well, here we are. Not only has Donald Trump become the first president to order the military to do essentially nothing just to make a political point (see: midterms 2018, border deployment), he has now become the first president to declare a national emergency because he made a political promise he just couldn't keep. He couldn't keep it because -- counter to his own self-portrayal as a dealmaking genius -- Donald Trump is such a terrible dealmaker that he couldn't even get a Republican Congress to give him what he wanted, for two whole years. And if that isn't a national emergency, then what is?
Let's just take a moment to quickly review how we got here. Donald Trump began his presidential campaign warning about the flood of evil brown people who were coming to rape and murder us all in our own beds. He boiled this down into one call-and-response phrase to use at his rallies:
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, February 8th, 2019 – 18:52 UTC ]
It's been an eventful week, with Trump's second State Of The Union speech and Virginia politics entering complete free-fall. Democrats in the House began work in earnest this week as well, on both the legislative and investigative fronts. Also, there are now some new Boondocks comics! So the week was anything but dull, although it was a bit disjointed.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Thursday, February 7th, 2019 – 17:30 UTC ]
President Donald Trump is not a happy camper. This was plain to see in his morning tweetstorm, where he finally realizes that he did not, in fact, win the 2018 midterm election. There has been a transfer of power in the House of Representatives, and Trump is finally waking up to what this is going to mean for both him personally and for his administration. Most normal politicians would have cottoned onto this basic fact over three months ago, but Trump is anything but normal.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Tuesday, February 5th, 2019 – 23:21 UTC ]
As usual, what follows are my own snap reactions to President Donald Trump's second State Of The Union speech (he's actually now given three such addresses to Congress, but the first one doesn't technically count as a State Of The Union speech). I write all of this before hearing or reading what other pundits thought, so I won't be influenced by any sort of groupthink about the speech.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, February 1st, 2019 – 19:38 UTC ]
The biggest news on the Democratic side of the aisle -- as it will be from now until at least the spring of 2020 -- is the presidential contest. The race is getting bigger, as more and more people toss their chapeaux into the ring.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Monday, January 28th, 2019 – 17:52 UTC ]
Denial, as the punny saying goes, is not just a river in Egypt. President Donald Trump seems to still be floating down De Nile, however, oblivious to the world of reality around him. This isn't exactly a crisis yet, but it certainly will become a lot more noticeable as time goes by.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, January 25th, 2019 – 18:28 UTC ]
President Donald Trump's government shutdown became only the second-biggest media story this morning, after the news broke of an early-morning raid that wound up with the arrest of Roger Stone on charges of obstruction and witness-tampering. Bob Mueller's investigation just caught another witch, in other words. Trump, of course, can't stand to see (1) news about Mueller, and (2) any television news story that isn't all about him, so he immediately decided to make even bigger news, by caving completely on the shutdown and handing Nancy Pelosi exactly what she's been demanding all along.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Thursday, January 24th, 2019 – 18:00 UTC ]
A scant few months ago, the topic du jour at the Washington cocktail parties was whether Nancy Pelosi would even become the next speaker of the House. Maybe a revolt-from-within would take her down. She was seen as (pick one): too old, too weak to fight Trump effectively, too centrist, or too squishy when the going got tough. These arguments now seem laughable, but an outsized amount of attention was paid to them in the punditocracy, and not all that long ago. Is anyone now still wondering whether Pelosi can effectively take on Trump, or whether her age precludes her from being an effective Democratic leader?
Read Complete Article »
