democratic norms

Another Trump Derangement Update!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The following is a Facebook post from a wonderful man, smart, ethical, analytical and compassionate. I’ve known him for over 40 years and respect him deeply. Yet he posted,

“Folks, remember nothing about the actions of this administration and its minions is normal What is going on in our country is not normal.

A President who insists on making himself the news and communicates in absolutely BIZARRE ways, the multiple DC building projects, dispatching the military to American citites, the ignoring of norms, Congress being AWOL, a $40 Trillion deficit, high gas prices, high food prices, and no explanation or plan to get out of this war. Most importantly, the flouting of Court orders and the endless work arounds to get what this administration wants is Not Normal.

I wonder what part of the Court order stating that only Congress could rename the Kennedy Center they didn’t understand?

“. . . Members voted to close the center for two years for a $285 million renovation, after being handed what lawyers challenging the board described as a “vague, two-page PowerPoint” two days before the meeting. Only three members voted no, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Rick Larsen. The board also voted to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” below Kennedy’s name, rename the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” and add a third line about a Trump-named endowment if it hits $100 million . . .”

I had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to stop myself from responding. But I did. I’m still sorely tempted, however, to point that what is so obnoxious about this post is the writer’s assumption that his assessment is undeniably fair and valid. He’s assuming that everyone on his feed is just as Trump Deranged as he is. These people make declarations; they aren’t interested in a discussion, and anyone who dares to say, “Now wait a minute…” will be unfriended, tarred as MAGA and a Fox News ventriloquist dummy while being rebranded as evil.

But talk about moldy Axis talking points! That “normal” salvo: what a cheap shot, and one the no one who wasn’t screaming for Joe Biden to be put in a home is ethically estopped from making! Strong leaders and effective Presidents are never “normal.” To me, that complaint is signature significance for someone who is ignorant regarding the Presidency and leadership.

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An Axis Trump Derangement Case Study: The White House Ballroom Tantrum

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Above is how a federal judge and all my Trump Deranged friends would like to see the White House East Wing look for the next three years or more.

How dignified and reflective of America’s history and greatness! This makes sense to them, you see, because President Trump took the initiative and decided to fix a long-standing deficiency of the White House, where he lives. Any previous President could have done this without uproar or significant opposition, you see, but as an example of the continuing 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, when the Left decided that it wasn’t going to accept the shocking election of a political outsider to foil their presumed coronation of a corrupt Democrat (but a historic one, see, so it was okay) and set out to obstruct literally anything he decided to do, big or small, important or trivial.

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Ethics Verdict: It Is Unethical For President Trump To Attend The SCOTUS Oral Argument On Birthright Citizenship

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

As I write this, the Supreme Court is hearing a case challenging the tradition that nearly all children born in the United States, whoever their parents may be and how they came to be here, are automatically citizens.

On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order stating that babies born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants and temporary foreign visitors were ineligible for birthright citizenship. That was an obvious shot across the bow of the U.S. Supreme Court as it challenged an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that has stood for over a century. The President knew his EO would be also challenged, and would eventually end up on the Supreme Court docket.

Because this is an important question that would, if SCOTUS agreed with the President’s interpretation of the Constitutional intent (there were no such things as “illegal immigrants” when the Constitution was written) have massive consequences in many areas, the oral argument is attracting blow-by-blow analysis. That is not my purpose here.

The issue for Ethics Alarms is President Trump’s decision to attend the oral argument. No previous President has done this, although nothing prevents the President from attending. Trump’s predecessors all avoided the option, though there have been many, many cases over the years that the President knew would have a major effect on his policies as well and the matters he had to deal with. President Pierce did not attend the Dred Scott oral arguments. To be fair, he was barely engaged at any time in his miserable four years in the White House. But FDR didn’t sit in while the Court was determining the fates of his many New Deal programs. Nixon didn’t listen to the Pentagon Papers arguments.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Ninth Circuit Judge Kenneth K. Lee

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“District courts cannot stand athwart, yelling ‘stop’ just because they genuinely believe they are the last refuge against policies that they deem to be deeply unwise.”

—Judge Kenneth K. Lee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, writing  separately as a panel overruled a district court and held that the President had the power to suspend the Refugee Admissions Program.

Of course he did. The law and Constitution is clear on that point, but a woke District Court halted the President’s decision anyway. This was unethical as well as illegal, but, as Prof. Josh Blackman writes,

“President Trump is back in office, progressives still challenge virtually every action he takes, and judges in blue states continue to grant relief. No surprise there. But there is a new dynamic. Now, not only are lower court judges resisting the President, but they are also resisting the Supreme Court. In August, Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuked an attempted . Judge Brian Murphy of the District of Massachusetts managed to get reversed twice by the Supreme Court in the same case. “When this Court issues a decision,” Gorsuch wrote, “it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” Gorsuch added that “[t]his Court’s precedents, however, cannot be so easily circumvented.” 

Remember, it is Trump’s opponents who keep accusing him of breaching “democratic norms,” yet the Axis of Unethical Conduct ( the “resistance,” Democrats and the media that carries on their propaganda) is literally defying the greatest democratic norm of all, the Constitution. Blackman calls this attempted usurpation of power by activist, partisan judges “judicial resistance,” in other words, an abuse of judicial power for partisan objectives. It is—this is me and not the professor saying this—grounds for impeachment. President Trump is not exceeding his Presidential authority as the Trump Deranged scream, but rather the judges and courts that are interfering in the Constitutional hierarchy. Unethical, you think? Damn right.

Blackman:

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Can This “Democratic Norm” Be Saved?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

One of the most hackneyed attacks on President Trump is that he violates “traditional democratic norms.” Of course, this is another Democratic Party double standards play: most assertive Presidents ignore some “traditional norms” while forging new ones, and the last Democrati in the White House crushed some surprising traditional norms I thought were secure, like the norm of enforcing immigration laws, and the norm of selecting Cabinet members on the basis of their abilities rather than their EEOC categories, the norm of holding press conferences, the norm of having the elected President actually be the President, and the norm of not dropping out of a re-election campaign once it has begun so the party can install a more promising replacement without the formality of primaries and a democratic nominating process.

A democratic norm that is definitely on death’s door in the Trump Administration is the traditional respect the President has extended to reporters and journalists. Yesterday, President Trump was openly hostile and insulting to CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins when she questioned him in the Oval Office on the deportation of El Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He called her a “low-rated anchor” while insulting her employer, CNN. Passing a question off to Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the President sniped, “Can you just also respond to that question because you know it’s asked by CNN and they always ask it with a slant because they’re totally slanted because they don’t know what’s happening. That’s why nobody’s watching them.” Ouchie! Later in the session, Trump responded to another question about Garcia from Collins by saying, “How long do we have to answer this question? Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country’? Why can’t you just say that? Why do you go over and over …and that’s why nobody watches you anymore! You have no credibility.”

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On Trump’s Fight Fight Fight Perfume

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

No doubt about it, one of the “norms” that President-Elect Donald Trump is shredding, stomping on and setting on fire is the tradition of Presidents not using their office, visibility, popularity and influence to sell products, with their names as brands. I’m not sure doing this had even occurred to previous White House residents; it certainly never occurred to the Founders…or me, to be honest.

Naturally, because it’s Trump, the usual Axis snipers are horrified. A particularly stinky response issued from New York Times Trump-hating columnist Frank Bruni‘s poison keyboard, titled “Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks.” [Gift link! Ho Ho Ho!]This is what the Axis propaganda machine is left with: playground-level insults for the elected President before he can even take the oath. Honeymoon? Respect? Good faith? Patriotism? Unity? Bi-Partisanship? Nah! What are they?

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The NYT Provides A Preview Of Its 2024 Campaign Toadying Strategy, Part 2: The Return Of Levitsky and Ziblatt

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One of the most referenced tropes among the Big Lies used by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance to de-legitimize Donald Trump’s Presidency was that he was uniquely willing to discard tradition, established practice, and “democratic norms.” The alleged authorities appealed to by such Trump-bashers as the Times and the Atlantic were Harvard political science professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who wrote a pure partisan screed masquerading as scholarship called “How Democracies Die.”Ethics Alarms discussed it and them here, here, here and here (Big Lie #6). In the last I wrote,

The exact conduct being engaged in by the “resistance” and the Democrats is projected on their adversaries, accompanied by the false claim that they are endangering American democracy. In truth, the calculated efforts to de-legitimatize the President, his election, and the Supreme Court by “the resistance”(and in this group we must include unethical academics like Levitsky and Ziblatt) has already harmed our institutions and the viability of democracy, perhaps beyond repair. For these two propagandists to make the absurd argument that it is [Trump] who undermines institutions and his party that “plays dirty” when it is so obvious to any honest and objective observer that it is their party and their political allies who are doing so is as insulting as it is infuriating.

And, of course, the New York Times gives the two a platform for their distortions. Of course.

Well, Biden’s in trouble, so the Times has summoned Levitsky and Ziblatt again to make the same untenable and intellectually dishonest argument. This time it is, if anything, more spectacularly hypocritical and insulting than their earlier efforts. Their latest is headlined, “Democracy’s Assassins Always Have Accomplices”—you know, like Levitsky and Ziblatt?—and illustrated by the drawing of the boot-licking dog above, as the two Harvard professors dutifully try to paint Joe Biden as democracy’s champion…this uniting figure!…

and Donald Trump as an existential threat to liberty who is being blandly supported by those dangerous fascist MAGA Republicans. In advocacy, one should always lead with one’s strongest argument, and the two partisan boot-lickers think this is their most persuasive:

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Wait…WHICH Side Of The Ideological Divide Is A Threat To Democratic Institutions Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This is so outrageous that even after three cups of coffee I don’t know what to call it. Pathological hypocrisy? Playing with metaphorical matches in a kerosene factory? Prime Great Stupid? Help me out here.

In reaction to a relatively obscure 5-4 Supreme Court decision yesterday, numerous woke journalists and pundits went bonkers and argued that President Biden should just defy the ruling, you know, like Andrew Jackson did when he supposedly said, after the Court (correctly) ruled against his position in Worcester v. Georgia, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

More about that later.

The Supreme Court yesterday temporarily reinstated a Trump environmental policy that made it harder for states to block projects that could cause water pollution. The opinion, on the so-called “emergency docket” that allows the Court to rule on urgent matters without hearing an oral argument, was unsigned and without any written explanation (so much for Justice Barrett’s “Read the opinion” remarks) prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to join the court’s three left-leaning justices in criticizing the majority’s use of the emergency docket, or as critics call it, the shadow docket.” The particulars of the case don’t matter; what does matter is the Left’s nascent totalitarians in the news media calling for direct defiance.

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Democratic Party Trump Derangement Actually Does Some Good, Including A Tacit Confession

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Trump Derangement

The House last week passed the so-called “Protecting Our Democracy Act” by a near strict party-line margin of 220 to 208. The bill seeks to impose new limits on Presidential power, many of which bi-partisan critics of “the Imperial Presidency” have advocated in the past (including me). Amazingly for anything coming out of the House of Pelosi, it’s a mostly good and reasonable bill….but there’s a catch.

“Disturbingly, the last administration saw our democracy in crisis with a rogue president who trampled over the guardrails protecting our Republic,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, framing the proposed law as one more partisan slap at the previous President. “Now, Congress has the solemn responsibility and opportunity to safeguard our democracy, ensuring that past abuses can never be perpetrated by any president of any party.”

Uh, but laws are the “guardrails of democracy,” not “norms,” which are merely what most Presidents have done but didn’t have to. The “norms” trope was one of the most transparently false of the Democratic Party phony Big Lies, and frankly I’m sick of explaining why. Here was one exposition on the topic (Big Lie #6), in which I quoted an earlier EA discussion of the topic:

This deliberately misleading talking point comes from the quieter Siamese Twin of Fake News, Fake History. Every President defies previous norms, or makes up new ones, and the stronger the Presidents involved are, the more norms they shatter. This doesn’t automatically threaten democracy…What threatens democracy is efforts to de-legitimize presidential power as an alternative to winning elections…

The bill passed by the Democrats includes,

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Continued Still…From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “What’s Your Reaction To Various Ethics Controversies, Including The Use Of The White House, During The Republican National Convention?” Part 3: The White House

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The question that spawned this long post [ Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here] was, “What’s your opinion of Trump using the White House as a political prop?”

D. The White House

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Trump will further “destroy” American precedents if given a second term in office. “This is what we can expect in a second Trump administration,” Schumer said. “All the rules, norms, values that have made this country great, Donald Trump will destroy them. He doesn’t care. He only cares about himself. The rules are you shouldn’t sit in the White House and give a speech at a convention. Donald Trump says, ‘I want to do it.’ So they do it.”

There’s no such rule. The President isn’t covered by the Hatch Act, and given all the political uses of The White House by previous Presidents, I’d love to hear the argument that a speech being delivered to a virtual convention during a pandemic using the White House as a backdrop is unconscionable, or even unethical.

Professor Julian Zelizer, whose field is history and public affairs at Princeton University, said that  using the White House as a “prop” at a party convention is “unprecedented” in recent times. “There still is a boundary between politics and governing, and the Oval Office and White House are a public site meant for the country that isn’t meant to be a political backdrop,” Zelizer told ABC News. “To just use it as the major site for a convention speech seems like a lot with President Trump — you just take all the guardrails down.”

Cite, please. That something is “unprecedented” doesn’t make it unethical. The White House has been used as a political prop many times, just not at a convention. Nothing has been quite as grubby as Bill Clinton selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom for big money donations, but way back in the Kennedy Administration, the nation gushed over lovely Jackie Kennedy  hosting a televised tour of her “home,” bolstering the developing legend of how graceful and refined the young First Couple were. (Jack was probably banging a starlet while Jackie was being filmed.) Go ahead, tell me that “special” wasn’t “unprecedented” or political. Continue reading →