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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 17:33:07 GMT
We now have trump ignoring a judge’s order. So much for ‘checks & balances”. So have we reached a Constitutional crisis? I think if we aren’t there we are pretty close. Judd Legum.. “BREAKING The Trump administration is maintaining a funding freeze at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in defiance of two federal court orders. The ongoing freeze was confirmed by an NIH official and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information.” ”2. By ignoring court orders, the Trump administration has created a Constitutional crisis. The research funded by the NIH is extremely important but this issue also speaks to the state of democracy in America.” ”3. David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on administrative law, told Popular Information that the Trump administration is "in contempt of court" and the continued funding freeze at NIH is "completely unlawful." Let's break down how we got here.” ”4. On January 27, the Trump administration, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memo requiring federal agencies to "temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Fede” ”5. The Trump administration quickly faced two federal lawsuits, one filed by the National Council of Nonprofits and another filed by 22 states. In an attempt to head off the litigation, the OMB rescinded the memo on January 29.” ”6. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, however, posted on X that the memo was only rescinded to evade the court's order and the "federal funding freeze" was not rescinded and would be "rigorously implemented." ”7. So the Plaintiffs in both cases sought and received Temporary Restraining Orders against the Trump administration. The TROs "restrained and prohibited [the administration] from reissuing, adopting, implementing, or otherwise giving effect to the OMB Directive"” ”8. Despite both of these injunctions, NIH staff was prohibited from issuing virtually any grant funding — including funding for multi-year grants that have already been approved and partially disbursed.” ”9. According to internal NIH email correspondence, the agency leadership said that the freeze was in place to ensure the grants were compliant with Trump's executive orders. This was the precise rationale stated in the OMB memo.” x.com/juddlegum/status/1889292522783997966?s=61&t=j45uMgNk1i8O0YllKF58nw |
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MDscrapaholic
Drama Llama
Posts: 7,238
Location: Down by the bay....
Jun 25, 2014 20:49:07 GMT
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Post by MDscrapaholic on Feb 11, 2025 17:35:58 GMT
Someone needs to go arrest that guy (FF).
If only...
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Post by Merge on Feb 11, 2025 17:43:10 GMT
When the president and his party no longer consider themselves bound by the constitution or our laws, I'd say that yes, we're at a crisis point.
SCOTUS allowed this, BTW, by saying that anything he does as an official act is A-OK, even if it is against the law. They re-created the presidency as a monarchy.
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 17:45:38 GMT
Joyce Alene ”If any party, including the government, doesn’t like a court order, it can appeal it. It doesn’t get to just disregard it. Vance took an oath to uphold the Constitution, just like Sen. Cotton did” Craig Crawford.. ”What ultimately happens if a federal agency refuses to obey a court order? Contempt of court, I assume. Then what? Can a judge send marshals to arrest the head of that agency? Or impose fines on the agency? Who pays the fine, and to whom?” x.com/craig_crawford/status/1889324909551034549?s=61&t=j45uMgNk1i8O0YllKF58nw |
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Post by iamkristinl16 on Feb 11, 2025 18:02:14 GMT
Yes.
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 18:08:24 GMT
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 18:13:13 GMT
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 18:25:58 GMT
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 18:29:56 GMT
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 11, 2025 19:05:49 GMT
Is there a way to get this in front of SCOTUS? Would they hear it and maybe say he has gone too far? I don’t know if even that would stop him but would add to the argument. How far does he have to go to get an impeachment that actually sticks and get imposed.
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Post by mollycoddle on Feb 11, 2025 19:19:30 GMT
We’re damn close. This chucklehead thinks that he’s in charge of everything. What a loathsome creature he is.
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Post by ntsf on Feb 11, 2025 19:24:05 GMT
yes is the simple answer. if you don't respect judges, you have lost the rule of law.
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Just T
Drama Llama
Posts: 6,145 
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Post by Just T on Feb 11, 2025 19:26:33 GMT
I don't know how any American think we are not in a constitutional crisis. When a president and vice president think and say outloud to ignore things set in the constitution, how can that not be a crisis?
My brother is staunchly conservative. He is also gay and a huge Trump supporter. We have had so many discussions about different things, and he is all about states rights and the constitution. He even thinks gay marriage should be up to states because it's not in the constitution. He has told me multiple times that the heart of conservativism is states rights and adhering to the constitution. So how can conservatives now be okay with what is happening? I truly do not understand.
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pilcas
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,748
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Post by pilcas on Feb 11, 2025 20:05:06 GMT
Yes.
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Feb 11, 2025 20:27:21 GMT
Is there a way to get this in front of SCOTUS? Would they hear it and maybe say he has gone too far? I don’t know if even that would stop him but would add to the argument. How far does he have to go to get an impeachment that actually sticks and get imposed. Even if the SCOTUS eventually rules against him, they have no police powers to enforce their decision. It will be our end! |
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 20:29:35 GMT
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 11, 2025 20:42:44 GMT
Is there a way to get this in front of SCOTUS? Would they hear it and maybe say he has gone too far? I don’t know if even that would stop him but would add to the argument. How far does he have to go to get an impeachment that actually sticks and get imposed. Even if the SCOTUS eventually rules against him, they have no police powers to enforce their decision. It will be our end! A was hoping that maybe their decision would maybe sway some congressmen to act not that I’m sure even they can rein him in. Reality has to start hitting people that voted for him - I thinking once food is scarce because farmers aren’t getting the funds they need to actually farm. But that will take months snd so much more damage can be done by then. I just keep hoping they will realize what is happening. |
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 11, 2025 20:46:04 GMT
As usual he offers no proof. Which means he is lying yet again…. We are so screwed.
”Billions of Dollars of FRAUD, WASTE, AND ABUSE, has already been found in the investigation of our incompetently run Government. Now certain activists and highly political judges want us to slow down, or stop. Losing this momentum will be very detrimental to finding the TRUTH, which is turning out to be a disaster for those involved in running our Government. Much left to find. No Excuses!!!
Donald Trump Truth Social Post 07:47 AM EST 02/11/25
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Post by Scrapper100 on Feb 11, 2025 21:04:20 GMT
As usual he offers no proof. Which means he is lying yet again…. We are so screwed. ”Billions of Dollars of FRAUD, WASTE, AND ABUSE, has already been found in the investigation of our incompetently run Government. Now certain activists and highly political judges want us to slow down, or stop. Losing this momentum will be very detrimental to finding the TRUTH, which is turning out to be a disaster for those involved in running our Government. Much left to find. No Excuses!!! Donald Trump Truth Social Post 07:47 AM EST 02/11/25 But they believe him. Personally I am sure there is waste but everyone is going to have a different idea of what is a waste to them. I don’t think this “audit” is appropriate and think it is criminal but a controlled audit not by someone who has a very vested interest in the outcome. It should be bipartisan. They won’t think it’s wrong unless it effects them 😢 |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 11, 2025 21:32:47 GMT
The attacks on the judiciary are intentional. Trump, Vance, Musk and the Republicans are trying to discredit and undermine judges in order to selectively ignore them. heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-10-2025MAGA loyalists, particularly Vice President J.D. Vance, have begun to suggest they will not abide by the rule of law, but before Trump and Vance took office, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called out Vance’s hints that he would be willing to defy the rulings of federal courts as “dangerous suggestions” that “must be soundly rejected.”
Today the American Bar Association took a stand against the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself” as it attacks the Constitution and tries to dismantle departments and agencies created by Congress “without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law.”
“The American Bar Association supports the rule of law,” president of the organization William R. Bay said in a statement. “That means holding governments, including our own, accountable.” He cheered on the courts that “are treating these cases with the urgency they require.”
“[R]efusing to spend money appropriated by Congress under the euphemism of a pause is a violation of the rule of law and suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government,” Bay wrote. “This is contrary to the constitutional framework and not the way our democracy works. The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop.”
Today, five former Treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that also reinforced the legal lines of our constitutional system, warning that “our democracy is under siege.” Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton; Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew, who served under President Barack Obama; and Janet L. Yellen, who served under President Joe Biden, spoke up about the violation of the United States Treasury’s nonpartisan payment system by political actors working in Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-9-2025After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”
The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.
Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.
Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars. |
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Post by epeanymous on Feb 11, 2025 21:35:29 GMT
We are there. It’s been a good run. I suppose when people voted for a convicted felon I should have appreciated we would get here. I did not imagine it would be so quickly and with so little resistance.
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 11, 2025 21:42:47 GMT
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/treasure-secretaries-doge-musk.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShareWe take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.
A key component of the rule of law is the executive branch’s commitment to respect Congress’s power of the purse: The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.
The role of the Treasury Department — and of the executive branch more broadly — is not to make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court previously wrote, “Even the president does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds.” Chief Justice John Roberts agrees: He wrote that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.”
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 11, 2025 21:52:41 GMT
If there was any hope the Republicans would grow a backbone and stand up to Trump when he takes away their legislative power to determine spending, Johnson made it clear that he is Trump's lap dog and that will not happen. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/johnson-congress-power-trump.htmlJohnson ‘Wholeheartedly’ Agrees With Trump’s Spending Cuts, Undermining Congress
The comments by the speaker were his latest move to diminish the role of the legislative branch, and in keeping with his move to define himself as a junior partner to President Trump.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he agreed “wholeheartedly” that the Trump administration could make sweeping cuts to federal spending without the approval of Congress, taking a position at odds with the Constitution’s separation of powers that undercuts his own branch of government.
“I’ve been asked so many times, ‘Aren’t you uncomfortable with this?’ No, I’m not,” Mr. Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, told reporters at the Capitol, adding: “There’s a presupposition in America that the commander in chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars.” |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 11, 2025 22:10:42 GMT
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-constitutional-crisis.html“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” he said on Friday. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.”
He ticked off examples of what he called President Trump’s lawless conduct: revoking birthright citizenship, freezing federal spending, shutting down an agency, removing leaders of other agencies, firing government employees subject to civil service protections and threatening to deport people based on their political views.
The distinctive feature of the current situation, several legal scholars said, is its chaotic flood of activity that collectively amounts to a radically new conception of presidential power. But the volume and speed of those actions may overwhelm and thus thwart sober and measured judicial consideration.
“It’s an open question whether the administration will be as contemptuous of courts as it has been of Congress and the Constitution,” said Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The administration’s early moves,” she added, “also seem designed to demonstrate maximum contempt for core constitutional values — the separation of powers, the freedom of speech, equal justice under law.”
Not all presidents gave the court’s rulings the same respect. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision arising from a clash between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. A probably apocryphal but nonetheless potent comment is often attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Even before this weekend, Mr. Vance has said that Mr. Trump should ignore the Supreme Court. In a 2021 interview, he said Mr. Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.
He added: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
“One way to look at the administration’s assault on legal barriers is that it is seeking to establish ‘test cases’ to litigate and win favorable Supreme Court decisions,” Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith wrote in their Executive Functions newsletter. “But the typical test case is a carefully developed, discrete challenge to statutory or judge-made law with some good faith basis.”
Mr. Trump’s executive orders have some features suggesting that they mean to test legal theories in the Supreme Court, they wrote. “But in the aggregate,” they added, “they seem more like pieces of a program, in the form of law defiance, for a mini-constitutional convention to ‘amend’ Article II across a broad front.”
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Post by crazy4scraps on Feb 11, 2025 22:35:08 GMT
Yeah, I think we’re there. I just really don’t know where you go from here if no one in the majority in the other branches of government will stand up for the Constitution they swore an oath to. It’s all quite disturbing. Guess he really wasn’t lying (for once) when he said during the campaign that we wouldn’t need to vote again after this. 😔
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 12, 2025 12:20:01 GMT
She’s absolutely right - all of this is an illegal, unconstitutional power grab www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/opinion/musk-trump-spending-congress.htmlThe Constitution is clear about many things. There are three branches of government. Presidents can only be elected to two terms. And Congress, not the executive branch, has the power of the purse, meaning the power to control federal spending. It is right there, as clear as day in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” This is a bedrock principle of our government, which President Trump and his unchecked billionaire buddy are attempting to subvert. They are trying to do so through a variety of avenues, including using social media platforms to berate elected officials into submitting to their demands, impounding funds — which is nothing less than stealing congressionally appropriated dollars promised to Americans — and empowering the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. What all these tactics to get around Congress have in common is simple: They are undemocratic. I will not surrender the authority of Congress and the Appropriations Committee, where I serve as ranking member, to the tide of cronyism and unlawful decision making that threatens to unravel our constitutional form of government. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency is clearly another attempt by wealthy donors like Mr. Musk to artificially insert their policy preferences into the governing process. He is trying to disguise this self-serving crusade as a blue-ribbon commission, but it has no legal authority and aims to substitute the will of a rich few for the will of the people. This is par for the course for Republicans and their Project 2025 agenda, which seeks to erode the Constitution at every turn and give the president unilateral authority. Amid the chaos of a Trump presidency, the Constitution must be our bedrock. Leaders of both parties have affirmed what every schoolchild learns: that Congress holds the power of the purse, and that bills to raise revenue must begin in the House. The executive branch is not empowered to decide these things, and the courts must uphold the plain text of our founding document. |
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ashley
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,571
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Post by ashley on Feb 12, 2025 12:28:58 GMT
I mean… I’m Canadian and even I understand that many of the actions of Trump are anti-constitutional and illegal.
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 12, 2025 16:08:54 GMT
And here we are hearing from the Putin Branch of the US Government Aaron Rupar… ”Hegseth: "We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective ... the US does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement." x.com/atrupar/status/1889683478578381015?s=61&t=j45uMgNk1i8O0YllKF58nw |
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scrappinmama
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,672
Jun 26, 2014 12:54:09 GMT
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Post by scrappinmama on Feb 12, 2025 16:11:16 GMT
Is there a way to get this in front of SCOTUS? Would they hear it and maybe say he has gone too far? I don’t know if even that would stop him but would add to the argument. How far does he have to go to get an impeachment that actually sticks and get imposed. Yes we are in a Constitutional crisis. But even if/when it goes before SCOTUS, they have already proven to be compromised. The majority will rule in his favor. He will never be impeached. Our only hope is to take control with those next elections in Florida and New York in April. If Democrats win those 3 available seats, Republicans will lose their majority. Then we need to hold on tight and hope to flip more seats in 2026. If that doesn't happen, it's over. And I'm not being dramatic. I think it's the sad truth. |
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 12, 2025 20:06:00 GMT
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