WTF are we going to bitch about when /if we ever get another decent President ???

Trump is no PR fool and all he did by mentioning the FCC is to plant the seed that the next guy that he "is coming for" is Ajit Pai the Chairman of the FCC who is actually appointed by the POTUS and this guys job is safe until 2021 but he pissed trump off with his "It doesn't work like that" tweet to Trumps ramblings about NBC.

I will watch that one closely and see if Trump is smart enough to drop the steaming pile he is holding.

 

Trump must not know that NBC News does not hold an FCC license. Their Radio and TV stations do have licenses but bad journalism is not a reason for revoking a license.

 

US citizens have never been united about much of anything...until we are attacked from outside.

 

Yet, it's Obama, the Constitutional scholar, who holds the record for the most unanimous Supreme Court smackdowns of any president. That's in addition to having the worst overall record of win/loss with the Supreme Court. It's pretty tough to argue a conservative bias when two of your very own appointees are siding with the other seven.

But let's start off with the latest decision on Obama. Not just "constitutional overreach", which has been his forte. This is a decision, and joined by one of his own appointees, that he willfully violated the constitution.


Kagan, Breyer Join GOP Justices to Strike Down Unconstitutional Obama Appointment


3/21/17


Court rules that another Obama labor appointee illegally served at NLRB

The Supreme Court ruled that President Obama violated the Constitution when he maintained an acting agency appointment after the Senate refused to confirm him.

The court ruled Tuesday that Obama appointee Lafe Solomon illegally served as acting general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board from 2010 to 2013. Solomon, who once violated the agency's ethics rules, should have vacated the position in accordance with the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (FVRA) after the Senate refused to take up his nomination to serve as permanent general counsel in 2011, the court found in a 6-2 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. The appointment was an "end-run around" the Constitution.

"We cannot cast aside the separation of powers and the Appointments Clause's important check on executive power for the sake of administrative convenience or efficiency," the majority ruled.

The case came to the court after the NLRB filed unfair labor practice charges against an Arizona-based ambulance service, Southwest General, following union complaints.

David Phippen, a management-side labor attorney at the firm Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, said the decision clarifies the meaning of the FVRA.

"The case is a reminder that the language of the FVRA statute means what it says and must be followed, not ignored by Presidents, as appeared to be the case here," Phippen said in an email. "The decision … appears to make it somewhat more difficult for Presidents to put ‘her or his people' into important agency positions unilaterally, i.e., without approval of the Senate."

The decision came less than five years after the court unanimously ruled that Obama unconstitutionally recess-appointed two Democratic attorneys as NLRB board members while the Senate was still in session. That decision allowed employers and unions to challenge more than 1,000 decisions issued during those board members' brief tenure at the agency. The NLRB reheard dozens of cases as a result.

"The Judicial Branch must be most vigilant in guarding the separation between the political powers precisely when those powers collude to avoid the structural constraints of our Constitution," the ruling says.

-------------------


Obama Has Faced More Unanimous Supreme Court Smackdowns Than Any Other President


7/8/16

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ended its 2015-16 session, and the news for President Obama is not good. The “constitutional scholar” residing in the Oval Office lost more unanimous Supreme Court decisions than any president in recent history.

That’s quite a record, given that the Court’s four liberal justices have bent themselves, and the U.S. Constitution, over backwards to support nearly all of Obama’s power grabs.

Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of its “Supreme Court Review,” has been tracking the number of unanimous decisions against the Obama administration.

According to Shapiro, President Bill Clinton’s administration lost 31 Supreme Court cases unanimously during his eight years in office. President George W. Bush’s administration lost 30.

Obama has bested both of their records by nearly 50 percent: 44 unanimous losses.

I know Obama wants a legacy, but I’m not sure having the most Supreme Court smackdowns is what he was hoping for.

My favorite 9-0 decision was National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, in part because both a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the second most powerful court in the country, and the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Obama’s argument. A double whammy.

In that case, the president wanted to appoint three new members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Richard Cordray to head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But the U.S. Senate, which constitutionally must approve such appointments, wasn’t cooperating.

The Constitution empowers the president to make appointments when the Senate is in recess — a power that has been used more creatively and aggressively as time has passed. In consequence, the Senate has been more creative in its efforts to avoid going into recess.

As the Christmas holidays arrived in 2011, the House of Representatives did not assent to go into recess, which meant both the House and Senate remained in “pro-forma” session, keeping Obama from making recess appointments — or at least, that’s the way it had always worked.

But in January 2012, Obama took it upon himself to make the appointments anyway. The new left-leaning NLRB members took their seats and quickly began to hammer employers.

Noel Canning, a Pepsi distributor affected by the NLRB’s actions, filed suit claiming the board’s decisions were unlawful because Obama had no authority to appoint the three people needed for the Board to have a quorum. Noel Canning won.

It’s hard to overstate Obama’s chutzpah in making those recess appointments. So audacious was his move that, given the Court’s ideological divide, all four of the liberals sided against him and agreed that he overstepped.

Of course, not all of the unanimous decisions against Obama — or Clinton or Bush, for that matter — had major constitutional implications. And many of the most important cases were closely divided, such as NFIB v. Sebelius, in which a 5-4 majority allowed the government to mandate people have health insurance.

But the reason Obama was hit with so many more unanimous decisions was because he went rogue early on, asking his staff to look for novel theories that would allow him to move forward with implementing his agenda. And if that meant twisting the Constitution — and basic logic — to get it, so what?

If others didn’t like it and decided to seek legal remedy, the president knew he had a chance of slow-walking the process through the courts for months or even years. Hence his taunt to Republicans: “So sue me.”

And if he got a unanimous Supreme Court smackdown for his efforts, as he has 44 times, he would simply say that he disagreed and go to his next rally where hundreds of people, also tired of being constrained by the Constitution, would cheer him on.

Fortunately, after January of next year, he won’t be able to do that anymore.

--------------

https://www.cato.org/blog/obamas-abysmal-record-supreme-court

 

So, according to your, as usual, "not fact-checked" claim, Trump was born in 1968.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/presidential-nepotism-debate-goes-back-to-the-founders-time/

So far, the speculation is that President-elect Donald Trump may want Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, in an advisory position in his new administration. Critics point to a 1967 law, the Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, as preventing this. The statute, known as Section 3110, was passed as part of a Postal Service reform law, and it states that an executive agency official can’t appoint relatives, including sons, daughters and sons-in law, to “a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control.”​

Before 1967, there was a rather long history of presidential relatives serving in appointed and unofficial government positions. The most famous example was President John F. Kennedy’s nomination of his brother, Robert, to become Attorney General. Robert Kennedy was confirmed in a voice vote by the Senate in 1961 and he served until September 1964.​

Robert Kennedy’s nomination was controversial at the time, since he lacked vast legal experience, but it wasn’t the first high-profile debate over the nepotism issue. Back in 1797, incoming President John Adams retained his son, John Quincy Adams, as a diplomat and appointed him as the United States minister to Prussia, over public criticism.

Other Presidents retained relatives at the White House in secretarial roles, including James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler and James Buchanan. Zachary Taylor kept his brother and son-in-law on the government payroll, using military commissions, as unofficial presidential advisers. President Ulysses S. Grant had many direct family members on the government payroll or at the White House. His brother, Orvil, was implicated in scandals involving Indian trading posts.​

In later years, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower had family members as secretaries or aides. Kennedy also appointed his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, as the first head of the Peace Corps.​

--------------------------

http://time.com/money/4842799/donald-trump-white-house-staff-salary/

Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, listed as adviser to the president, and her husband Jared Kushner, listed as senior adviser, earn no salary, according to the list. Real estate developer Reed Cordish, who assists Trump on intergovernmental and technology initiatives, also does not take home a salary.
​

-----------------------------


Anyway, Jared and Ivanka have Bill & Hillary to thank for setting the precedent showing the anti-nepotism law wouldn't apply to them.


Trump's appointment of son-in-law could rest on Clinton precedent


In the early '90s, an appeals court suggested that anti-nepotism laws didn't bar Hillary from the White House health task force.

11/17/16

Hillary Clinton may wind up smoothing the way for Jared Kushner to work in the White House.

Donald Trump’s best argument that it’s legal to appoint his son-in-law to a high-level West Wing post comes from a two-decades-old legal case involving the woman Trump just vanquished in the presidential race.

In an obscure passage in that case, stemming from President Bill Clinton's appointment of his wife to head up health care reform efforts, two federal appeals court judges opined that a federal anti-nepotism law passed in 1967 did not appear to cover appointments to the White House staff.

“We doubt that Congress intended to include the White House or the Executive Office of the President” in the anti-nepotism statute, D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman wrote in the 1993 decision joined by Judge Stephen Williams. "So, for example, a President would be barred from appointing his brother as Attorney General, but perhaps not as a White House special assistant. ... The anti-nepotism statute, moreover, may well bar appointment only to paid positions in government."

 

Not qualified, huh?

Jared Kushner

Kushner graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government.

Jared Kushner graduated from New York University in 2007 with dual JD/MBA degrees. He interned at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, and at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP​

Prior to his appointment as Senior Adviser to the President, he was CEO of Kushner Companies, and Publisher of The New York Observer.
​

Ivanka Trump

Trump attended the Chapin School in Manhattan until she was 15, when she transferred to Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. After graduating from Choate, she attended Georgetown University for two years, then transferred to the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, from which she graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics in 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choate_Rosemary_Hall

Among Choate's alumni are President John F. Kennedy, two-time presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, playwright Edward Albee, novelist John Dos Passos, investor Brett Icahn, Ivanka Trump daughter of US President Donald Trump, philanthropist Paul Mellon, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, and actors Glenn Close, Michael Douglas, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Paul Giamatti.
​

I'd go so far as to say you're not qualified to judge their qualifications.

I guess you missed that whole part about just about every president having one or more family members serving in some capacity, including JFK when he appointed his brother Attorney General, who many felt was unqualified.

Yeah, except for the fact that they are indeed employees of the White House in every sense, except for the fact that they don't draw salaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#First_Lady_of_the_United_States

Some critics called it inappropriate for the first lady to play a central role in matters of public policy. Supporters pointed out that Clinton's role in policy was no different from that of other White House advisors and that voters had been well aware that she would play an active role in her husband's presidency

Clinton traveled to 79 countries during this time, breaking the mark for most-traveled first lady held by Pat Nixon. She did not hold a security clearance or attend National Security Council meetings, but played a role in U.S. diplomacy attaining its objectives.A March 1995 five-nation trip to South Asia, on behest of the U.S. State Department and without her husband, sought to improve relations with India and Pakistan.

​

Yeah, I guess you don't get much more silent than that, huh? Really kept kept her thought and advice to herself (while flying around the world and "playing a role in US diplomacy".

 

And for Democrats and other anti-Trumpers who keep popping political Viagra to maintain their hardons in hopes of the 25th being used, you're guaranteed to end up just as depressed and tearfully dehydrated as you were on November 9th.

Section 3. covers the president resigning. Fuhgeddaboutit.

And section 4 is worded that the Vice President AND [either "majority of executive"s or "other such body"] Not "Vice President OR..."

So, without Pence, you have about as much hope as seeing Trump and the 25th as you do of seeing Hillary as the 45th. And I really, really don't see Pence joining the Trump Derangement party.

 

Nothing like crystal clear law to clear up any confusion...

 

Same delusional people who think Hillary won the election came up with something that, in their delusional mind, would work to bypass the will of the people.

 

If an election were held today someone else would become President. The 'will of the people' is currently not what Trump is following according to the Gallup 3 day rolling poll. It has found that since February he has lost ground consistently in his approval/disapproval number and has become the least popular holder of the Office since such polls began being taken.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx

Well, at least he has one milestone for his legacy.

 

Here is what the polls told us.....

 

Thanks Randy. It was funny listening to people who were so out of contact with the normal people that they thought Hillary was going to win.
They must have been polling each other. Much like the polling taking place today.

 

That election was almost a year ago. What has Trump done since?

 

He has had to undo quite a bit of Obama's fuck ups. Democrats like to ask what has he been doing but really do not want to know.
He has already done more than Obama did when he was at this point in his first term.

 

I'm not a fucking Democrat. I'm an Independent. What has your so-called President for 9 months accomplished beyond breaking promises and being a general fuck-up?

 

A simple search will show what he has been doing. That would be much better than people trying to list what he has been doing.
You might learn something also.

 

You are very correct on that point!!! As recounted in Newsweek:

From the comfort of his reality TV-host perch, Donald Trump slammed then-President Barack Obama over his use of executive orders. Once in the White House, though, Trump has done the exact thing for which he criticized his predecessor—on a range of issues, from golfing days to attacking Syria to, yes, signing executive orders. Indeed, not only has he failed to reverse course, he has gone much further than Obama.

The executive order [which Trump signed on Thursday Oct. 12 and repealed the ACA subsidy payments to insurance companies] was significant in another way, too: It was the 50th Trump has signed as president. By comparison, Obama had signed just 26 at this point of his presidency. He would eventually average 35 a year during his eight years in the White House—the fewest of any president for 120 years—en route to a total of 277. Trump is currently on pace to sign 275 executive orders. In one term.

So. Yes indeed!!! Trump is doing more signing of executive orders, almost double in fact, in almost 10 months in office than Obama did over his same period of time in office.

 

Ok, lets see...
Fired the head of the FBI for investigating possible campaign connections to foreign government influences.
Fired his national security advisor for having connections to foreign government influences.
Took so many vacations that he drained the yearly budget allowance for the secret service.
Trashed three foreign treaties. Working on screwing up a fourth.
Called Nazis "Good people."
Had Twitter fights with everyone from Saturday Night Live to Kim Jung Un to the Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico to Cher.
Cut off insurance support for at least 23 million people. (minimum estimate per OMB)
Threatened WWIII.
Started violations of the Emolluments Clause of the Constitution of the United States on 1/30/2017. Still in violation.
Threatened violation of First Amendment by asking for FCC review and possible revocation of NBC station licences.
Said he had spoken to the President of the US Virgin Islands.

I could go on but these are the highlights I remember.