Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) had a stern message for Republican officials threatening to arrest lawmakers who were involved in a confrontation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
The congresswoman accused President Donald Trump’s administration of illegally preventing a group of Garden State Democrats from touring the facility, where Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing on Friday.
Afterwards, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the government was looking into arresting three congress members who joined Baraka during the visit.
“They’re using public intimidation because they know that they cannot come for us all,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a livestream on social media Saturday night.
She argued that the protesting politicians were exercising “their legal and constitutional obligation to conduct oversight,” and it was Trump officials who were actually in the wrong.
“If anyone is breaking the law in this situation, it’s not members of Congress, it’s the Department of Homeland Security,” she said. “It’s people like Tom Homan and Secretary Kristi Noem.”
Ocasio-Cortez then warned, “You lay a finger on Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman or any of the Representatives that were there… we’re going to have a problem.”
The congresswoman said the lawmakers were “legally required to be granted access and they legally cannot be inhibited from accessing these facilities to conduct their constitutional obligation to investigate and conduct oversight.”
“So if Kristi Noem wants to break the law, that’s on her,” she continued. “But it sure as hell is not someone like Rep. Robert Menendez that needs to be arrested.”...
Fighters, not huggers!
President Donald Trump's administration's suggestion of suspending habeas corpus rights has been criticized by legal experts, with a Boston professor telling Newsweek that classifying the immigration situation as an invasion as justification was "absurd."
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said on Friday that the White House was exploring ways to expand its legal power to deport undocumented migrants, including suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government. [snip]
"The Constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion," Miller told reporters outside the White House on Friday.
Lawrence Friedman, a professor at New England Law in Boston and author of Modern Constitutional Law, told Newsweek that "the whole notion that the immigration issue constitutes an 'invasion' strikes me as absurd; and worse than absurd, as a blow to the very fabric of American democracy."
Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck wrote in a Substack blog that Miller's statement is both "wrong" and "profoundly dangerous," while former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin said suspending habeas corpus would be a "wild step."
The comments came after U.S. District Judge William Sessions on Friday ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student from Turkey who was detained in late March, pending a final decision on her claim that she has been illegally detained.
In his post, Vladeck wrote that Miller was "being slippery" about the actual text of the Constitution.
"The Suspension Clause does not say habeas can be suspended during any invasion; it says, 'The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.'
The last part, he wrote, is "not just window-dressing; again, the whole point is that the default is for judicial review except when there is a specific national security emergency in which judicial review could itself exacerbate the emergency. The emergency itself isn't enough."
He wrote that Miller "also doesn't deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the president are per se unconstitutional."
Vladeck added that Miller is "suggesting that the administration would (unlawfully) suspend habeas corpus if (but apparently only if) it disagrees with how courts rule in these cases. In other words, it's not the judicial review itself that's imperiling national security; it's the possibility that the government might lose. That's not, and has never been, a viable argument for suspending habeas corpus."
Anyone who doesn't see where they're going with this lives in a Panglossian bubble.
The Trump administration is preparing to accept a superluxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar as a gift to be used by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One for presidential travel until shortly before Trump leaves office, according to four sources familiar with the planning.
Two of the sources also confirm that ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation once the president ends his second term.
According to one of the sources, the arrangement will be done according to U.S. and international laws, in observance of ethics rules. That official said it will take some time for the plane to be delivered to Trump but that the president will discuss the arrangement during his visit to Qatar this week.
Another one of the sources said the idea of gifting Trump this specific plane has been under discussion for “quite some time” and that when the formal offer was made more recently, the president “happily accepted.” [snip]
"Trump must seek Congress’ consent to take this $300 million gift from Qatar. The Constitution is perfectly clear: no present “of any kind whatever” from a foreign state without Congressional permission. A gift you use for four years and then deposit in your library is still a gift (and a grift)," Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in a post on X. [snip]
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., when even further, calling the move "corrupt" and "unconstitutional."
"I don’t know who needs to hear this, but NO, Donald Trump cannot accept a $400 million flying palace from the royal family of Qatar. Not only is this farcically corrupt, it is blatantly unconstitutional," Sanders wrote.
It comes ahead of the president’s first foreign trip of his second term, in which he will travel to Saudi Arabia this week and also make stops in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
What president in our history would think to do this? Why the president who's a world class con artist, convicted fraud felon, corrupt nitwit, grifter, liar, cheat, would- be lawless dictator, and traitor (and so much more), that's who!
Had to look up Pangloss: a person who is optimistic regardless of the circumstances. Pretty much describes the magas...
ReplyDelete