Posted on 03/25/2017 11:44:10 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
After just two months, there is no question that the Donald Trump presidency is an unmitigated disaster.
The FBI is conducting an investigation to determine whether members of the Trump campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to help elect Donald Trump last year. This by itself is extraordinary and unprecedented. As Republicans noted last year, it is very difficult to have a presidential administration under FBI investigation.
No one knows what the investigation will find, but what we already know is bad enough. Senior Trump advisors lied about their contacts with Russian officials; one, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign from the administration....
(Excerpt) Read more at billingsgazette.com ...
To me it seems very odd that a Billings Montana newspaper is carrying water for a professor at the American University in Washington DC by publishing this crap.
Guess this kook author knows someone on the Billings Gazette staff or shopped article around and Gazette was only paper to publish it?!
There's no way around it, our entire body politic has been overrun by luciferians.
Lock all of em up, give em trials and executions per law!
They all seem to ignore the proof hillary and her top agents talked to the russians.
Uranium one quid pro quo as SoS.
Obama caught on an open mike in 2012 about tell putin he will uave more flexibility after the election.
A professor criticizing the Trump administration? What’s next, two 17-year-olds going all the way?
Well done! Well done indeed!
Bam! Didn’t even know what hit little professor chrissy.
Flaming light in the loafers useless leftist
Fake News.
I read no further than: Professor Chris Edelson
At this point and ever since he won the election, the Trump presidency has been a disaster for the democrats and their media wing, however mitigated. Eventually, Obama will be unmasked and he won’t be holding any press conferences to announce that he’s turning himself in.
This has to be click bait. I refuse to believe a “professor” thinks we’re going to have a special election for President, mostly because he simply does not like who won the real one in November.
Thank goodness I don’t have kids attending American University - they might be indoctrinated by this fool.
Ha! Delivered it in Glasgow in the early 60s!
Degrees
B.A. Brandeis University, J.D. Harvard Law School...
He was obviously cutting class in law school when they studied the Constitution.
Aw - no comments section?
The more liberal a paper the less likely a comments section.
This prof. DIDN’T consider Trump’s election ITSELF an unmitigated disaster? Yeah, gotcha’ prof.
1) That same FBI was also conducting an investigation into Mrs. Clinton, if you recall. So it's hardly "unprecedented."
2) The fact that an investigation is being held doesn't mean the investigation will find any evidence of wrongdoing. I refer you once again to Mrs. Clinton.
So, how exactly did this disaster unfold?
1. Democrats have continued the “Russia COnnection” meme that the election was hacked or swayed, and have presented Z*E*R*O evidence that any activity swayed a single vote. No evidence whatsoever.
2. The former administration leaked classified information to take down his national security advisor.
3. Democrats and GOP Establishment have drug their feet on Trumps’s cabinet appointment confirmations.
4. The MSM and Democrats have waged a coordinated war on Trump over the “Russia” angle, with ZERO evidence.
Complete manufactured scandal and crisis.
I wonder why he doesn’t believe in what he teaches. Constitutional Law just in and of itself is revealing now, in the early 21st, He might believe the Constitution is a malleable and plastic instrument of “law suggesting.”
If he does he is definitely a problem. Constitutional law is not malleable though there is a great effort over the years to make it so. Actually there is not much wrong with it the way it was written originally. Bill of Rights, same thing.
I think this nation needs a discussion about this but not lead by the MSM. And not the judiciary...The 9th District Ct knows about as much as I about “Law”.
I disagree with this liberal profs premises.
So I stopped reading after, “has.”
5.56mm
Professor Chris Edelson’s Blog
Insights and ideas about emergency presidential power
Wanted: Leaders With Guts to Stand Up to Bully-in-Chief
January 6, 2017
https://chrisedelson.com/2017/01/06/wanted-leaders-with-guts-to-stand-up-to-bully-in-chief/
Donald Trump is a bully.
He bullied his way through the primaries, using schoolyard taunts and boorish male primate displays to push aside “low energy” Jeb Bush, “little” Marco Rubio, and “lyin’” Ted Cruz.
He bullied his way through the general election, trying to intimidate Gold Star parents out of exercising their First Amendment rights, insulting a former Miss Universe in a nasty, ad hominem twitter war, and bizarrely feuding with Rosie O’Donnell. The Hillary Clinton campaign ran an ad that justly compared Trump to infamous movie bullies like Biff from Back to the Future.
Trump’s venom reached a fever pitch when he personally threatened to send Clinton to jail during a debate. Unfortunately, Clinton failed to respond.
The thing about bullies is that they tend to back off when people stand up to them. There is evidence that this strategy works with Trump. When the pastor of a Flint, Michigan church firmly refused to let Trump turn a visit into a political event, Trump meekly backed down.
But Clinton’s failure to directly confront Trump proved costly.
While bullies may back down when confronted, they grow emboldened when their bullying goes unchallenged.
After his election win, Trump has continued to push his critics around. He launched what one Republican strategist called a round of “cyberbullying” directed at union official Chuck Jones. He blasted an angry tweet at Vanity Fair after it gave one his restaurants a bad review. He gave media executives a tonguelashing in a meeting one described as a “firing squad”.
Most ominously, he has shown a willingness to bully intelligence officials who have concluded Russia intervened in the election with the specific purpose of helping Trump win.
Bullies, by definition, push to get their own way at the expense of others. They refuse to recognize limits on their power. That makes a bully-in-chief as president dangerous for American constitutional democracy, which depends on checks and balances to prevent any one branch of government from amassing too much power. But Trump has made clear he does not think ordinary rules apply to him. In the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he bragged about having the right to grab women by the crotch without consequence. As a star, he explained, he could do what he wants. He has similarly declared that he and he alone will decide whether to order torture or put limits on business relationships with foreign powers as president.
The framers of the Constitution did not want a bully as head of the executive branch. They outlined a system designed to prevent the president from having too much power. After all, they had just launched a revolution against a king they saw as a tyrant. They certainly didn’t want to create an American monarch who could rule without regard to limits on his power.
As a result. our constitutional system provides us with the tools to rein Trump in—but this depends on key actors stepping up to the plate. So far, members of Congress, some leading media outlets, and prominent Republicans who know Trump is dangerous, have signaled they are ready to let Trump have his way as president. Just two Republican senators have called for a nonpartisan investigation of Russian hacking in the election. Some of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics, including Mitt Romney and Carly Fiorina, have disgracefully lined up to kiss Trump’s ring in a scene better suited to a royal court than a constitutional democracy.
Omarosa Manigault, formerly of reality television notoriety and now a Trump advisor, predicted all this. In September, she vowed that Trump’s critics would have to “bow down” to him if he won the election. This sounds like the kind of cartoonish dialogue you’d expect from a fictional arch-villain—and, in fact, it is. In one of the Superman movies, General Zod called on his enemy, Superman, to “kneel before Zod”.
Somehow, we have found ourselves inhabiting a bizarre reality where our president-elect is a power hungry caricature.
Of course, we can’t count on a superhero to bail us out of this crisis. But we can reasonably expect human leaders to stand up to Trump’s bullying.
So far, conservative presidential candidate and former CIA operative Evan McMullin has emerged asTrump’s leading post-election critic. McMullin has used Trump’s own favored medium of communication—Twitter—to forthrightly describe the president-elect as a threat to democracyitself. Not surprisingly, McMullin has gotten under Trump’s skin: Trump has responded bymaking fun of McMullin’s last name. That’s the kind of stuff we’d expect from a middle school bully, not the president-elect. But, of course, with Trump, it’s depressingly familiar.
McMullin seems to understand who he’s dealing with. In response to Trump’s petty taunts, McMullin tweeted: “Come now, Donald. Every madman needs a nemesis.” That’s the kind of attitude we need—someone who won’t back down from a bully. McMullin should challenge Trump to a public debate on the topic of Russian efforts to help its preferred candidate win the presidential election. McMullin’s example could inspire members of Congress to stand up to Trump as well. Let’s see how long Trump can keep up his tough guy talk once he has to deal with real opposition.
Chris Edelson is an assistant professor of government in American University’s School of Public Affairs. His latest book, Power Without Constraint: The Post 9/11 Presidency and National Security, was published in May 2016 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
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