I thought these were the bad old days. Now they're beginning to seem like a more innocent time:
The Bush-Cheney White House and the media went nuts after 9/11 and then deviously used the event to further long-standing geopolitical goals. Now we would have Trump, Flynn, Bannon, Sessions, Kobach and all manner of authoritarian, extremist imbeciles running around doing God knows what. That combination is even more lethal than Cheney and his band of neoconservative wetdreamers. And the neoconservative wetdreamers were very, very lethal.
The Republicans have now completely abandoned all pretense of democratic norms. We know that Trump has no intention of avoiding conflict of interest . He's going to run his company out of the White House and become the richest man in the world. Nobody will stop him --- what's good for Trump is good for the USA.
Newt Gingrich said on NPR today that Trump could appoint his children to White House jobs and then simply pardon them in advance. Why not? The president has the power to do it, half the people would complain and the other half would shrug and after some handwringing we'd all move along to the next outrageous stunt.
There is this, but I doubt it would matter:
Rehm asked Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007, for his reaction to Gingrich's comments.
“There is no billionaire exception in the Constitution of the United States,” Painter said, adding later: “The pardon power can not be used by the president to pardon himself, or to cause other members of his administration to engage in illegal conduct or unconstitutional conduct and then simply use the pardon power in that way. If the pardon power allows that, the pardon power allows the president to become a dictator."
That would be correct. Of courses the founders probably assumed the congress would impeach such a person but they didn't anticipate the former constitution revering Republican party of 2016, did they? They assumed that there would always be people who put the country first and even if they didn't, they'd put the prerogatives of their own branch of government ahead of loyalty to the president.
Oops.
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