• Tag Archives Clinton

  • Neither Trump Nor Clinton Understands What the Supreme Court Is Supposed to Do

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The next president will appoint at least one and perhaps as many as three Supreme Court justices, who in turn will have a decisive impact on the Court’s jurisprudence for decades. But last night’s presidential debate revealed that neither of the major-party candidates understands what Supreme Court justices are supposed to do.

    Moderator Chris Wallace started the discussion off on the wrong foot by asking the candidates where they “want to see the Court take the country,” implying that justices are legislators in black robes, pursuing a policy agenda instead of deciding the controversies that come before them. Both candidates seemed to agree with that premise.

    Donald Trump promised that “the justices that I’m going to appoint will be pro-life” and will therefore vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that discovered a right to abortion in the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. There are good reasons to think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, or at least that its constitutional rationale left much to be desired. But a justice’s personal views on abortion are logically and legally distinct from the issue of Roe‘s soundness. A conscientious justice strives to separate his policy preferences from the question of what the Constitution allows or requires.

    Hillary Clinton also promised to appoint justices who will help her achieve the policies she favors, which include speech restrictions that protect politicians like her from criticism close to an election. Clinton said her Supreme Court picks “will stand up and say no to Citizens United, a decision that has undermined the election system in our country because of the way it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system.”

    Clinton neglected to mention, as she always does when discussing Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that the case involved a movie that made her look bad. The Court concluded that a conservative group organized as a nonprofit corporation had a First Amendment right to present Hillary: The Movie on pay-per-view TV while Clinton was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Presumably Clinton disagrees. But instead of explaining why, she says the decision should be overturned because “it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system.” Clinton worries that these dastardly dollars are “drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans and distorting our democracy.” But that is not a constitutional argument. Even if Clinton were right about the baleful impact of Citizens United, it would not follow that the First Amendment permits the sort of self-serving censorship she favors.

    In addition to promising Supreme Court justices who agree with her that suppressing Hillary: The Movie was consistent with freedom of speech, Clinton said her picks would “stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy.” That sounds like she thinks the Court should be biased against big businesses and rich people, a position that cannot be reconciled with the constitution or the statutes that the justices are charged with interpreting and applying. The law is supposed to provide equal protection to all Americans, regardless of their income or wealth.

    Clinton is also wrong when she says “the Supreme Court should represent all of us.” That is what a democratically elected legislature is supposed to do. A court is supposed to apply the law, a function that does not cater to constituencies or dole out favors based on political considerations.

    In light of that role, Chris Wallace’s other question about the Supreme Court was more apposite: “What’s your view on how the Constitution should be interpreted? Do the founders’ words mean what they say, or is it a living document to be applied flexibly according to changing circumstances?”

    Clinton did not even attempt an answer, while Trump at least tried to mouth the words that somebody told him conservatives expect to hear from a Republican presidential nominee:

    Source: Neither Trump Nor Clinton Understands What the Supreme Court Is Supposed to Do – Hit & Run : Reason.com


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  • Hillary Clinton’s & Barack Obama’s E-mails — WikiLeaks Reveals John Podesta’s Concern

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Among the most noteworthy of the hacked e-mails from John Podesta’s accounts is an exchange in which Podesta consults Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills about the private e-mail exchanges between President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

    As readers may recall, I have long maintained (see here and here) that the principal reason why Mrs. Clinton was not prosecuted, despite a mountain of evidence that she committed felony mishandling of classified information, is the fact that Obama engaged in the same kind of misconduct. The president’s use of a private, non-secure channel to discuss sensitive matters with high level officials may not have been systematic, as Mrs. Clinton’s was. (Obama’s disturbing use of an alias, however, suggests that Clinton was not the only one he was privately e-mailing.) Nevertheless, the fact that the president was e-mailing Clinton means he not only participated in her misconduct but also that the Obama-Clinton e-mails would have been admissible evidence in any criminal trial of Clinton.

    For the parties to prove such culpable conduct on the president’s part in a high-profile criminal trial would have been profoundly embarrassing to him, to say the least. Therefore, it was never going to happen. As I’ve noted before, after exclaiming, “How is that not classified?” upon being shown an Obama-Clinton e-mail by the FBI, Hillary’s confidant Huma Abedin asked agents if she could have a copy of the exchange. She obviously realized that if Obama had been communicating on Clinton’s non-secure server system, no one else who had done so was going to be prosecuted for it.

    We now know that Podesta was very concerned about the Obama-Clinton e-mails and turned to Mills for advice. His succinct e-mail to Mills is dated March 4, 2015 (at 8:41 p.m.), and he entitled it “Special Category.” He stated:

    Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I [sic] seems like they will.

    Plainly, Podesta was suggesting to Mills that the Obama-Clinton e-mails were in a “special category” — i.e., distinct from the tens of thousands of other Clinton e-mails — because they involved the president. Only the president has power to invoke executive privilege, and Podesta believed such invocation would legitimately cover a communication between Obama and his secretary of state, since such consultations are “the heart of” the privilege recognized by the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon. (I think he was wrong about that, but that’s a matter for another day.)

    If Mills ever responded to Podesta’s question, we do not have an e-mail to that effect. It is unlikely Mills would have ignored Podesta, particularly on a matter of such significance. Thus, I suspect further discussion was had face-to-face, by phone, or through intermediaries.

    The timing of the March 4 Podesta-Mills e-mail is highly significant. The date places it about three weeks after Podesta left his White House job as the president’s top advisor in order to head up the Clinton presidential campaign; the transitioning Podesta was still involved in Oval Office doings, and the Clinton campaign was up and running though not yet publicly launched. More significantly, the e-mail occurred when both the administration and the campaign were in crisis mode: It was immediately after the New York Times publicly exposed Clinton’s private e-mail system, and the House Benghazi committee had just issued a subpoena, demanding that Clinton preserve and provide any private e-mails within the scope of the committee’s investigation.

    With that as background, we should consider three salient matters.

    1. OBAMA’S CONCEALMENT OF HIS E-MAILS WITH CLINTON

    In the days immediately after the Times’ revelation of Mrs. Clinton’s systematic use of private e-mail to conduct government business, President Obama sat for interviews in which he claimed that he’d learned of Clinton’s personal e-mail use through “news reports” like everyone else. He flatly denied that he had any personal knowledge about the matter. Clearly, the president was lying to the American people: He knew he personally had engaged in several e-mails with Clinton. By extension, Obama was also lying to the Congress. As he well knew, congressional committees had been investigating matters (most prominently, Benghazi) in which communications between Obama and Clinton were of immense importance. Now, we know Obama not only had intimate personal awareness of what Clinton was doing; his top White House advisor, Podesta, was both aware of and concerned about the Obama-Clinton e-mails.

    Did Obama figure that because he had used an alias, the public and the Congress would never find out about his e-mails with Clinton (and with whomever else he has been exchanging e-mails while using the alias)? Did the president figure he could quietly invoke executive privilege such that no one would ever find out about his e-mails with Clinton? Given that Obama was manifestly determined to conceal his e-mails with Clinton, what is the chance that he would ever have permitted a prosecution of Clinton, which would necessarily have exposed those e-mails?

    Full article: Hillary Clinton’s & Barack Obama’s E-mails — WikiLeaks Reveals John Podesta’s Concern | National Review




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  • Hillary Clinton Never Met a War She Didn’t Want Other Americans to Fight

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Never before were the two leading presidential candidates so disliked. Both major parties have nominated candidates that most Americans desperately want to reject.

    There many reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton: a history of scandal, reaching back to Bill Clinton’s Arkansas governorship; greedy, grasping friendships with economic elites; and brutal partisan war against political opponents. She is smart, competent, and experienced, but so were Richard Nixon and Richard Cheney. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that she would put her virtues to good use as president. She almost certainly would lead America into more foolish wars. About the only reason to hope for a Clinton victory is her flawed opponent, Donald Trump.

    Yet despite his many failings, he remains superior to Clinton when it comes to foreign policy. No one knows what Trump would do in a given situation, which means there is a chance he would do the right thing. In contrast, Clinton’s beliefs, behavior, and promises all suggest that she most likely would do the wrong thing, embracing a militaristic status quo which most Americans recognize has failed disastrously.

    In fact, her proclivity for promiscuous war-making has attracted the support of leading Neoconservatives, including some architects of the disastrous Iraq war, which as Senator she voted to authorize. Some otherwise obscure Neocons even have appeared in her campaign ads. Her record of backing every recent U.S. military intervention is far more attractive than Trump’s intermittently blustering rhetoric to war-happy Republican hawks.

    As my Cato Institute colleague Christopher Preble pointed out, “Clinton supported every one of the last seven U.S. military interventions abroad, plus two others we ended up fighting.” For instance, while First Lady she pushed for U.S. intervention in the Balkans—attacking the Bosnian Serbs and then Serbia. She was an enthusiastic war advocate, explaining: “I urged him [her husband] to bomb.” Alas, Bosnia remains badly divided while Kosovo has turned into a gangster state which, according to the New York Times, is “a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists.” Oops.

    She apparently took the same position toward Iraq, backing bombing that became almost routine during her husband’s administration. He also turned a humanitarian mission in Somalia into nation-building on the cheap, threatened a military invasion of Haiti to enforce regime change, launched a lengthy occupation of the faux state of Bosnia, and expanded NATO toward Russia. None of them were in America’s interest or turned out well, but Hillary Clinton apparently only objected to the Haiti misadventure. She was seen by aides as the most influential of the administration’s many ivory tower warriors, always available to lobby Bill to do more bombing and killing abroad.

    Sen. Hillary Clinton supported the overbroad Authorization for Use of Military Force after September 11, which 15 years later the Obama administration claims as warrant for its very different war against the Islamic State. She strongly backed the Iraq invasion. Only after it turned out badly and threatened to damage her political career did she acknowledge her mistake. Of course, that was too late to retrieve the thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars squandered. At the same time, she said she was sorry for opposing the 2007 “surge” of troops, despite what Iraq became. Worse, a former State department aide reported that Clinton later announced she would not feel “constrained” in the future by the failure in Iraq. She apparently sees no need to learn from one’s mistakes.

    Clinton supported the Obama administration’s decision to double down, twice, on its expensive yet failed nation-building mission in Afghanistan. She pushed for even higher troop levels than did President Obama. Clinton once warned about the ill consequences of drone strikes in Pakistan, became a strong supporter as secretary of state. Then she backed the administration’s drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen as well as Libya, Somalia, and Syria.

    Clinton was more responsible than anyone else for America’s Libyan misadventure, another attempt at regime change on the cheap, though with a humanitarian gloss. She reportedly warned President Obama against allowing America to “be left behind” by not joining the foolish war parade in North Africa in early 2011. She responded to Moammar Qaddafy’s death with a joke, but the war left another failed state, host to Islamic State killers and convulsed by civil war.

    Her insistence on the ouster of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad discouraged a negotiated settlement, but the administration provided his opponents with no practical means to oust him. Clinton advocated lethal aid to rebels, who displayed a dismaying tendency to surrender and turn weapons over to radial groups, including ISIS. She later urged direct U.S. military intervention in the form of a “no-fly” zone.

    Clinton backed NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders, a policy guaranteed to poison bilateral relations. She further advocated including both Ukraine and Georgia, which would turn their next confrontation with Moscow into a potential nuclear war involving America. After leaving office she made the overwrought comparison of Russia’s annexation of Crimea with Nazi Germany and supported military aid to Ukraine, which would encourage Moscow to escalate accordingly.

    Of her belligerent record Trump observed: “Sometimes it seemed like there wasn’t a country in the Middle East that Hillary Clinton didn’t want to invade, intervene in, or topple.” Indeed, as he suggested, she is “trigger-happy and very unstable.” This is one of the most important reasons Americans face a terrorist threat. While she previously contended that “We need a real plan for confronting terrorists,” she apparently failed to recognize how bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, supporting murderous foreign rulers, intervening in other countries’ conflicts, and killing foreign peoples all create enemies around the globe, some of whom retaliate against U.S. civilians.

    Alas, her policies guarantee even more wars in the future. Every military action creates blowback, which is used to justify escalating involvement and new conflicts. Yet she believes that her mistakes entitle her to the presidency: “I’m proud to run on my record, because I think the choice before the American people in this election is clear.”

    It is. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more meddling, intervention, and war, with more dead Americans and wasted dollars, and ultimately even more meddling, intervention, and war.

    She cloaks her constant push for war with praise of “American exceptionalism” and America’s role as “the indispensable nation.” In her recent speech to the American Legion she cited Ronald Reagan’s belief in America as a “shining city on a hill,” even though he urged the U.S. to lead by example, not by becoming an international dominatrix. In fact, Reagan was a veritable peacenik in comparison to Clinton, embracing missile defense out of his horror at the prospect of war.

    As justification for her belligerence Clinton affirmed “America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity.” Like intervening in Iraq and Libya, one wonders? Supporting Saudi Arabia in its brutal war in Yemen? Backing authoritarian dictatorships across Central Asia? Too bad Clinton never took seriously her admission that America’s “power comes with a responsibility to lead, humbly, thoughtfully, and with a fierce commitment to our values.”

    Source: Hillary Clinton Never Met a War She Didn’t Want Other Americans to Fight | Cato Institute


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