Impeachment Trial Continues | Should Dems Ask Chief Justice Roberts To Call Bolton And Other As Witnesses?
January 27, 2020
COMPLETELY SHOCKED
|Today the White House’s legal team resumes the impeachment trial with their opening arguments in defense of PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP. However, the landscape of the trial has changed dramatically now that its been revealed in the manuscript of former national security adviser, JOHN BOLTON, that Trump wanted to continue freezing security aid to Ukraine until he got help with investigations into JOE BIDEN and HILLARY CLINTON.
HEY, DON'T LOOK AT ME
|“An overwhelming number of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe the Senate should hear from relevant witnesses and obtain documents during President Trump’s impeachment trial. Striking new revelations about the president’s role in the Ukraine affair, as reported from an unpublished manuscript by John Bolton, underscore the need for his testimony and that of others.” Neal K. Katyal, Joshua A. Geltzer and Mickey Edwards together penned an op-ed in The New York Times to point out that even if Democrats don’t get any Republicans to vote in favor of calling witnesses to hear new evidence in the impeachment trial, CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS could issue subpoenas and make it happen. They argue, “This week, Democrats can and should ask the chief justice to issue subpoenas on his authority so that key witnesses of relevance like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney appear in the Senate, and the Senate should subpoena all relevant documents as well.”
TRUST THE PROCESS?
|Yesterday on Meet the Press, REP. ADAM SCHIFF similarly spoke of the chief justice and the role he should play when it comes to the calling of new witnesses during the impeachment trial. Schiff said, “We have a very capable justice sitting right behind me who can make decisions about the materiality of witnesses…We trust the Supreme Court chief justice to make those decisions.”
IS IT WORTH IT? LET ME WORK IT
|“With several GOP senators publicly on the fence about allowing witness testimony, one key argument the president’s defenders are wielding is that calling current and former officials would create a legal quagmire over executive privilege — the protection for the president’s ability to receive confidential advice and to trade views freely with his advisers.” That’s Josh Gerstein with POLITICO remarking on one of the Republican strategies in the impeachment trial. He writes, “Trump’s backers hope the prospect of a protracted delay and litigation that might wind its way to the Supreme Court will contribute to all or nearly all Republican senators deciding that witness testimony just isn’t worth the hassle.”
SCOTUS VIEWS
The Supreme Court May Poke Another Hole In The ‘Wall Of Separation’ Between Church And State
Los Angeles Times“Questions by conservative Supreme Court justices on Wednesday suggested that they disagreed with the Montana court and thought that its ruling violated the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. That seemed to herald a ruling that if a state decides to provide subsidies or tax breaks that benefit students in private schools, it must include religious schools. We hope the court will not rule that way. Such a decision would go well beyond a 2017 ruling in which the justices held 7-2 that the state of Missouri couldn’t exclude a Lutheran school from a state grant program that paid for the resurfacing of playgrounds. But in the lead opinion in that case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made it clear that the ruling applied only to playground resurfacing, not other examples of religious use of state funding.”
What The Supreme Court Missed About Wednesday’s Religious-Schools Case
The Washington Pot“On its face, Espinoza seems to be a small case concerning a now-defunct school voucher program, but in reality, it is the culmination of a 50-year campaign to provide parochial and other private schools with government money. If successful, these school choice advocates will remake American education by opening the door to publicly funded private religious education across the United States.”
Separating Church And State Is Nothing Like Racial Discrimination
The Washington Post“Regardless, anti-Catholic bias in the United States is nowhere near as pervasive as racial discrimination, the nation’s oldest, deepest and still destabilizing fault line. But while conservative justices still ring alarms about anti-Catholic sentiment, they are just as quick to overlook the continuing effects of racial discrimination. In Shelby County v. Holder, his controversial 2013 opinion striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts wrote that because ‘our country has changed,’ protections for racial minorities in states with historically discriminatory voting practices were no longer necessary.”
A Partisan Supreme Court Ruling On The ACA Just Gave President Trump A Boost
The Washington Post“The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a gift Tuesday — one that could greatly help the president in the 2020 election. In an order that received less attention than it deserved, the court declined to speed up its consideration of a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. In that case, Texas v. United States, the Trump administration has argued that the court should invalidate all of the ACA, including its legal protections for people with preexisting conditions. The administration is pursuing this course even though President Trump has made bizarre assertions that imply quite a different stance.”
Why Do We Have An Electoral College Again?
The New York Times“Faithless electors are unlikely to affect the outcome even if the Electoral College tally is very close, as it was in 2000, when as few as three Republican electors could have broken their pledges and handed the presidency to the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, who won the most votes nationwide. None did. That makes sense. Americans would rightly revolt if a handful of people they’d never heard of ignored their votes and decided the election for themselves. It’s almost as if we believe that we, the people, should be voting directly for the president — the only official whose job it is to represent all of us equally, wherever we live. Which raises the question of why we still have an Electoral College at all.”