Trump 42: Racist In Chief

[fraurosena]

Is this the beginning of the end of the effects of Obama’s policies, or the beginning of the start of the effects of Trump’s policies? ?

 

[Ozlsn]

12 hours ago, Dandruff said:

Does this mean that citizens may need to carry some sort of additional documentation, just in case?

How long before the offical ID cards come in?

[WiseGirl]

Breaking per Seth Abramson. 

Spoiler

 

Edited July 24, 2019 by WiseGirl
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[GreyhoundFan]

I guess all the flattery by the Saudis worked on the mango moron: "Trump vetoes Congress’s attempt to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia"

Spoiler

President Trump on Wednesday vetoed three resolutions that Congress passed to stop several arms sales benefiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which the president pushed through without congressional approval.

Earlier this month, bipartisan majorities — but not a veto-proof majority — in the House and Senate voted to block the arms deals, worth more than $8 billion.

The sales would replenish part of the Saudi arsenal that lawmakers say has been used against civilians in Yemen’s civil war. Many lawmakers also object to the idea of rewarding Saudi leaders after the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The president announced in May that he would use emergency authority to push through the weapons sales that include missiles, munitions and surveillance aircraft.

“The misguided licensing prohibitions in the joint resolution directly conflict with the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States,” Trump said in all three White House statements declaring his vetos.

The Trump administration has insisted the arms sales are crucial to protect the region against a growing threat from Iran.

The vetoes come as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to vote Thursday on two competing bipartisan bills to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia. The president has resisted congressional efforts to punish Saudi Arabia for human rights abuses and Khashoggi’s murder, which U.S. intelligence officials say was ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Lawmakers and international human rights organizations have accused Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign in Yemen — enabled in part by the type of munitions Trump maneuvered to sell to Saudi leaders — of contributing to a crisis that has put 20 million Yemenis at risk of starvation and exposed hundreds of thousands to cholera.

“The United States is very concerned about the conflict’s toll on innocent civilians and is working to bring the conflict in Yemen to an end,” Trump said in the veto statement. “But we cannot end it through ill-conceived and time-consuming resolutions that fail to address its root causes.”

Congress is unlikely to have the votes to override the veto, and does not have a consensus on how to proceed.

 

[fraurosena]

In case we didn't know where his true allegiance lies.

 

[fraurosena]

It turns out the seal was epic trolling.

Apparently the two-headed eagle is holding 13 golf clubs in one claw and dollar bills in the other. Best of all, the banner says '45 is a puppet' in Spanish.

[Ozlsn]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

It turns out the seal was epic trolling.

Apparently the two-headed eagle is holding 13 golf clubs in one claw and dollar bills in the other. Best of all, the banner says '45 is a puppet' in Spanish.

Apparently it was done in error. 

Oh-kay, I'm willing to believe that... 

I am finding it hilarious that apparently no one else actually noticed before Trump arrived. You'd think at least one person might have thought "something looks different about that..."

Whoever did it should be grateful they've only been fired and aren't going to be shot in a basement or shipped out to a gulag. Yet.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Meet the man who created the fake presidential seal — a former Republican fed up with Trump"

Spoiler

Charles Leazott hadn’t thought about the seal in months.

The 46-year-old graphic designer threw it together after the 2016 presidential election — it was one part joke, one part catharsis. He used to be a proud Republican. He voted for George W. Bush. Twice.

But Donald J. Trump’s GOP was no longer his party. So he created a mock presidential seal to prove his point.

He substituted the arrows in the eagle’s claw for a set of golf clubs — a nod to the new president’s favorite pastime. In the other set of talons, he swapped the olive branch for a wad of cash and replaced the United States’ Latin motto with a Spanish insult. Then, his coup de grace: a two-headed imperial bird lifted straight from the Russian coat of arms, an homage to the president’s checkered history with the adversarial country.

“This is the most petty piece of art I have ever created,” the Richmond resident said in an interview with The Washington Post.

The seal wasn’t meant for a wide audience. But then, years later, it wound up stretched across a jumbo-tron screen behind an unwitting President Trump as he spoke to a conference packed with hundreds of his young supporters.

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, The Post was the first to report that the seal was fake — and that neither the White House, nor Turning Point USA, the organizers of the star-studded Teen Student Action Summit, knew how it got there or where it came from. Leazott woke up Thursday and saw the news in a Reddit post as he drank his morning coffee. Then, a torrent of messages.

“It’s been chaos,” he said. “This is not what I expected when I woke up today.”

No one expected it. A Turning Point spokesman said Wednesday the conservative group wasn’t even aware of the phony seal until The Post called him. He spent that night trying track down the culprit and determine whether it was an intentional act by a rogue staffer, or just an honest mistake.

The faux seal was on-screen for at least 80 seconds, in plain sight but largely ignored as hundreds in the room at the Washington Marriott Marquis trained their attention on Trump.

But the modified symbol was loaded with jabs at the president — subtle and overt. The Russian eagle, an allusion to accusations that he embraced the Kremlin, and the Spanish script, a reference to Trump’s controversial border policies and his denigration of Latin American immigrants. Instead of E pluribus unum — “out of many, one” — Leazott wrote “45 es un títere,” or “45 is a puppet,” a callback to a viral exchange between Trump and Hillary Clinton in a 2016 debate.

“I’m a graphic designer, it’s just something I tossed together,” he said. “This was just a goofy thing for some people I knew. I had no idea it would blow up like this."

By Thursday morning, the Turning Point spokesman said the group had identified the staffer responsible for turning Leazott’s design into a trending topic. He called the incident a last-minute oversight, the result of a quick online search to find a second high-resolution photo of the presidential seal to place behind Trump. He said the mistake was “unacceptable.”

“We did let the individual go,” the spokesman said. “I don’t think it was malicious intent, but nevertheless.”

Leazott doesn’t buy it. He thinks whoever was responsible had to know exactly what they were looking for. He believes the person dug up the image he created and used it intentionally.

“That’s a load of crap,” he said in response to Turning Point’s explanation. “You have to look for this. There’s no way this was an accident is all I’m saying.”

After The Post story published, Internet sleuths went looking, too. They found the image’s origin, tracing it back to an online marketplace Leazott set up to sell shirts and stickers sporting the seal, along with other jokey “resistance” apparel. And the citizens of the Web wanted to buy his stuff.

In one fell news cycle, Leazott began making money and fielding calls from papers and TV stations from across the country. People wanted to support him. But the trolls came, too.

“The worst has been Facebook,” he said, which he hadn’t checked “in like a year.”

“Holy crap at the amount of vile, hateful Facebook messages," he said. "It’s apparently a personal affront to some people.”

But, Leazott said, it’s him who gets the last laugh. A photo of Trump in front of his seal is now his computer background, and the person who used it at the event is “either wildly incompetent or the best troll ever — either way, I love them.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Leazott’s shirts were sold out. He said he had to start working with a fulfillment center just to meet the demand. He also revived the primary website for his brand, OneTermDonnie, which includes a paean to the American Civil Liberties Union, where the site says 10 percent of all sales will be directed.

“It’s cool people are buying this, that’s great and all,” he said. “But I’ve got to be honest, I am so tickled in the most petty way possible that the president of the United States, who I despise, stood up and gave a talk in front of this graphic. Whoever put that up is my absolute hero.”

 

[fraurosena]

I blame the meds they had to give to calm him down after the Mueller testimony.

 

[Ozlsn]

"Lawmurkers" actually sounds like a useful word. The lawyers you hire to bury the truth are the lawmurkers. 

The infantroopen are presumably the underage marchers?

[AmazonGrace]

Trump is mad at Sweden because the Swedish prime minister won't agree to fix court cases so that the outcome pleases Trump.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/25/politics/trump-asap-rocky-tweets/index.html

Earlier he offered to pay the rapper's bail but the Swedish court system does not recognize bail and has no buy-your-way-out-of-jail card for sale. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump is the true socialist"

Spoiler

Republicans are right. The scourge of socialism is already upon us. They’re just wrong about which party is to blame.

Technically, “socialism” refers to a system in which the government controls the means of production. In popular parlance, however, “socialist” has instead become a more generic right-wing slur. To the extent the descriptor signals any substance whatsoever, it’s about government handouts, picking winners and losers, redistribution of wealth, or something to that effect.

And yes, some  Democrats have proposed  some  pie-in-the-sky ideas (such as free college) that meet these vague Big Government principles. Yet, if you look at who has successfully implemented policies that fit such pseudo-socialist criteria in recent years, it’s Republicans. 

Not that you’d know it from their rhetoric.

“Our freedoms are under attack because the radical left will stop at nothing until socialism has spread from coast to coast,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) proclaimed last month when she kicked off her reelection campaign. “Let me be clear: Socialism has no place in the Hawkeye State or America, and I will stop at nothing to protect our Iowa values.”

Maybe Ernst was being painfully un-self-aware here. Or maybe she thinks her voters are. Either way, for decades, “Iowa values” have explicitly included demands for big fat federal government subsidies for corn ethanol — among other payouts and market-distorting government interventions that Republicans might in other contexts smear as “socialist.”

Agricultural subsidies have been blessed and perpetuated by politicians from both parties. But lately, a Republican president, with the support of Republican lawmakers, is in the midst of a broader “socialist” endeavor to bail out the farm industry.

After President Trump picked trade wars with nearly every major U.S. trading partner — friend and foe alike — U.S. exports of soybeans, pork and other agricultural products dried up. The president subsequently decided to cover up one foolish economic policy with another, and another. He launched not one but two rounds of massive farmer bailouts, together totaling tens of billions of dollars.

Yet Republican politicians have portrayed neither of these taxpayer-funded handouts as “socialist.”

Nor do Republicans cry “socialism” when the treasury secretary lectures U.S. retailers and manufacturers about how and where they should reallocate their supply chains; nor when the president himself lectures firms about what products to stock; nor when the administration tries to get other  countries to engage in more centralized economic planning — by, for example, demanding that European political leaders commit private companies to buy more U.S. crops and liquefied natural gas regardless of price, quality or market needs.

You would be hard-pressed to find better recent examples of the U.S. government trying to exert influence, if not outright control, over the means of production, both domestically and abroad.

When not disrupting previously functional industries, Republicans have also been busy propping up failing ones. Consider the case of coal.

Technological change (i.e., fracking) has made the U.S. coal industry less competitive; at least six  major U.S. coal producers have filed for bankruptcy in the past year, with the most recent filing last week. But rather than letting markets run their course, Republicans at both the federal and state levels are concocting complicated handouts.

Trump, who rants on Twitter about how Democrats want to turn us into a “Socialist or Communist Country,” has repeatedly attempted Soviet-style bailouts of failing coal plants. On Tuesday, Ohio, a state under unified Republican control, decided to copy him, with a new law that adds taxpayer-funded subsidies for coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

What of that Republican fearmongering about Democratic wealth distribution?

It’s worth remembering that wealth can be redistributed down  or  up. Lately, the direction of that redistribution, under Republican stewardship, has been decidedly upward — in the form of both top-heavy tax cuts and the shredding of the safety net. As my Post colleague Philip Bump pointed out, the administration’s latest attempts to gut the food-stamp program proves that while Trump’s brand of socialism may extend to farmers, it’s still not available for the working poor.

What remains interesting is how Republicans manage to reconcile their anti-socialist words with their Big Government actions.

Polling last fall from YouGov, for instance, found that Republicans overwhelmingly supported  Trump’s trade-war-driven farmer bailout, despite an avowed antipathy for “socialism.” A separate YouGov poll conducted this week asked respondents whether they considered various policies to be examples of socialism, such as free college tuition (according to Republicans: yes!), or Social Security and government medical care for veterans (both no, somehow). Medicare for the elderly is decidedly not  socialist, but something approximating Medicare for everyone definitely  is .

So maybe the problem isn’t hypocrisy, exactly. It’s that the word “socialist,” to Republicans at least, has evolved to mean anything the other side is for.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The clip with Dumpy sexually harassing a cross-dressing Ghouliani is too much:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The 23 most over-the-top lines from Donald Trump's phone interview with Sean Hannity"

Spoiler

(CNN)On Thursday night, Donald Trump took a victory lap. On the phone with Sean Hannity.

Trump called into Hannity's Fox News show to talk (and talk) about former special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony on Capitol Hill and his various conspiracy theories related to the Justice Department.

I went through the transcript and pulled out the most, uh, notable lines. They're below.

1. "Well, I think people learned a lot yesterday, watching a very poor performance and watching things that they couldn't believe when they saw what was going on."

"I think Robert Mueller did a horrible job, both today and with respect to the investigation. Obviously he did very poorly today." -- Donald Trump, Wednesday. And away we go!

2. "It was a disgrace to our country, it was a disgrace from every standpoint and I would say that most people have never seen anything like it."

Trump is right -- we've never seen anything like a foreign power seeking to influence our election in a broad and deep way to aid someone they believed would be better for their interests. Oh wait, that's not what he's talking about?

3. "So, I wasn't going to watch at all, and then I started thinking about it, and then I watched a little bit at the very beginning and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. So, I ended up watching more than I wanted to."

I laughed out loud when I read this quote. Not kidding.

4. "It was sort of good television."

Remember that Trump, at root, is a TV producer. His lens on the world is cable TV.

5. "I have heard the same thing about the fake dossier. I've heard it came out of Russia. I think a lot of it also is made up."

So, Trump, with zero evidence -- "I have heard the same thing" is not evidence -- is suggesting here that the dossier that Christopher Steele produced was actually a Russian effort to influence the election. Again, he has zero actual proof of this claim.

6. "Nobody would write a novel like this because people wouldn't believe it. It wouldn't be believable."

Agree! A billionaire businessman and reality TV star who has been a Democrat in the not-distant past becomes not only the Republican nominee but also the President! It's a way crazier story than most novels! Oh wait, that's not what he is talking about?

7. "This was a fake witch hunt and it should never be allowed to happen to another president again."

199 criminal counts against 37 people and entities. Seven people pleaded guilty. Five sentenced to prison.

8. "This was treason. This was high crimes. This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with."

Treason! What, exactly? Oh yeah, Trump didn't say/doesn't know.

9. "I think the press has lost all credibility, much of it. But it's lost a big part of it. I mean, a very substantial part of it, lost all credibility."

So, the media has lost all credibility. Actually just most of the media. But all of the media has lost a big part of its credibility. Actually it's a "substantial" part of the media. But they've lost all credibility, that's for sure. Got it?

10. "I watch as people scream at these poor Democrats, the congressmen, scream like I've never seen. You must do this, you must do that, I mean, these are supposed to be journalists, talk show hosts, of all sorts of people, I could not believe it."

Hannity's show on the night before the Mueller hearing was just him going through a series of questions congressional Republicans needed to ask the former special counsel. Amazing.

11. "It's fake news, but it's the enemy of the people, more importantly."

Let's not normalize this. The President of the United States is saying, again, that the free and independent media is the enemy of the people.

12. "So, I had the absolute right to fire him but I didn't."

It's very debatable whether this is true. A president can remove -- or ask the attorney general to remove -- a special counsel for cause. It's not clear what that cause would be in the case of Mueller.

13. "I didn't do any of the things -- you know, when they said he was going to do this or said he was going to do that, I didn't do any of it and it's really incredible when I hear this."

Trump here is saying he never tried to fire Mueller. That directly contradicts the Mueller report, which says that Trump told Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, to remove Mueller.

14. "You know, all of these things like the Russian bloggers, they had nothing to do with us. And everybody knew it."

Here's an exchange between Mueller and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-California) in Wednesday's hearing:

SCHIFF: "Trump and his campaign welcomed and encouraged Russian interference?"

MUELLER: "Yes."

SCHIFF: "And then Trump and his campaign lied about it to cover it up?"

MUELLER: "Yes."

Ahem.

15. "General Flynn, who is a good man, what they did to General Flynn and so many others -- Hope Hicks, this wonderful young woman."

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the depth and breadth of his connections and conversations with the Russians. So....

16. "Yes, it is absolute and it's a beautiful thing."

Donald Trump on presidential pardoning power. Very legal and very cool!

17. "We have some very, very bad people in government that would be willing to do very bad things and for bad reasons."

Like former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned amid 13 separate federal investigations into his conduct? Oh wait, that's not what he's talking about?

18. "Well, Comey is a liar and a leaker and that's obvious. All you have to do is just follow him along and see what he said to Congress."

Lying to Congress is a felony that carries a five-year prison sentence.

19. "The country has had tremendous support from [Mark] Meadows and [Jim] Jordan and Devin Nunes and so many of the names that you saw yesterday, performed so well."

"Performed." And yes, the people Trump named understood that they were playing to an audience of one. And the audience of one very much appreciated it.

20. "I mean, this was -- this was a coup attempt, in my opinion."

!!!! A coup attempt! How? What? Where? Also, this isn't some commenter on "The Donald" subreddit suggesting this. It's the President of the United States.

21. "I'll tell you what, more people working in the United States today than at any time in the history of our country. "

True! But also misleading. More people are working in the US today than ever before because there are more people in the US today than ever before.

22. "Every time, you've never seen an empty seat. We go into these massive arenas and they are packed and there's thousands of people outside. You've never seen an empty seat."

Crowd size has long been Trump's stand-in for popularity. If 8,000 people in North Carolina turn out to see his rally, how can he be unpopular in all of these "fake" polls? The logic flaw here, of course, is large enough to fly a 747 through.

23. "Had Hillary won this election, you'd be at war right now with North Korea, and I have no doubt about that."

Yes, this is a hugely broad assertion. And no, Trump has no way of knowing what would have happened with North Korea under a President Hillary Clinton. This feels like a good place to end.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump golf course in the Bronx lost money last year, city documents show"

Spoiler

President Trump’s company operates a city-owned golf course in the Bronx under a contract that makes it far easier for Trump to turn a profit. New York City agreed to pay Trump’s massive irrigation bills. And, for the first four years, it didn’t require Trump to pay a cent in rent on 192 acres.

Despite all that, Trump’s course lost money for the first time last year — running $122,000 in the red, according to a new filing with the city.

The loss for the past operating year, from April 2018 to March 2019, is the latest bad financial news for Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. It comes as other Trump golf courses — from his Doral resort in Florida to his expensive courses in Scotland and Ireland — have reported declining revenue, or outright losses, during Trump’s polarizing presidency.

In the Bronx, Trump’s stubbly, Scottish-style course is built on top of an old landfill, with views of the East River, two huge bridges and the coast of Queens. It opened in April 2015, two months before Trump entered the 2016 presidential race.

Since then, the course — located in the district of liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) — has struggled. The number of rounds played has declined every year. Overall revenue has fallen 14 percent, according to documents filed with the city.

The latest filing — an annual “income statement” in which Trump’s company summarized the club’s income and expenses at the city’s course — was released by the city parks department after a public records request.

Beyond the $122,000 in losses, the filing revealed something else: a previously hidden dispute at the course, which pits the president’s company against the government of America’s largest city.

The fight is over a gas pipe.

In the filing, Trump’s company said that an “inadequate gas pipe installed by” New York City had caused its losses, by delaying the opening of the course’s new clubhouse.

Although Trump’s company held an elaborate opening ceremony for that clubhouse in June 2018, the company said it didn’t actually open until this year. Without that delay, it said, the clubhouse restaurant and pro shop might have produced enough revenue to turn a profit.

The Washington Post asked both the Trump Organization and the city for details — both about the size of the gas pipe and the size of their dispute.

Further details were not given.

“Our letter to the city says it all and speaks for itself,” said Alan Garten, an attorney for the Trump Organization. “Nothing more to add.”

“We are aware of their claim and do not believe the City is responsible,” said Crystal Howard, a spokeswoman for the New York parks department.

A spokeswoman for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) — making a long-shot bid to run against Trump in the 2020 presidential election — said the dispute had not involved him.

At ConEd, New York’s gas utility, a spokesman said they weren’t involved in the argument.

“We do provide adequate gas service to the facility,” the spokesman said. “Any dispute is between the city and the customer.”

Eric Trump, who helps run his father’s businesses while Trump is in the White House, has blasted de Blasio on Twitter as a “clown mayor” and “total disgrace.”

De Blasio said this week that Trump “will not be welcome back in New York City” after his presidency.

Neither one has mentioned the dispute about the gas pipe.

Before last year, the Bronx golf course had managed to turn a profit of about $500,000 per year — helped by the city paying its water bills and not asking for rent.

Last year, however, the club’s expenses rose faster than its revenue, according to the Trump Organization’s filing. It fell into the red.

“He’s managed to do the impossible: Get this amazing gift from the city, and lose money,” said Geoffrey Croft, of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates. He said one major problem was “the terrible reputation of the Trump name” in New York, after Trump’s rise as a hard-right politician. Croft also blamed the Trump club’s high greens fees, which top out at $224 per round. Most of the city’s other public courses charge $53 at most.

Trump’s clubhouse is now fully open, which could bring in more revenue for next year.

But now, Trump’s company faces a new challenge in the Bronx: Its four years of free rent are over. Next year, the club will have to pay the city at least $300,000 in fees.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Well, it appears that Dumpy's packing of the court is paying off. They're letting him ignore congress and be a dictator. "Supreme Court says Trump can proceed with plan to spend military funds for border wall construction"

Spoiler

The Supreme Court Friday night on a 5 to 4 vote revived the Trump administration’s plan to use $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds to build part of the wall project along the southern border.

The court’s conservatives set aside a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruling for the Sierra Club and a coalition of border communities that said a reallocation of the Defense Department money would violate federal law.

The unsigned ruling by the Supreme Court said the government “made a sufficient showing at this stage” the groups did not have proper standing to challenge transfer of money.

In a 2-to-1 decision earlier this month, the 9th Circuit majority noted that a stalemate between Congress and President Trump over the issue prompted the longest government shutdown in history. The judges reasoned that Congress made its intentions clear by allocating only about $1.4 billion for enhanced border protection.

The lower court said the public interest was “best served by respecting the Constitution’s assignment of the power of the purse to Congress, and by deferring to Congress’s understanding of the public interest as reflected in its repeated denial of more funding for border barrier construction.”

After Congress’s decision earlier this year, Trump announced plans to use more than $6 billion allocated for other purposes to fund the wall, which was the signature promise of his presidential campaign

Environmentalists and the Southern Border Communities Coalition immediately filed suit to block the transfer of funds. Democrats in the House of Representatives filed a brief supporting them.

U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court that the 9th Circuit ruling was wrong. “The sole basis for the injunction — that the Acting Secretary exceeded his statutory authority in transferring the funds — rests on a misreading of the statutory text,” Francisco wrote. He was referring to Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting secretary at the time.

Francisco said that the challengers did not have proper legal standing to challenge the transfer of funds. He added that even if they did, their “interests in hiking, birdwatching, and fishing in designated drug-smuggling corridors do not outweigh the harm to the public from halting the government’s efforts to construct barriers to stanch the flow of illegal narcotics across the southern border.”

The money was transferred from DOD personnel funds in response to a request from the Department of Homeland Security. Federal law allows such transfers for “unforeseen” reasons and for expenditures not previously “denied by the Congress.”

The administration contends that Congress did not reject the specific expenditures at issue, which would fund projects in California, New Mexico and Arizona.

The challengers said Congress was clear.

“Congress recently considered, and rejected, the same argument defendants [the government] make here: that a border wall is urgently needed to combat drugs,” said the brief from lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the groups.

“If defendants were nonetheless permitted to obligate taxpayer funds and commence construction, the status quo would be radically and irrevocably altered.”

The brief from the U.S. House of Representatives agreed.

“The administration refuses to accept this limitation on its authority, as clearly demonstrated by Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s statement that President Trump’s border wall ‘is going to get built with or without Congress,’ ” House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter wrote. “Under our constitutional scheme, an immense wall along our border simply cannot be constructed without funds appropriated by Congress for that purpose.”

And Letter said that the administration’s view of who is within the “zone of interest” to have standing to sue is “in reality, an argument that no one can challenge the conduct at issue here.”

Francisco moved quickly after the 9th Circuit’s July 3 ruling to ask the Supreme Court to dissolve the lower court’s injunction. It asked the justices to rule before July 26, so the Defense Department would have time to finalize construction contracts before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Otherwise, he said, “the remaining unobligated funds will become unavailable.”

The challengers said the money already was unavailable.

The brief filed by the House said the money would not be lost, but would simply go back into the treasury, where the administration would again be free to make its request to Congress.

It noted there was no rush. “The administration has apparently completed only 1.7 of the 95 miles of border fencing Congress approved and appropriated funds for in fiscal year 2018,” it said.

The case is Trump v. Sierra Club, et al.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Okay that settles it , Trump drinks like a sponge 

 

[fraurosena]

Somebody is rattled at what the House Judiciary is doing right now.

 

[fraurosena]

I wonder what Elijah Cummings said that pissed him off.

 

[fraurosena]

Kompromat is compelling.

 

[fraurosena]

Watch until the end.

 

[fraurosena]

You scared, Donnie? You sound scared.

 

Edited July 27, 2019 by fraurosena
merging posts

[fraurosena]

Elijah Cummings had a masterful response. This is how you react to bullying racists.

 

 

Edited July 27, 2019 by fraurosena

[fraurosena]

Completely logical thing for a fascist to do.

[...] who go around hitting (only non-fighters) people [...]

What does that even mean?

Oh, and he's still scared. Very scared.

Nice one-eighty from 'completely exonerated' to 'he had no facts on his side'. 

[thoughtful]

A song for Elijah Cummings and Victor Blackwell:

Oh, oh, oh, got out of bed
Feeling the dread I always do,

Oh, oh, oh
Wond’ring what new thing
Don Trump has said
What’s wrong with his head?

And now that big clown is dissing your town
It's like a message from
Hell below.

Oh, oh, oh
Pissing me off
He’s a fool and he
Just doesn’t know!

Good folks of Baltimore
I’m so mad, ’cause that orange boor
Is infested with racism
And he’s leaning towards fascism!

Good folks of Baltimore
On the day when we show him the door,
The world's gonna wake up and see
Baltimore is free!