City officials in Bakersfield, California, agreed to a record $22 million settlement after a police officer caused a deadly crash…
The post Brickbat: Without Warning appeared first on Reason.com.
City officials in Bakersfield, California, agreed to a record $22 million settlement after a police officer caused a deadly crash…
The post Brickbat: Without Warning appeared first on Reason.com.
On Friday, Fox News host and political analyst Brit Hume offered a prediction that President Donald Trump is unlikely to appreciate. If the Democrats come out ahead in the midterms, the chief executive could find himself paying big for his "breathtaking" crypto corruption. Hume's forecast comes in the wake of the president's 2025 financial disclosures earlier in the week, which revealed that his family raked in a shocking $1 billion from its cryptocurrency ventures while Daddy Trump regulated the market. As Mediate explains, "The filing reported roughly $500 million in income from World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded with his sons Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump, along with approximately $635 million from sales of the $TRUMP meme coin through CIC Digital LLC. The disclosure also detailed hundreds of millions of dollars in income from Trump’s real estate holdings and millions more from licensing deals and other business ventures. The president made more than $2 billion overall."Another Fox News host, John Roberts, called the numbers "eye-popping," prompting Hume to respond, "It is, John, and I think the right word for this is unseemly, for a president to profit while in office.”He continued, "Now, it’s not fair to say that he profited from the office, although, you know, that’s surely gonna be subject to investigation — particularly if the Democrats get control of one or both branches of Congress. But, if you wanted seemliness in the White House, Donald Trump was not your man, and if you wanted a guy that wasn’t very rich in the White House, he wasn’t your man for that either. The fact is that he’s a very rich guy, and when you hold the kind of holdings he has, you do get richer. This amount from crypto seems breathtaking, but as the point was made by you and [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent, not illegal. So, the people that don’t like Trump won’t like this. The people that do like Trump won’t care very much, in my judgement."Hume is only partly true in regards to that last assertion. While much of MAGA has remained loyal to the president regardless of his financial improprieties, he's had pushback from some high-profile supporters. The New York Post, for example, which is typically complimentary toward Trump, declared that a recent story involving his sons' profiting off a Kazakhstan mining deal their father struck "stinks to high heaven." According to the Post, "The Lutnick [sons of Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick] and Trump boys have been sloshing around in the muck since their dads came to power 18 months ago. They’ve profited handsomely from cryptocurrency deals while the government their fathers control were setting crypto policy.”
Conservative commentator Steve Bannon weighed in on the stunning primary wins by far-left Democrat candidates, declaring that the country is entering a new era in politics. The […]
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted progressive Democrats during an appearance on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime,” warning that they are pushing a “full-blown communist revolution.” […]
Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf has warned of an Iranian response if the U.S. and Israel breach the interim peace deal, as Tehran prepares to bury its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “We strongly demand full implementation of the agreements, and if the U.S. and the Zionist regime fail to fulfill their commitments, Iran…
The Supreme Court has previously been accused of having a far right ideology, engaging in judicial activism rather than strict constructionism and moving to empower President Donald Trump even at the expense of the Constitution.“In the wake of Slaughter, presidents now hold the keys to the kingdom,” wrote Ryan J. Owens, a political science professor and director of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, for The Dispatch on Thursday. Owens was referring to the Supreme Court case of Trump v. Slaughter, which overturned a 1935 case holding that presidents could not fire commissioners of independent agencies except for cause. By allowing Trump to fire a Federal Trade Commissioner, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, simply because she is a Democrat, the majority of justices brushed aside concerns that this would allow civic and non-partisan institutions to be manipulated for political ends.Owens argues that the Supreme Court was correct to make it possible for presidents to effectively implement their agenda so long as voters can remove that president. Yet he also argued that this is not in itself enough to help America.“If the president can remove agency officials at will and Congress continues to delegate substantial authority to the executive, the president will have become more powerful than the Framers possibly imagined,” Owens wrote. “The Supreme Court must now finish the job. Revive the nondelegation doctrine. Make Congress legislate again.”He then quoted a Trump-appointed judge, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who suggested in his decision that it might be time “to reinvigorate the intelligible principle doctrine and recognize that Congress cannot delegate its legislative authority.” Agreeing with this principle, Owens argued that “the court’s Slaughter opinion hints at such. Somewhat surprisingly (and unnecessarily), the majority opinion positively referenced A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. (1935), the last case in which the court struck down a law for violating the nondelegation doctrine. The Slaughter opinion further called the Federal Trade Commission Act’s delegation ‘startingly abstract.’ This sounds an awful lot like a formalist court ready to revive the nondelegation doctrine now that the president’s removal power is back in its rightful constitutional place.”Owens continued that “constitutional formalists and liberals should hope the Supreme Court revives the doctrine—formalists, because it would return legislating to Congress where it belongs, and liberals because they fear an empowered Trump.” He then concluded that, while he believes the Slaughter decision corrected an earlier case with which he disagreed, he hopes “it follows this great ruling with another.”
According to the renowned fascism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the Supreme Court has become President Donald Trump’s “partner in corruption,” not only working to enrich those who are in on the scam, but reshaping the U.S. as an authoritarian state in which one must “fear and obey” Trump.“This is the summer of corruption,” wrote Ben-Ghiat on Thursday. “Defined as the abuse of power for private gain, corruption can happen in any kind of organization and government, but under authoritarianism it attains a new status: it is how the executive branch operates, expands its power, and recruits elite and grassroots partners. The Supreme Court is one of these partners, as we’ll see below.”The Trump administration and its enablers on the Court, argues Ben-Ghiat, “are providing Americans and the world with a lesson in how corruption can become systemic.” This, she says, is the goal of all authoritarians: they “seek to retool government and the culture to create the conditions to lie, steal and repress people with impunity. That means going after journalists, judges, investigators, opposition politicians and others who expose official wrongdoing. It also means puffing up the leader’s personality cult and inventing narratives, backed by complicit religious institutions, about his selflessness and purity.”She raises the example of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has a well-documented history of “accepting luxury gifts and travel from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow,” who in turn “has a garden full of statues of dictators, and collects Adolf Hitler and Nazi memorabilia.” And, according to Ben-Ghiat, “As per the sacred laws of corruption, these ‘gifts’ were likely supposed to be repaid whenever Thomas put on his robes. No matter that the Court, which has no ethical oversight mechanism, finally instituted a code of conduct in November 2023, which states that justices must ‘uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary’ and avoid actual and apparent impropriety.”Thomas has paid no attention to this code, refusing to recuse himself in cases involving Trump’s election lies, even though Thomas’s wife Ginny was directly engaged in those lies. As Ben-Ghiat muses, “What good would Thomas be as a link in the chain of corruption if he took himself out of the game just when he was most needed?”“And here we arrive at the Supreme Court as a partner in Trump administration corruption, first by giving the President immunity for official acts, and now by upholding his right to dismiss an official on political grounds,” writes Ben-Ghiat. “A landmark ruling in July 2024 gave the president ‘the power of a king,’ as the Brennan Center termed it, conferring upon him absolute immunity (for the exercise of core constitutional powers) and presumptive immunity (for all other official acts). This created the legal space for a lawless individual such as Trump to feel even more emboldened to use corruption and violence to destroy our democracy and make money doing it.”Now, while the Supreme Court has for 100 years upheld that the president does not have the authority to fire heads of independent agencies without cause, Trump’s allies on the court have overturned that precedent, creating conditions for further “systematic corruption.”“We need to see this decision through autocratic eyes,” explains Ben-Ghiat. “Not obeying the Leader, refusing to participate in his corruption, and politicizing the practice of government are acts of negligence and malfeasance in office in the authoritarian world. Such people must be removed from public service, lest they influence others with their moral stances.”The power to fire agency officials at will is exactly what the president needs to shape government to his private agenda. According to Ben-Ghiat, proof of this intention was revealed by the words of Solicitor General John Sauer, who represented the Trump administration in the case, arguing before the court that the president needs to be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
