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appalachiablue

(41,047 posts)
Tue Jul 21, 2020, 08:15 AM Jul 2020

'Trump Consults Bush Torture Lawyer On How To Skirt Law And Rule By Decree'

"Trump consults Bush torture lawyer on how to skirt law and rule by decree." Julian Border, The Guardian, July 20, 2020.
John Yoo wrote memo used to justify waterboarding. Trump keen to use executive orders and circumvent Congress.

The Trump administration has been consulting the former government lawyer who wrote the legal justification for waterboarding on how the president might try to rule by decree. John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws. “If the court really believes what it just did, then it just handed President Trump a great deal of power, too,” Yoo, a professor at Berkeley Law, said.

“The supreme court has said President Obama could [choose not to] enforce immigration laws for about 2 million cases. And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration – create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder.” In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. The White House consultations with Yoo were first reported by the Axios news website.

Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights.
“This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.”

Yoo became notorious for a legal memo he drafted in August 2002, when he was deputy assistant attorney general in the justice department’s office of legal counsel. It stated: “Necessity or self-defense may justify interrogation methods that might violate” the criminal prohibition on torture. Memos drafted by Yoo were used for justifying waterboarding and other forms of torture on terrorism suspects at CIA “black sites” around the world...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/20/trump-john-yoo-lawyer-torture-waterboarding
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- 'Moral & Intellectual Bankruptcy': Trump Seizes on Bush-Era Torture Memo, John Yoo's Call for Extralegal Executive Authority. "There is a lot of continuity between the Bush & Trump administration, including an almost limitless view of executive power." https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/20/moral-and-intellectual-bankruptcy-trump-seizes-bush-era-torture-memo-author-john

- RULE BY DECREE is a style of governance allowing quick, unchallenged promulgation of law by a single person or group, and is used primarily by dictators, absolute monarchs and military leaders. The expression is also sometimes used when describing actions of democratic governments that are perceived to unduly bypass parliamentarian or popular scrutiny.
Rule by decree allows the ruler to arbitrarily edit law, without approval by a legislative assembly.

When a state of emergency, such as martial law, is in place, rule by decree is common. While rule by decree is easily susceptible to the whims and corruption of the person in power, it is also highly efficient: a law can take weeks or months to pass in a legislature, but can be edited with ease by a leader ruling by decree. This is what makes it valuable in emergency situations. Thus, it is allowed by many constitutions, including the French, Argentine, Indian and Hungarian constitutions...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_by_decree

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'Trump Consults Bush Torture Lawyer On How To Skirt Law And Rule By Decree' (Original Post) appalachiablue Jul 2020 OP
If he tries this, he needs to be impeached again, quickly Fiendish Thingy Jul 2020 #1
That could happen on a weekly basis... 2naSalit Jul 2020 #2

Fiendish Thingy

(15,362 posts)
1. If he tries this, he needs to be impeached again, quickly
Tue Jul 21, 2020, 10:26 AM
Jul 2020

Pelosi could file articles and vote the same day, and send it to Mitch to squirm.

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