RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-loser-pelosis-house-11594336504?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Supreme Court on Thursday punted in two cases concerning subpoenas for President Trump’s financial records, sending them back to lower courts to resolve a host of legal questions. Yet if the cases had no clear winner, one of the rulings did produce an outright loser: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s overzealous House.

Since the moment Mrs. Pelosi retook the gavel in January 2019, she’s operated as if her institution is the only branch in town, with limitless power. Within days of the 2018 election, an unnamed House Democrat bragged that the incoming majority was loading a “subpoena cannon,” aimed at more than 80 different areas of Trump investigation. The president’s tax returns, his firing of former FBI Director James Comey, his discussions with foreign leaders, security clearances, the Trump family business, Stormy Daniels, the reassignment of executive branch employees, the Mueller report. Ad nauseam.

No one disputes the House has oversight authority. But courts have always made clear that this power must be firmly tethered to a “legislative purpose.” Prior Congresses at least attempted to hew to the spirit of that phrase. Mrs. Pelosi’s committee chairmen—driven by fury over the Trump presidency—embarked on an extended fishing expedition. In doing so, they exposed how easy it is to abuse the legislative-purpose doctrine.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-danger-of-denigrating-americas-founding-fkers-opinion-634565

The fifth season of the hit HBO comedy series Veep opens with the fictional US president, Selina Meyer – played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus – panicking about the electoral tie of the previous day, which could result in her not being able to remain in the Oval Office for a second term.

Aptly titled “The Morning After,” the premier episode of the season highlights what happens in America when a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College. Addressing the nation, Meyer insists that she is in “barefaced awe of the majesty of our democratic system,” while also saying that the “electoral college is a somewhat arcane institution that many scholars say we should do away with.”

Talk about prescience.

The episode aired on April 24, 2016, nearly seven months before the election in which Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump beat his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, by garnering an electoral college majority – even though she had won the popular vote. Unlike Clinton, however, the protagonist of Veep ultimately obtained the electoral college coup that she needed to keep her coveted seat in the White House.

But before it was clear to Meyer that this was the case, she told her staffers sardonically that she had forgotten in her speech to “thank the voters for making our country look like a high-school Spanish

She added bitterly, “Didn’t those founding f**kers ever hear of an odd number?”

https://spectator.us/trump-mount-rushmore-1619-statues-speech/

Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to their correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.’ She went on to report that the President was expected to focus on efforts to ‘Quote “Tear down our country’s history”.’ And where might the President have acquired such an idea?

Even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major network like CNN to have described Mount Rushmore in such nakedly hostile terms. America still had its agreed-upon holy sites, people and ideas – revered as unifying points of the nation’s past and necessary for any conceivable future.

Not anymore. Today every element of the American past is up for grabs, and the intensity of the campaign may well provide the likeliest means for Donald Trump to remain in the White House.

It is stunning to watch, this unweaving of a nation. While going on for decades, the latest orgy of iconoclasm has seen crowds assail statues of the Founding Fathers with equal ferocity to that aimed at Confederates. A statue of George Washington pulled down in Portland, Oregon had ‘genocidal colonist’ spray-painted on it. A statue of Thomas Jefferson, pulled down outside a high school bearing his name, was graffitied with ‘slave owner’, as well as the name of George Floyd.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/506562-in-rueful-praise-of-elena-kagan-the-little-sisters-ruling

I wish she were on my side.

Conservatives ruefully jest that, while John Roberts may hold the lofty title of Chief Justice, he’s really just another seat on the Kagan Court. In Wednesday’s much-anticipated ruling on a religious liberty challenge to the ObamaCare contraceptive mandate, Justice Elena Kagan again demonstrated that she is not just the Supreme Court’s center of gravity. She is its master tactician.

And how she must be chortling, while the Trump administration celebrates as if the 7-2 majority decision were not just a win but a rout in favor of the Constitution’s guarantee of free religious exercise. Justice Kagan knows better. If you scratch beneath the surface, religious liberty is actually losing, albeit in slow motion. Thanks to Kagan’s strategy, there are lots of innings left to play, and her team is much better suited to the long game.

When the hangover ends, conservatives will remember Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania as the case in which the court choked. Don’t be deceived by the 7-2 vote, in which the court’s putative conservative bloc of five justices was joined by Kagan and her fellow progressive, Justice Stephen Breyer. This seven-justice majority agreed only on a narrow holding, confined to a technical matter of statutory construction regarding the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA, or ObamaCare). 

That was not a vindication of liberty. On the core question, there were no more than four justices, and maybe just three, supportive of free exercise of religion. That’s why it’s a mirage of victory in what eventually will be a desert of defeat.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supreme-courts-rulings-on-trump-subpoenas-ho-hum/

A New York prosecutor may pursue the president’s financial information. Congress, though, must relitigate its case in lower courts.

The Supreme Court’s decisions Thursday on two separate cases involving subpoenas for the president’s personal financial information are legal defeats for the presidency. Politically, they are a win for Donald Trump.

Both opinions were authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and were ostensibly resounding 7–2 defeats for the president’s position. But there’s less here than meets the eye.

The State Grand Jury Subpoena One case involves a subpoena issued by a New York state grand jury conducting a criminal  investigation led by the office of Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney. That investigation is believed to be focused, at least in part, on the payment of hush money to women who claim to have had liaisons with Donald Trump about a decade before he became president, including how the reimbursement for those payments was allegedly booked by the Trump real-estate organization. The subpoena, issued to Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars, is believed to be sweeping, seeking voluminous financial information (including tax-return information), over a number of years.

The Court’s ruling against the president is emphatic. It was expected that the president would lose. This seemed obvious during the oral argument, when the Court focused intently on the fact that, while the president was making a broad immunity claim, he was not arguing that he had immunity from being investigated; just that he had immunity from complying with subpoenas — indeed, subpoenas addressed to a third-party agent of his, not to the president himself.