RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/new_jersey_and_gun_control.html

The gun control conundrum will continue ad infinitum. But what is happening in New Jersey should frighten anyone — gun owner or not. NJS102 will most likely be affirmed by the Democrat senate majority in the NJ legislature. The NJ Assembly has already passed the following:

A1217, which would create restraining orders in the state allowing family members and others to ask a judge to have a person’s guns seized and ban them from buying weapons for up to a year.
A2757, which would require all private gun sales in the state to go through a licensed dealer who can perform an additional background check at the point of sale.
A2759, which would create an outright ban in the state on possessing armor-piercing bullets.
A2761, which would ban magazines in the state that hold more than 10 rounds, with some exceptions.

How will this affect gun owners? The proposed legislation states that

No person shall be convicted of an offense… for possessing any firearms, weapons, destructive devices, large capacity ammunition magazines, silencers or explosives, if after giving written notice of his intention to do so, including the proposed date and time of surrender, he voluntarily surrendered [emphasis mine] the weapon, device, instrument or substance in question to the superintendent or to the chief of police in the municipality in which he resides, provided that the required notice is received by the superintendent or chief of police before any charges have been made or complaints filed [.]

Furthermore, a firearm with a fixed magazine capacity holding up to 15 rounds which is incapable of being modified to accommodate 10 or less rounds is to be registered. If not, the firearms owner “must complete a registration statement to be prescribed by the Superintendent of the State Police, and produce for inspection a valid firearms purchaser identification card, permit to carry a handgun, or permit to purchase a handgun.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/trump-lawyers-mueller-letter-two-things-right/

“In short, unless there is a smoking gun against the president that is lurking unseen even in the private jousting between Trump’s team and Mueller, the special prosecutor should be wrapping up the obstruction aspect of his probe rather than extending it via a court fight over the president’s testimony.”

We learned more about the back-and-forth between President Trump’s legal team and Special Counsel Robert Mueller this past weekend. The New York Times published a long letter from Trump’s team to Mueller arguing that he should drop his request to interview the president.

The lengthy letter makes many factual and legal assertions, some of which are highly debatable. Yet, assuming that it accurately reflects the nature and scope of Mueller’s investigation, its two bottom-line claims have merit: The special counsel does not have a viable criminal case against the president, nor has he justified the extraordinary measure of seeking the president’s testimony.

The letter suggests that the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s conduct is focused on obstruction. Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, amid the uproar over two events: Trump’s May 9 firing of Comey, and Comey’s subsequent leak of a memo-to-self (published by the Times on May 16), which claimed that Trump had pressured him to drop any investigation of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn. The letter implies that these two events remain the gravamen of the special counsel’s obstruction probe. If that is so, there is no obstruction case.

Only illegal acts to influence an investigation can predicate a criminal charge of obstruction against a president. Investigation and prosecution are executive functions in our system. FBI investigations are conducted under the president’s power; unlike ordinary citizens, the chief executive has the authority to influence, impede, and even shut down investigations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/can-a-president-pardon-himself-yes-trump-can/But he shouldn’t be talking about it.

As he often does, President Trump hijacked the news cycle with a Monday-morning tweet, this one observing that “numerous legal scholars” agree that “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” The president elaborates that he has done nothing wrong, and thus there is nothing to pardon.

So, one might ask, why bring it up?

It’s a good question, and not for the first time are we asking. Late last July, Trump tweeted that “all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon” — only to add that there was no point discussing pardons because the only crimes arising out of the Russia probe were leaks of classified information to hurt the administration, not misconduct by the administration. On that occasion, the president was obviously reacting to a Washington Post report that he had been asking advisers “about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself.”

In any event, if we must discuss the matter then, yes, the Constitution empowers the president to pardon himself. Like any other power, the pardon power may be abused, and if Congress finds a presidential self-pardon is sufficiently abusive, it may impeach and remove the president. But that would not vitiate the pardon — it would be impossible to prosecute the president on whatever crimes had been pardoned.

I wrote a column for PJ Media last year when the president raised the subject. Here’s the pertinent part:

The pardon question is factually premature in the sense that there is no allegation or indication that [the president] or those close to him have committed a crime. It is not, however, legally premature. There need not be a formal criminal charge before a president issues a pardon. After President Nixon resigned, President Ford pardoned him even though he had not been indicted. President Lincoln mass-pardoned Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, and President Carter mass-pardoned Vietnam draft evaders. Thus, the fact that special counsel Mueller has not, and may never, file criminal charges would not prevent President Trump from issuing pardons.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-obama-and-the-jobs-report-1528137323

The outrage over President Trump’s Friday jobs tweet may be fake, but there’s a real issue here over the way our government should communicate.

Here’s the story: On Friday, more than an hour before the release of the Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report, the President tweeted, “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.”

The report turned out to include plenty of good news—more job creation than expected and an encouraging increase in wages, particularly for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But the President’s vague early tweet sparked an intense reaction from former aides to his predecessor and from many members of the press corps.

“Trump Touts Jobs Report Before Official Release, Breaking Protocol,” announced a New York Times headline on Friday. It was just one of many reports focusing on the President’s early tweet.

President Trump “has proven he cannot be trusted with the information,” proclaimed former Obama White House aide Aaron Sojourner.

Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during President Obama’s second term, addresses the issue with an op-ed in the Journal:

If—69 minutes before the numbers were set to be released—President Obama had signaled via Twitter that they were going to be great, I’d have been shocked.

A president who signals advance news about economic data invites concern that he also is bragging about the good news privately, which could result in the information’s exploitation for enormous private gain by some well-connected investor.

The handling of such data certainly requires great care. But it’s not clear just how shocking such an event would have been during Mr. Obama’s second term. Mr. Furman has raised—without evidence—the possibility that Mr. Trump might privately share non-public jobs data. What about Mr. Obama?

The Journal reported on Friday:

While disclosures of economic data are rare, they aren’t unprecedented. In February 2009, with the U.S. economy in crisis and Congress debating a stimulus package, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) heard from Mr. Obama around midnight that the following morning’s jobs report numbers “would be somewhat scary,” he told the Senate after the report’s release. The Labor Department reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-04/u-s-supreme-court-throws-out-gay-bias-finding-against-baker-ji0cf2pg

The U.S. Supreme Court left unresolved questions about the competing rights of business owners and gay customers as the justices issued a narrow ruling Monday favoring a Colorado baker who wouldn’t make a cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.

Voting 7-2, the court tossed out a Colorado Civil Rights Commission finding that the baker had violated a state civil-rights law. The high court said the decision was tainted by anti-religious bias, pointing to one commissioner’s comments that religion had been used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.

“The commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

But Kennedy also said the court wasn’t deciding whether other business owners have a right to refuse to take part in gay weddings, saying those issues “must await further elaboration in the courts.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/breaking-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-colorado-baker-in-gay-wedding-cake-case/

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who was sanctioned for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, was told by a Colorado Civil Rights Commission that he cannot refuse to bake cakes for events that violate his conscience, even though he had a long history of selling items in his cakeshop to anyone who walked through the door. Phillips, citing his Christian faith, said his conscience would not allow him to design cakes for events like divorce parties, lewd bachelor parties, or same-sex weddings.

Colorado ordered him to either make cakes for same-sex weddings or stop making cakes at all.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that “The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.” Citing Obergefell v. Hodges, the justices wrote that the Commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case:

…showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection. As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. No commissioners objected to the comments. Nor were they mentioned in the later state-court ruling or disavowed in the briefs filed here. The comments thus cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.