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By Doug64
#15207416
Steve_American wrote:The people who voted in a way the Repuds say is unconstitutional, did so in good faith. It was entirely legal. If they could not have voted by mail for example, many of them would have still voted. How many? Nobody will ever know.

No, an illegal act doesn’t become legal because those that committed it acted in good faith, it just means that the responsibility for committing that act shifts to those that lied to them. I’m sure you are right, that an unknown (and unknowable) number would have voted legally if they hadn’t been misled. That doesn’t change the fact that their votes were not cast in accordance with the laws passed by their legislatures and were therefore constitutionally invalid … and were counted anyway.

What I do know is that changing the rules AFTER to voting is over is forbidden. We need this rule or we will get chaos.
.

I agree, but there is a difference between that and insisting that the proper laws be followed. Mind, the Republicans weren’t blameless in the whole mess, in too many cases they let the unconstitutional acts go until after the election, undoubtedly thinking it wouldn’t be enough to make a difference and not wanting to look like they were “suppressing people’s ability to vote” and possibly energizing the opposition. They won’t be making that mistake this year, from what I’ve read they already have people in place to challenge any unconstitutional alterations to voting laws (or possibly insistence on continuing previous such alterations). If so, it’s likely to make for an “exciting” election cycle.
By late
#15207422
Doug64 wrote:

No, an illegal act doesn’t become legal because those that committed it acted in good faith, it just means that the responsibility for committing that act shifts to those that lied to them. I’m sure you are right, that an unknown (and unknowable) number would have voted legally if they hadn’t been misled. That doesn’t change the fact that their votes were not cast in accordance with the laws passed by their legislatures and were therefore constitutionally invalid … and were counted anyway.




Ahh, the Big Lie..

Republican election officials, and the Republican who was in charge of national election security, said the election was fine.

About 60 court cases found nothing. They did get Trump lawyers in hot water for abusing the courts.

Your lie isn't just dumb, it's worse than brain dead. It's the product of traitors.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15207539
ckaihatsu wrote:US media launches war propaganda campaign against Russia as CIA prepares to back an “insurgency” in Ukraine

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/0 ... a-j15.html

Looks like Ukraine is about to become the next Afghanistan….
User avatar
By ckaihatsu
#15207541
Potemkin wrote:
Looks like Ukraine is about to become the next Afghanistan….



Already has....



To date, some 13,000 people [298] have been killed, a quarter of them civilians, and as many as 30,000 wounded in the war in eastern Ukraine since it broke out in April 2014. OHCHR estimates the total number of conflict-related casualties in Ukraine are 40,000-43,000 wounded and 12,800-13,000 killed.[299]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan#Casualties
User avatar
By ckaihatsu
#15207547
Does *this* sound familiar -- ?



On 21 February [...] representatives of "Right Sector" declared that they don't accept the gradualness of political reforms stipulated in the document, and demanded immediate resignation of the president Yanukovych—otherwise they intended to go for storm of Presidential Administration and Verkhovna Rada.[358]



---


U.S. involvement:



A telephone call was leaked of US diplomat Victoria Nuland speaking to the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt about the future of the country, in which she said that Klitschko should not be in the future government, and expressed her preference for Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who became interim Prime Minister. She also casually stated "fuck the EU."[348][349] German chancellor Angela Merkel said she deemed Nuland's comment "completely unacceptable".[350] Commenting on the situation afterwards, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that Nuland had apologized to her EU counterparts[351] while White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been "tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia's role".[352]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaida ... cal_impact
#15207680
Yo nothing is going to save Joe at this point. I read that 45% of Democrats want to put the unvaxxed into camps but like, Joe can't even keep lettuce on the shelve (I grow lettuce in my apartment for God's sake), how the fuck is he going to put a bunch of paranoid gun-totting rednecks into camps? So yes, we can prepare for "fascism" again.

The good news for leftists is that millennials are so retarded that they will surely learn nothing from this period of inflation and bare shelves. So we can look forward to at least a couple more Democrat juntas at some point in the future no matter how badly they fuck it up, even if Republicans presumably stage a comeback in 2022-24.

I'm in Colombia right now. The grocery stores and local markets run by little brown dudes are all overflowing with food and the inflation rate for several years has been lower than what it is in the US. Yes, fucking Colombia is beating the US in some ways right now. :lol:
#15207688
Wulfschilde wrote:Yo nothing is going to save Joe at this point. I read that 45% of Democrats want to put the unvaxxed into camps but like, Joe can't even keep lettuce on the shelve (I grow lettuce in my apartment for God's sake), how the fuck is he going to put a bunch of paranoid gun-totting rednecks into camps? So yes, we can prepare for "fascism" again.

The good news for leftists is that millennials are so retarded that they will surely learn nothing from this period of inflation and bare shelves. So we can look forward to at least a couple more Democrat juntas at some point in the future no matter how badly they fuck it up, even if Republicans presumably stage a comeback in 2022-24.

I'm in Colombia right now. The grocery stores and local markets run by little brown dudes are all overflowing with food and the inflation rate for several years has been lower than what it is in the US. Yes, fucking Colombia is beating the US in some ways right now. :lol:

Joe Biden isn't responsible for global supply chains, omicron, or stupid Americans including farmers and truck drivers etc who refuse to get vaxxed. Americans need to grow a brain and own their incompetence instead of always blaming Biden. Joe Biden is the POTUS he isn't the master of the universe, he doesn't even control the House or Senate, he's just 1 guy and he has limited powers and doesn't have a magic wand which people don't seem to understand. The gov includes the Senate, House, and state governors and legislation plus mayors and city councilors, and he doesn't control every other government in the world.
User avatar
By noemon
#15207697
Potemkin wrote:Looks like Ukraine is about to become the next Afghanistan….


For Russia.

I am delighted that James Stavridis and other high-ranking NATO/US officials, current or former are no longer entertaining Russian aggression in the Ukraine and are explicitly telling Russia that they will support the Ukraine:

wsws wrote:On Friday, the New York Times quoted at length James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who previously served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO. Pointing to the US support for the muhajedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s, Stavridis said, “The level of military support” for Ukraine “would make our efforts in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union look puny by comparison.”



wsws wrote:The Kremlin has rejected the veracity of the reports with Press Secretary Dmitri Peskov stating, “So far all these statements have been unfounded and have not been confirmed by anything.”


Except for a 100k strong Russian army. :|

That communist(wsws) source is a clear Russian propaganda outlet. It describes the Russian preparation to invade the Ukraine for a second time as a "response" to something(what is that exactly?) and all the accusations it makes against unnamed US officials are themselves unsourced and made by unnamed Russian officials. :lol:
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15207698
noemon wrote:For Russia.

And for the Ukrainians too.... :hmm:
User avatar
By noemon
#15207699
So why do you guys support a Russian invasion in the Ukraine? :hmm:

Why do you take issue with Ukraine signing a trade-association agreement with the EU and claim that such a trade agreement justifies the previous Russian invasion and ongoing occupation?
By Doug64
#15207941
late wrote:Ahh, the Big Lie..

Republican election officials, and the Republican who was in charge of national election security, said the election was fine.

About 60 court cases found nothing. They did get Trump lawyers in hot water for abusing the courts.

Your lie isn't just dumb, it's worse than brain dead. It's the product of traitors.

Funny you should say that.... :lol:

Wisconsin Judge Bans Ballot Drop Boxes, Says Election Officials Broke The Law
A judge in the key battleground state of Wisconsin ruled Thursday that ballot drop boxes and ballot harvesting violate state law and cannot be used in the upcoming midterm elections.

Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren determined “there is no statutory authority” to allow for either practice, which became highly controversial in Wisconsin following the state’s razor-thin outcome in the 2020 presidential election. President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in the state by approximately 20,000 votes.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is under fire for allegedly bending and even openly violating state law to give Biden an edge, authorized the dramatic increase in the use of ballot drop boxes, but Judge Bohren held that the agency lacked lawful authority to do so.

The plaintiffs, voters represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), argued that state law allowed for only two methods of returning an absentee ballot: Through the mail or in person at the municipal clerk’s office. Nowhere does it allow for a ballot to be dropped off in a drop box.

Likewise, Wisconsin law provides that no person “may receive a ballot from or give a ballot to a person other than the election official in charge.” This, the plaintiffs argued, is a clear prohibition on ballot harvesting, the practice of third parties collecting absentee ballots from voters.

Despite this, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent a memo to municipal clerks ahead of the 2020 election indicating that “a family member or another person may also return the ballot on behalf of the voter” and that ballots could be returned in drop boxes instead of in person at the clerk’s office.

Neither of these, Bohren ruled Thursday, were lawful orders. Still, clerks set up more than 500 ballot drop boxes across the state, which were used to collect tens of thousands of absentee ballots. The ruling, which will almost certainly be appealed, prohibits the use of drop boxes in upcoming elections.

Wisconsin’s current U.S. Senate race is among the most hotly contested in the country, as control of the Senate may depend upon its result. Last week, incumbent Republican Ron Johnson announced he would run for a third term. Several Democrats, including Lt. Gov Mandela Barnes and Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, have launched bids to unseat Johnson.

The state will also have a fiercely fought gubernatorial election, as former Republican Lt. Gov Rebecca Kleefisch is challenging Democrat incumbent Tony Evers. Last fall, Kleefisch filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission in an effort to force it to follow state law during the 2022 election cycle.

Her suit, seeking direct action from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, also alleged the use of ballot drop boxes violated state law, a position confirmed by a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. That agency determined in October that the Wisconsin Elections Commission did not comply with numerous laws in the way it administered the 2020 election.

Among the Audit Bureau’s findings were that the Wisconsin Elections Commission did not perform legally required checks of the multistate voter database to identify potential double voting, that tens of thousands of voters were able to skirt Wisconsin’s Voter ID law by falsely claiming to be indefinitely confined to their homes, and that voting in all of the state’s nursing homes was unlawfully conducted.

In addition, the Wisconsin legislature has launched a special counsel investigation into the election, which has focused primarily on the manner in which outside money from groups funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was used to unlawfully influence (and, in the city of Green Bay, possibly even take over) the administration of the presidential election.

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, the special counsel, has faced significant stonewalling from the Wisconsin Elections Commission and local election officials in Green Bay as well as the Democrat-controlled cities of Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay. In response, he has filed numerous subpoenas compelling those officials to sit for interviews with his investigators.

The investigation, which began last summer, is expected to conclude in the coming weeks. Gableman has not given any public indication of his timeline, but Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who hired Gableman, has said he wants it to conclude by the end of February.
By late
#15207988
Doug64 wrote:

Funny you should say that....




That ruling is unlikely to survive appeal.

Based on my admittedly brief look at it, it's childish.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15208025
I really do wonder what's going to happen with the contract works I have in Ukraine. :?:

Anyway, Putin = dickface asshole
#15208198
Unthinking Majority wrote:Joe Biden isn't responsible for global supply chains, omicron, or stupid Americans including farmers and truck drivers etc who refuse to get vaxxed. Americans need to grow a brain and own their incompetence instead of always blaming Biden. Joe Biden is the POTUS he isn't the master of the universe, he doesn't even control the House or Senate, he's just 1 guy and he has limited powers and doesn't have a magic wand which people don't seem to understand. The gov includes the Senate, House, and state governors and legislation plus mayors and city councilors, and he doesn't control every other government in the world.

You're partly correct but it's not really the point.

The issue here is that Biden rode a crisis into power, with >40% of the population thinking he cheated.

Then he fails to contain that crisis, lets it spiral into multiple new crises and has entirely new unrelated crises (like Afghanistan and the border) on top of those, which leaves no doubt that he's incompetent.

Democrats seem to already be pointing the finger at each other. Joe has historically low approval ratings, a record number of Dems are retiring from congress, Repubs lead in the polls and have surpassed Dems in voter registration numbers for the first time in years.

Then there's the "voter suppression", which is to say that Democrats don't appear to have ever come up with a single human being who was unable to vote due to not having an ID, most of the country supports voter ID, the Dems want you to have your papers to get a slice of pizza but not to vote, yet they treat every popular attempt to strengthen election integrity as if they were cheating or something.
User avatar
By ckaihatsu
#15208204

Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck (commonly referred to as IVRC or Crosscheck) was a database in the United States which aggregated voter registration records from multiple states to identify voters who may have registered or voted in two or more states. Crosscheck was developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh in conjunction with Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska. In December 2019, the program was suspended indefinitely as part of a settlement[1] of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas challenging Kansas' management of the program. Prior to Crosscheck's legally mandated suspension, a dozen states had withdrawn from the program citing the inaccurate data and risk of violating voters' privacy rights. Crosscheck was also accused[2] of facilitating unlawful purges of voters in a racially discriminatory manner.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstat ... ck_Program
#15208208
Wulfschilde wrote:You're partly correct but it's not really the point.

The issue here is that Biden rode a crisis into power, with >40% of the population thinking he cheated.

Then he fails to contain that crisis, lets it spiral into multiple new crises and has entirely new unrelated crises (like Afghanistan and the border) on top of those, which leaves no doubt that he's incompetent.

Democrats seem to already be pointing the finger at each other. Joe has historically low approval ratings, a record number of Dems are retiring from congress, Repubs lead in the polls and have surpassed Dems in voter registration numbers for the first time in years.


The US gov is so corrupt that some Americans would rather have a fascist with balls who will do the things they see as necessary that nobody will dare do than a democratically elected wuss puppet owned by all the lobbyists and corporations who is some PC ninny choosing all the correct words for fear of offending. They want some courage and leadership FFS, someone fearless who will take the hits to make the hard decisions. That's how desperate Americans are for change. If somebody in Washington with some ethics and courage (who wasn't a socialist) would just stand up they'd win in a landslide. They want a POTUS who will grab the football and run 100 yards while telling the haters to suck it.

Joe is a decent man in a corrupt system who is a sellout and plays their games. Obama was the same. Biden is also well past his prime. He's old and half-senile and probably needs to put on his slippers and take a nap every afternoon. Trump is an asshole, but he also stands up for American interests (along with his own unfortunately) and gets shit done. Joe is much more sane and reasonable, but he's bit of a wet noodle. Most Democrats are. Some exceptions, the alpha Dems like JFK and Clinton. Americans don't want a wet noodle. Americans are dicks. Americans are desperate for a dick with some balls but who is also honorable and ethical. A true American patriot. GI Joe for POTUS.

By Doug64
#15208240
Speaking of a corrupt government drifting toward fascism:

Congress's 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power as it Investigates Citizens With No Judicial Limits
In its ongoing attempt to investigate and gather information about private U.S. citizens, the Congressional 1/6 Committee is claiming virtually absolute powers that not even the FBI or other law enforcement agencies enjoy. Indeed, lawyers for the committee have been explicitly arguing that nothing proscribes or limits their authority to obtain data regarding whichever citizens they target and, even more radically, that the checks imposed on the FBI (such as the requirement to obtain judicial authorization for secret subpoenas) do not apply to the committee.

As we have previously reported and as civil liberties groups have warned, there are serious constitutional doubts about the existence of the committee itself. Under the Constitution and McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases interpreting it, the power to investigate crimes lies with the executive branch, supervised by the judiciary, and not with Congress. Congress does have the power to conduct investigations, but that power is limited to two narrow categories: 1) when doing so is designed to assist in its law-making duties (e.g., directing executives of oil companies to testify when considering new environmental laws) and 2) in order to exert oversight over the executive branch.

What Congress is barred from doing, as two McCarthy-era Supreme Court cases ruled, is exactly what the 1/6 committee is now doing: conducting a separate, parallel criminal investigation in order to uncover political crimes committed by private citizens. Such powers are dangerous precisely because Congress’s investigative powers are not subject to the same safeguards as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. And just as was true of the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that prompted those Supreme Court rulings, the 1/6 committee is not confining its invasive investigative activities to executive branch officials or even citizens who engaged in violence or other illegality on January 6, but instead is investigating anyone and everyone who exercised their Constitutional rights to express views about and organize protests over their belief that the 2020 presidential election contained fraud. Indeed, the committee's initial targets appear to be taken from the list of those who applied for protest permits in Washington: a perfectly legal, indeed constitutionally protected, act.

This abuse of power is not merely abstract. The Congressional 1/6 Committee has been secretly obtaining private information about American citizens en masse: telephone records, email logs, internet and browsing history, and banking transactions. And it has done so without any limitations or safeguards: no judicial oversight, no need for warrants, no legal limitations of any kind.

Indeed, the committee has been purposely attempting to prevent citizens who are the targets of their investigative orders to have any opportunity to contest the legality of this behavior in court. As we reported in October, the committee sent dozens if not hundreds of subpoenas to telecom companies demanding a wide range of email and other internet records, and — without any legal basis — requested that those companies not only turn over those documents but refrain from notifying their own customers of the request. If the companies were unwilling to comply with this "request,” then the committee requested that they either contact the committee directly or just disregard the request — in other words, the last thing they wanted was to enable one of their targets to learn that they were being investigated because that would enable them to seek a judicial ruling about the legality of the committee's actions.

But now the committee is escalating its aggressive investigative actions. They have begun sending subpoenas to private banks, demanding the banking records of private citizens, and doing so such that either the person never finds out or finds out too late to obtain a judicial order about the legality of the committee's behavior. In one case, they targeted JP Morgan with these subpoenas while knowing that that bank is being represented by former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch; Lynch — unsurprisingly — then directed her client not to accommodate any requests from its own customers to ensure they can seek judicial review.

On November 22, the 1/6 Committee served a subpoena on Taylor Budowich — a former spokesman for the Trump campaign who never worked for the U.S. Government — that requested a wide range of documents as well as his deposition testimony. On December 14, Budowich voluntarily complied by handing over a large amount of his personal records, and then, on December 22, he flew to Washington at his own expense and submitted to questioning. There is no suggestion that Budowich was engaged in any violence or other illegal acts at the Capitol on January 6. Their only interest in this private citizen is his connection to the Trump campaign and his stated view that he believed the 2020 election was marred by fraud.

After he furnished the committee with those documents and then testified, Budowich learned from others that the committee was issuing subpoenas directly to the banks used by other individuals for their personal accounts. He thus requested that his lawyer notify his own bank, JPMorgan Chase, that he would object to their cooperation with any subpoena without first providing notice to him so that he can have time to seek a legal ruling in court.

Typically, citizens learn when law enforcement agencies such as the FBI serve subpoenas to third-party providers such as banks or internet companies. That allows a crucial right: to contest the legality of the action in court before the documents are supplied. But when such a subpoena is concealed from the person, it prevents them from obtaining judicial review. In general, citizens learn of FBI subpoenas, and the FBI (with rare exceptions) has the power to impose a "gag order” or otherwise prevent the person from learning about it only if they first persuade a court that such an extreme measure is warranted (by arguing, for instance, that a terror suspect will flee or destroy evidence if they learn they are being investigated). That safeguard ensures that in most cases, a citizen has the right to seek judicial protection from an illegal act by an investigative body.

But the 1/6 Committee recognizes no right of any kind and no limits on its power. On November 23 — the day after it served a subpoena on Budowich himself — it served a subpoena on Budowich's bank, JPMorgan. The original date for the bank to produce the records was December 7, but JPMorgan — advised by Loretta Lynch as its legal counsel — bizarrely requested that the deadline be extended until December 24: the day before Christmas, knowing that courts would be closed that day and the next. It was only on December 21 — when Budowich was in Washington for his testimony before the committee — did JPMorgan send him notice at his home that it had received a subpoena and intended to produce the requested documents on December 24: just three days later. As JPMorgan and Lynch knew would happen, Budowich did not see the letter until he arrived home on the evening of December 22: less than forty-eight hours before the bank told him they were going to give up all of his financial records to the committee.

Upon discovering that the committee had subpoenaed his bank, Budowich's lawyers immediately advised JPMorgan that they had legal objections to the subpoena, and requested that — given it was about to be Christmas Eve and the courts would be closed — the bank seek an extension from the committee to enable Budowich to seek a judicial ruling. But the bank, advised by Loretta Lynch, refused — and told him they intended to turn the documents over on Christmas regardless of whether that gave him time to request judicial intervention. The bank even refused to provide a copy of the subpoena they received from the committee, which Budowich, to this very day, has not seen.

Budowich's lawyers did everything possible to seek judicial intervention before JPMorgan gave all his financial documents to the committee, but the timing agreed to by the committee, Lynch and the bank — documents produced on Christmas Eve, with notice to him arriving just a couple days before when he was testifying in Washington — made it impossible, by design. As a result, JPMorgan gave all of his banking records to the committee without even seeking an extension.

Budowich was therefore left with no alternative but to file an after-the-fact lawsuit against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the committee members, seeking an emergency injunction against the committee's use of his banking records. In response, both the committee and JPMorgan argued that the entire question was “moot” given that they already handed over the documents.

In other words, lawyers for the committee and Loretta Lynch created a plot whereby JPMorgan would notify Budowich of its intent to hand over the documents right before Christmas, so as to purposely deny him time to seek a court ruling, and then used the fact that he was "too late” in filing as a ground for arguing that the court should shut its doors to him and refuse to even give him a hearing. The court agreed that Budowich's request for an emergency injunction was “moot” given that the bank already supplied the documents, but agreed to rule on the merits of the arguments about whether the subpoena was legal.

The parties’ briefs on this question were submitted to an Obama-appointed federal judge, James Boasberg, in Washington. The oral argument on Budowich's request to enjoin the use of his banking records by the committee was held earlier on Thursday, and Judge Boasberg quickly rejected Budowich's objections to the subpoena. It will now be appealed to the Court of Appeals, but the issues presented by the committee's arguments are chilling.

At the hearing, the committee's lawyers essentially repeated the same argument they advanced in their legal brief: namely, that none of the legal safeguards imposed on the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to guard against abuse of power apply to this Congressional committee, which therefore enjoys virtually absolute power to do what it wants.

That is not an exaggerated summary of the committee's argument. The primary law on which Budowich is relying is The Right to Financial Privacy Act (“RFPA”), which prohibits any “financial institution, or officers, employees or agent of the financial institution” from "provid[ing] to any Government authority access to or copies of, or the information contained in, the financial records of any customer” unless they have first complied with the requirement of that law. Among the key requirements is that a “financial institution shall not release the financial records of a customer until the Government authority seeking such records certifies in writing to the financial institution that it has complied with the applicable provisions of this chapter.” As Budowich's lawyers argued, the key to the law is that a person whose financial records are sought must receive notice of that attempt and be given sufficient time to challenge it in court:

    Both 12 U.S.C. §§ 3405 (administrative subpoena or summons) and 3408 (formal written request) require that a copy of the subpoena or request “have been served upon the customer or mailed to his last known address on or before the date on which the subpoena or summons was served on the financial institution” together with a formal statutory notice allowing ten (10) days from the date or service or fourteen (14) days from the date of mailing the required notice. See 12 U.S.C. §§ 3405, 3408. Additional provisions of RFPA establish the right of a financial institution customer to challenge a request for their financial records in an appropriate United States District Court, and that proceedings involving such challenges should be completed or decided within seven (7) calendar days of the filing of any Government response. See 12 U.S.C. § 3410(a)-(b).

The committee did not deny that it failed to meet these requirements. Obviously, they could not argue that, given that the plan they created with JPMorgan and its lawyer, Loretta Lynch, was designed to ensure that Budowich have no time to obtain a judicial ruling before his bank records were handed over. Instead, the committee's response is they do not have to comply with this law. “The Act restricts only agencies and departments of the United States, and the Select Committee is neither,” the committee's lawyer contended. In fact, they explicitly argued that these safeguards were meant to be imposed only on the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, but were intended to exempt Congress even when, as here, they are clearly engaged in investigating private citizens for potential crimes. “Multiple provisions of the statute underscore that Congress intended 'Government authority' to mean an executive branch agency or department,” the committee's lawyers wrote in an assertion of power breathtaking in its scope and limitlessness.

All of the other committee's arguments are similarly designed to bestow on itself absolute and unlimited power in how it investigates private citizens, and to insist that the judiciary is without power to impose limits on it. The committee insists, for instance, that it can investigate anyone it wants in connection with 1/6 even if its motive is not to enact new laws and even if the documents it seeks (Budowich's financial records) have no relationship to any proposed new laws. That is because, it says, “Congressional committees are not required to identify a specific piece of legislation in advance of conducting an investigation of the pertinent facts. It is sufficient that a committee’s investigation concerns a subject on which legislation 'could be had.'"

Such a principle, if accepted, would destroy any limits on Congress’s ability to investigate citizens (clearly, it was possible for the McCarthy-era Congressional investigations to lead to new laws even though, as the Supreme Court twice ruled when striking them down, that was clearly not its primary purpose). But Judge Boasberg nonetheless accepted the committee's argument on the ground that an appellate court had already ruled that the 1/6 Committee had a valid legislative purpose and he was therefore bound by that decision.

The committee's other arguments are even more extreme: namely, that “the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause provides absolute immunity to Members and committees when performing legislative acts" and that “sovereign immunity prohibits litigation against Congress to which it has not consented, and no such consent has been.” That would mean that the 1/6 Committee could literally do whatever it wanted to citizens, and no court would have the right even to review the legality or constitutionality of what it is doing let alone put a stop to it.

What happened during the first War on Terror — and so many other events that were perceived as traumatic — is instructive here. So many Americans were so horrified by the carnage of that day that, for years, many did not care or want to hear about legal niceties, constitutional limits or civil liberties regarding the government's actions. Anything the government did in the name of responding to or retaliating for 9/11 became inherently justified, and anyone who objected — no matter the principles cited — was deemed to be on the side of the terrorists.

The same dynamic is prevailing here. There are serious constitutional limits on the ability of Congress to investigate private citizens. It is blatantly abusive to scheme with JPMorgan and its counsel Loretta Lynch to ensure that a citizen has no time to seek judicial relief regarding the committee's attempt to obtain mounds of his personal and financial records. And, in general, the committee has been on a rampage targeting not only Trump officials or people who engaged in criminal behavior at the Capitol on January 6 but a wide group of citizens whose only crime appears to be their political beliefs and associations — exactly what the Supreme Court cited when striking down the excesses of Congress’s McCarthy-era probes of citizens.

But with the media overwhelmingly cheering anything done in the name of stopping the Trump movement and those who supported 1/6 in any way, all of these civil liberties concerns and constitutional protections are run roughshod over in the name of safety. The latest arguments from the Congressional 1/6 Committee amount to little more than an assertion of unfettered power for Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney and the rest of the committee members to dig into the lives of anyone they want without limits.
By Rich
#15208290
Yes. The average person if not a fascist is certainly a latent one. And doesn't take much to trigger the fascist instinct in the average person. Different people have different triggers. The fascist wave after 9/11 was driven by the right. the reason that it was so successful was because Islmophillia crossed the political spectrum. The enslavement torture even murder of Muslims without trial or due process was sold to the left and centre on the basis that they weren't Muslims and had nothing to do with Islam. That they had committed for Cultural Marxists the most heinous crime any human being can commit, bringing Islam into disrepute.

Islamophillia may not have had much hold on your small town archetypal Texas "Redneck" but it sure had a hold over the Conservative foreign policy establishment. In this view Islam was pure and wonderful second only to Judaism and Christianity and any faults of Iran could be attributed to the pervasion of Islam by Nazi and Communist ideologies. In this somewhat deranged view any Muslim who didn't support the state of Israel was not a true Muslim.
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