President Trump: Making America Great Again...

[Commando]

yeah, mail not getting delivered would be great for the economy!

And even better for absentee votes!

[wapiti]

yeah, mail not getting delivered would be great for the economy!

Pretty sure Trump sees the post office as an extension of Amazon. It would have been good for the post office had Bezos not bought the Washington Post.

[Uncle Ted]

And even better for absentee votes!

Tell me about it... 16M absentee ballots went missing in 2016-2018:

More than 16M mail-in ballots went missing from 2016 and 2018 elections: Report

Roughly 16 million mail-in ballots ended up missing in the 2016 and 2018 elections, according to federal data.


Data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Election Administration and Voting Surveys for both the 2016 and 2018 elections show that 16.4 million ballots that were sent to registered voters by mail went missing
[...]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...ections-report

Not to mention that sh*t is just ripe for abuse.

The dumbass USPS is always losing my mail. I am always getting my neighbors mail as well. Once I even got their passports.

[Eddie]

Tell me about it... 16M absentee ballots went missing in 2016-2018....

Would that include ballots that were mailed out and never returned? I perused the article, but didn't see anything about that. Wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that 16M people didn't bother to fill out the ballot and mail it in.

[Uncle Ted]

Would that include ballots that were mailed out and never returned? I perused the article, but didn't see anything about that. Wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that 16M people didn't bother to fill out the ballot and mail it in.

I assume when the 10.5 million ballots "went missing" the voter didn't get them... the USPS is frankly unreliable.

In the 2018 election, about 42.4 million ballots were mailed to registered voters. Of those mailed, more than 1 million were undeliverable, more than 430,000 were rejected, and nearly 10.5 million went missing.

“Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said. “In 2018 and 2016, there were 16 million missing and misdirected ballots.”

“These represent 16 million opportunities for someone to cheat," Adams said. "Absentee ballot fraud is the most common, the most expensive to investigate, and can never be reversed after an election. The status quo was already bad for mail balloting. The proposed emergency fix is worse.”


The problem was especially bad in California, where 1.4 million mail-in ballots went missing in Los Angeles County alone during the 2018 election. In Orange County, the number was 374,000. The California counties of San Diego, Sacramento, Riverside, San Bernardino, Alameda, and Santa Clara combined for 1.6 million missing ballots.

If folks want to vote absentee they should use UPS or FedEx. Better yet, they should just get off their butts and go vote in person if they really care about their vote. I am constantly reading about problems with absentee ballots and the USPS.... oh, here is another one.

[Northwestcoug]

I look forward to the coming coherent GOP argument that the president does in fact have total power.

[PaloAltoCougar]

I look forward to the coming coherent GOP argument that the president does in fact have total power.

My contempt for Trump's actions has become nearly automatic, but I do enjoy the strangeness of those on the left becoming strong advocates for state rights while many on the right proclaim the supremacy of the executive branch.

[myboynoah]

My contempt for Trump's actions has become nearly automatic, but I do enjoy the strangeness of those on the left becoming strong advocates for state rights while many on the right proclaim the supremacy of the executive branch.

We're in Bizarro World.

What a fiasco that turned out to be. All that COVID-19 expertise sidelined for 2-3 hours so Trump can preen and yell and whine and poop his Depends.

[beefytee]

If folks want to vote absentee they should use UPS or FedEx. Better yet, they should just get off their butts and go vote in person if they really care about their vote. I am constantly reading about problems with absentee ballots and the USPS....

I've been voting by mail for about a decade. I am able to validate that it has been received. They have gotten it every time. I often drop it in a dedicated drop box rather than send it through the mail.

[Bo Diddley]

I've been voting by mail for about a decade. I am able to validate that it has been received. They have gotten it every time. I often drop it in a dedicated drop box rather than send it through the mail.

Sometimes it's my only option to vote.

[BlueK]

I look forward to the coming coherent GOP argument that the president does in fact have total power.

They mostly don't want to talk about it.

But AG Barr's recent move should be getting more play in the media than it is, as it isn't just words, but is an actual attempt to do something to attack civil liberties. I doubt he just threw this request out there completely on his own:

National crises—real or manufactured—often bring out the worst in government officials. It was reported on Saturday that the Justice Department requested from Congress the ability to ask chief judges to indefinitely detain people without trial during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19, Bill Barr and the American authoritarian tradition
© Greg Nash
National crises—real or manufactured—often bring out the worst in government officials. It was reported on Saturday that the Justice Department requested from Congress the ability to ask chief judges to indefinitely detain people without trial during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This penchant of federal officials to attempt or actually suspend the Bill of Rights dates from the first decade of the American republic to the present day. Now, Attorney General Bill Barr is seeking to revive the use of at least some of those past tools of political repression in the name of combatting a microscopic, and all-to-frequently lethal virus.

It was the authoritarian Federalists who pushed the Alien and Sedition Acts through the Congress in 1798. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus at the outbreak of the Civil War. President Wilson and a pliant Congress gave the country the Espionage Act, Trading with the Enemy Act, a revived Sedition Act and the Food and Fuel Control Act (which allowed federal agents to enter people’s homes to see if they were “hoarding” flour, sugar or other daily staples). President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the internment of over 100,000 innocent Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor attacks—a scurrilous unconstitutional act upheld by the Supreme Court at the time and only repudiated by the current Supreme Court less than two years ago. During the Cold War, the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its Senate counterpart, the Internal Security Subcommittee, spent decades and taxpayer dollars in public anti-communist witch hunts that destroyed the reputations and lives of thousands of Americans.

Exactly how would suspending court proceedings prevent the spread of the virus? Given where we are in this pandemic, eliminating in-person court proceedings might be prudent from a public health standpoint, but much of the American justice system can operate utilizing existing telecommunications technology.

My ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Defense Department and the National Security Agency is a case in point. Since the beginning of March, the magistrate judge presiding in our mediation proceedings has held two judicial teleconferences with the parties. From a procedural and technological standpoint, those conferences have gone off without a hitch. Given the availability of video teleconferencing capabilities, there’s simply no justification for suspending criminal proceedings either, as Barr is pushing.

Barr’s power play for essentially open-ended suspensions of criminal proceedings and related matters has nothing to do with stopping the spread of COVID-19. Barr’s proposals, at least so far as we know from public reporting thus far, involve giving judges the power to suspend court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.” The only reason to suspend court proceedings would be if no judges, court recorders, or other court personnel were available to deal with cases. That’s not the case now and is highly unlikely ever to be the case. Our legal system can absolutely continue to operate in the digital age, as my own experience and that of many others demonstrates.

The condemnation of Barr’s proposals has been swift and bipartisan. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), representing one of the states hardest hit by COVID-19, had a terse response to Barr’s gambit: “Hell no.” Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) tweeted “Congress must loudly reply NO.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) went further in his tweet:

“We absolutely must, must, resist government run amok taking advantage of a crisis. This is how your liberty dies. Stand up America and resist.”

Resist indeed.

{by the way, Mike Lee's response to this was "over my dead body"}

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...-powers-140023

https://themilsource.com/2020/03/24/...tment-suspend/

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-b...rian-tradition

[YOhio]

Trump finally did something good and now I have a Rhymin' and Stealin' earworm.

[Moliere]

They mostly don't want to talk about it.

But AG Barr's recent move should be getting more play in the media than it is, as it isn't just words, but is an actual attempt to do something to attack civil liberties. I doubt he just threw this request out there completely on his own:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...-powers-140023

https://themilsource.com/2020/03/24/...tment-suspend/

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-b...rian-tradition

Well, we already can't assemble without fear of being fined or jailed. People can't attend church even when they are isolated in their cars and not posing any additional harm to anyone that is caused sitting in their homes. Democrats already have let governments trample all over our civil liberties, and I'd say Democrats are the biggest cheerleaders of infringing on these civil liberties, so I'm not as worried about this power play.

And in what I can see, more republicans do not support Trump's claim of absolute authority...in fact, most know it's baseless.

[PaloAltoCougar]

...
And in what I can see, more republicans do not support Trump's claim of absolute authority...in fact, most know it's baseless.

I think this is true. Trump suffers from a kind of mental illness that drives him to claim total and absolute authority, while simultaneously blaming others and declaring he has made no mistakes.

[Uncle Ted]

I look forward to the coming coherent GOP argument that the president does in fact have total power.

Where have you been? We are at war against the Chinese and their virus. Drumpf is your commander and chief! Even your fellow Dems recognized that we are at war.