We Can't Count On Journalists To Tell The Real Truth-- How About Pusha T?

It's incumbent on journalists to never give up on pointing out that Trump never opens his mouth without lying and attempting to manipulate the public. Most Americans know he's a liar; a recent poll found that only 13% of Americans consider Señor Trumpanzee honest and trustworthy. And yet... his job approval rating has crept back up into the 40s. Are people not paying attention-- of what they gown unured to the constancy of lies?

Over the weekend Maggie Haberman of the "failing NYT" tweeted that she has "written stories about his lies, falsehoods, whoppers, half-truths, salesman-like stretches. The reality is that what he does can be hard to label because, as anyone who has worked for him will tell you in candor, he often thinks whatever he says is what’s real." Does that matter? As Joshua Benton wrote, "the statement is a lie, regardless of Trump's state of mind."

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, noted, also on Twitter that "in a large and important sense, not calling this lying is actually a form of misinformation or even at times questionably-motivated disinformation about what's really happening. BINGO! There is no overdoing it for reporters to pound away on the depth of untruthfulness and manipulationinherentin every statement, every tweet, every action. Nothing that comes from the Regime can be reported on without reference to lies.

For example Trump's despicable attempt to blame Democrats for separating migrant families at the border an attempt to rile up his primitivist base again. He claimed the disgusting and reviled practice was all about Democrats refusing to change a "horrible law" that he claimed, falsely, "mandated, as the Washington Post reported, "separating children from parents who enter the country illegally. But there is no law specifically requiring the government to take such action, and it’s also the policies of his own administration that have caused the family separation that advocacy groups and Democrats say is a crisis."

"Debase" is the word that described him and his governance. Have you been a fan of Pusha T? His new album, Daytona just dropped. Ironically produced by Trumpist Kanye, Pusha T is the Joni Mitchell of rap music. But more political.

I be thinkin', what would 2Pac do?

You be thinkin' what New Kids on the Block do
If you ain't drivin' while Black, do they stop you?

Will MAGA hats let me slide like a drive-thru?

Last week, Arizona Republican Jeff Flake delivered the commencement address at Harvard Law. The sentence that got reported in the news was "Our presidency has been debased by a figure who has a seemingly bottomless appetite for destruction and division and only a passing familiarity with how the Constitution works." But there was more. He followed that line with another one that I'd like to hear Pusha T rapping about: "And our Article I branch of government, the Congress (that’s me), is utterly supine in the face of the moral vandalism that flows from the White House daily. I do not think that the founders could have anticipated that the beauty of their invention might someday founder on the rocks of reality television, and that the Congress would be such willing accomplices to this calamity. Our most ardent enemies, doing their worst (and they are doing their worst), couldn’t hurt us more than we are hurting ourselves... We may have hit bottom."

Maybe not. Norman Eisen and a legendary political figure when I was growing up in Brooklyn, Elizabeth Holtzman, penned an OpEd for USAToday last week, Donald Trump should not assume he's above the law. A sitting president can be indicted. Trump and Giuliani, they warn "would be unwise to assume presidents can't be indicted. The Constitution doesn't bar it and Rod Rosenstein could allow it... Giuliani’s assertion comes as President Trump faces at least four allegations of criminal misconduct. He and senior members of his campaign are under investigation for coordinating with Russians [something Pusha T accuses them of on the new album] to win the 2016 election. There is also substantial evidence that he obstructed justice by engaging in a pattern of conduct aimed at interfering with that investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of his former aide Michael Flynn.

While a president is entitled to special accommodation, the court has held that a president enjoys no special immunity from court jurisdiction and the legal process while in office.

If in fact a president is so consumed by a legal defense that he or she cannot lead the executive branch, there are other options. The vice president is constitutionally permitted under the 25th Amendment to assume the office when a president cannot perform its functions. If Trump finds himself in a position where he cannot faithfully execute his official duties, he may resign, or invoke the 25th Amendment and step aside temporarily.

Those options, while obviously unpalatable to the president, are consistent with a basic principle of our democracy: No person is above the law.

There is no explicit declaration in the text of our Constitution that provides immunity to the president while in office for crimes that he or she commits. In addition, while the text of the Constitution is silent on presidential immunity, it is explicit on congressional immunity. No member of Congress may be prosecuted for what is said during speech and debate.

Plainly, the Framers knew how to provide for immunity when they wanted to-- so their failure to do so for the president strongly implies that they didn’t believe it was appropriate in that case.

The closest the Constitution comes to addressing the matter is Article I, Section 3, which provides that after impeachment and removal from office, an individual “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”

This provision does not imply that prosecution takes place only when a president is out of office; it is simply intended to show that impeachment is not the only remedy for presidential crimes.

The opinion that a president cannot be indicted has been rejected by those who have held the solemn responsibility of deciding how to handle potentially criminal conduct by a president. Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor who took over the Watergate prosecution after Nixon fired his predecessor, Archibald Cox, ultimately asked a grand jury to refer evidence against the president to Congress.

However, that report said the grand jury was “deferring” to Congress’ “primary jurisdiction,” not that the grand jury was powerless to indict.

Furthermore, Congress had already begun impeachment proceedings, so it was clear that another branch of government would seriously grapple with holding Nixon accountable. (In addition, Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the major criminal prosecution in Watergate.)

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr also famously reported evidence of possible articles of impeachment against Clinton to Congress. However, Starr’s team concluded that “it is proper, constitutional and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties.”

That brings us to the ultimate reason that Giuliani and the president would be unwise to rely on the Justice Department policy. Even if Mueller did acknowledge that as special counsel he cannot indict the president, as Giuliani claims, that is not definitive. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may give him permission to override that limit.

The special counsel regulations and the authority Rosenstein enjoys as acting attorney general over this matter allow him to make that decision. Because of the legal infirmities of the OLC opinions we have described, that outcome cannot be considered off the table. Then it would be for the courts to resolve, and as we have shown, they have been hostile to similar presidential claims.

Make no mistake-- we are not suggesting that the forbearance on prosecution that Jaworski and Starr demonstrated is a bad model for Rosenstein and Mueller. The indictment of our democratically elected leader would be an unprecedented and somber moment for our democracy.

Instead, we are arguing that pursuing an indictment of a sitting president is a last resort that is entirely consistent with our constitutional values and democratic norms. It should be on the table not because it is a perfect option, but rather because it is preferable to a world in which our president is above the law and can engage in criminal conduct with impunity.

Chucky and me: At last, I come clean and reveal to the world the full sordid story of my history with New York's power-grasping senior senator

"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty."
--James Madison (pictured at left)

"The most dangerous place on earth is standing between Chuck Schumer and a camera."
--Oscar Wilde (some sources specify "a TV camera," but that seems doubtful; where would Oscar Wilde have heard about TV cameras? this sounds to me like a later embellishment of the great wit's bon mot)


All right already. I give! The hue and cry to once and for all pull the scab off my relationship with Chuck Schumer has become deafening.

Just recently in this space, you may recall Howie reporting his relentless grilling of me regarding my awareness of Chucky while we were all students at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. And not just Chucky himself, but apparently I was supposed to remember all the members of his family. I denied everything.

For the record, Chucky (class of '67) was two years behind Howie and me (class of '65). Which is more significant than the bare number might suggest, because unlike many traditional high schools, Madison had only 10th, 11th, and 12th graders infesting the halls of what was known popularly as "the Main Building," to distinguish it from "the Annex," an eerie isolation ward quarantined on the top floor of an elementary school way the hell out on the other side of Nostrand Avenue. In our district, graduates of K-8 elementary schools were bundled off to the Siberia of the Annex as freshmen, to be joined the following year by graduates of the district's junior highs as sophomores in the Main Building.

I had just moved to New York that September, a fugitive from the Midwest--into a house my grandfather had bought for us in part because it was only a block from Madison! The Main Building, that is. You know, the place where I couldn't go to school for another year.

As fate would have it, only a couple of blocks from our house in the other direction was P.S. 197, which Howie and my other first friends as a transplanted New Yorker had gone there. And it happens that my family has a history with P.S. 197. My mother grew up in more or less this same neighborhood, and her baby brother, my Uncle Ralph, attended P.S. 197 the year it opened! According to family legend, the classrooms weren't ready in time for the first day of school, and so classes began in hastily assembled chicken coops. (Okay, so my family doesn't have the most inspirational legends. If you can do better, who's stopping you?)

Now, to recap: Since Chucky was two years behind us, that means that we were only in the building (i.e., the Main Building) together for one year, while Howie and I were seniors and he was rocketing his way to superstardom in the sophomore class. In addition, New York City public high schools were so overcrowded, at least back then, that we were on three shifts-- admittedly overlapping, but still. What's more, my recollection is that sophomores were in general assigned to the PM shift, while we lordly seniors hunkered down in the early hours.

One thing all Madison students were meant to have in common: a daily burst of inspiration from this stirring quote by our namesake:

"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty."

It was engraved in a long stretch of stone centered above the Main Building's main entrance, stretching a good ways south and north on Bedford Avenue. The only hitch was that, at least in our time, students were never allowed to use the main entrance. Side entrances were designated for that purpose.

So what, you're probably waiting to hear, about me and Chucky? Well, as I tried to point out to Howie while he was grilling me, he may have known people in the classes of '66 and '67, because it's in his nature, wherever he is, to wind up knowing everyone there is to know. I usually wind up knowing hardly anyone, and I don't remember having contact with anyone outside the class of '65, except in gym class, and we're not going there now. (If you've seen the gym-teacher episode of Seinfeld, you have a clue.)

So the complete story of my history with Chucky is, well, zilch.

Well, not quite. Without even knowing of his history-making romp through my old alma mater, I soon enough became aware of him. He was only 23 when, straight out of Harvard Law School, he was first elected to the New York State Assembly ("becoming," according to Wikipedia, "the youngest member of the New York legislature since Theodore Roosevelt. Following what turned out to be a lifelong pattern, he stockpiled campaign cash while be bided his time, waiting for an opportunity, which came when U.S. Rep. Liz Holtzman chose not to run for reelection, but instead to challenge New York's veteran and much-respected liberal Republican U.S. senator, Jacob Javits. The year was 1980, and we will be coming back to this momentous election. For Chucky it was the year he was first elected to Congress, where once again he bided his time.

It took awhile. In part, the path upward was blocked by a startling newcomer to state electoral politics, a right-wing Republican from Long Island named Alfonse D'Amato, who in 1980 stunned a complacent Senator Javits by defeating him in a Republican primary.

Now of course, if you grew up Jewish in New York in those years, Jack Javits was something of a god--he was a man who had risen as high as anyone could imagine a Jewish pol rising. Why, a couple of times his name was even mentioned as a possible vice presidential nominee! He was famous as a man of principle. He had wound up a Republican because he had no wish to deal with the loathsome Tammany political machine that controlled Democratic politics in New York City in those years.

But by 1980, Javits was old and sick. (I don't think we knew yet that he had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, but he was clearly ailing.) He shouldn't even have run for reelection, and when he did, he didn't even see the punk D'Amato coming. And then his pride led him to do something unforgivable.

Javits was used to running with the cross-endorsement of the state's Liberal Party (I wish we had time to get into that strange entity, of which it was often quipped that it was neither liberal nor a party), and when he lost the Republican nomination for reelection, he still had the Liberal line available. At this point his pride wouldn't allow him to bow out more or less gracefully. As I recall, he deeply resented the Democratic nominee, Liz Holtzman (remember her?), for having the termerity to run against him and declare him obsolete. So he ran, and predictably siphoned off enough liberal votes from Holtzman (a great public servant who would have made a spectacular senator--and has racked up a distinguished career in public service anyway) to elect the unknown and unspeakable D'Amato.

Finally in 1998 our Chucky saw the opening he'd waited so long for. Al D'Amato was by now an entrenched three-term senator, and with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, he was at the height of his power, using his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which his committee controlled) as not just a power base but a personal piggy bank. And yet Chucky sensed that the great man was vulnerable. Or perhaps he thought that after waiting 18 years he couldn't afford to wait any longer. He went for it, and he won. [comment: no thanks to the gay "civil rights" group, HRC, which endorses insiders and endorsed D'Amato over Chuckie. Schumer has owned them ever since and they routinely do his bidding-- endorsing insider hacks. Sometimes everything works out perfectly.]

In fact, Chucky clobbered D'Amato, 54 percent to 44 percent. Ding-dong, the witch was dead. I for one couldn't have been prouder or happier. I even thought Chucky was going to be the liberal adornment to the Senate that Liz Holtzman should have been 18 years earlier. Judging from his House record, and the liberal causes he chose to champion, it seemed a reasonable hope. And as for his embarrassingly naked ambition, well, for once I could forgive it. Without it, could he have brought the odious Al D'Amato down?

So you see, in a sense I do have a history with Chucky. It's a long time since I lived in that congressional district, but it's hard not to be mindful of political developments there, and of course that eerie and indefatigable homing instinct for a camera for which he has become famous has made him hard not to keep in view.

I don't think I have to tell DWT readers that Chucky's Senate tenure has been, to put it mildly, a disappointment. And the reason I have taken this stroll down Memory Lane is that this history seems to have played a role in shaping the 2008-model Chucky. Oh, power-grasping instinct was probably all there, but as he made his slow-but-steady ride up the electoral on-ramp, he seems to have learned by example--negative example. He watched Liz Holtzman, to whose House seat he succeeded, stick to her liberal guns and find herself chased out of electoral politics.

But even more--and here I am totally speculating--he learned from Jack Javits that you can't let yourself be marginalized, and nothing will marginalize you more inescapably than an unwavering commitment to political principle. My guess is that Chucky admires Javits as much as anyone does, but that he also knows that Javits, for all the popularity and admiration he commanded in New York State, and even in the Senate itself, was a schnook, a nobody.

Even while Javits was being regularly reelected easily to his seat, he had risen as high as he was ever going to. Even within the Senate Republican caucus, in those years the perennial minority, he had no clout. I think Javits not only knew this but in some ways felt liberated by it. With nothing to lose, he could afford to stand on principle, and to say things and take positions that would have been unthinkable if he harbored any further political ambition. He knew that that vice presidential talk in his younger years had been just talk. That wasn't going to happen. Not for a traditionally liberal, bald New York Jew.

No schnook is our Chucky. No, Chucky always meant to be a macher--a "doer," a mover-and-shaker, what we might now call a "player." And as soon as he finally made it to the Senate, he set to work on the two paths necessary to get him where he wanted to be: insinuating himself into the Senate Democratic leadership, and working--as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee--to make Senate Democrats the majority party.

I still have the feeling that if Chucky and I were to sit down and talk politics, there wouldn't be much difference in our views. But I think principle means something different to him, as a matter of both natural inclination and historical observation. Principle must never be allowed to stand in the way of ambition or power.

And so when Chucky is trawling for Democratic Senate candidates, as with his upwardly mobile House counterpart "Master Rahm" Emanuel (also very much a macher, not a schnook), nothing seems to matter more to him than finding "our kind" of guy: the kind of "centrist" (meaning, as Howie never tires of pointing out, right-wing) who appeals to people of wealth (of which he's apt to have a nice pile himself) and the custodians of the inside-the-Beltway establishment.

You know what my fantasy is. I dream of someday, just once, hearing our Chucky present his latest senatorial "find," a candidate he's promoting, with a pitch something like:

"We have here a candidate of such clear vision and unshakable visionary principle that he/she can't help but excite not just traditional Democrats but independents and nonvoters who have felt shut out of the political system. And we're betting that the excitement his/her candidacy generates will make him/her one of our most successful fund-raisers, especially at the grass-roots level."

Or is he just too scared that his beloved TV cameras wouldn't show up for, or look favorably upon, a presentation like that?

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