Scott Colom has won the U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi! Woo-HOO!
The White House’s top lawyer has warned the Democrat in line to lead the House’s chief investigative committee that aggressive oversight of the Trump administration “may cross the line into blatant criminality,” a threat that experts called legally dubious.
Ya think?
In a three-page letter to Representative Robert Garcia of California, the incoming chairman of the Oversight Committee, the White House counsel, Will Scharf, said Democrats had “evinced a clear intent to transgress” constitutional limits on congressional investigations. He predicted that their inquiries would be used “to harass and aggrandize, rather than to advance any legitimate legislative end.”
The Supreme Court settled a case near the end of Trump’s first term that said congressional inquiries must serve a legislative purpose. (Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP (591 U.S. 848, decided July 9, 2020) I have no idea if how much of a limit that puts on Congress regarding, say, presidential corruption. But articles of impeachment are a legislative purpose, right?The same case rejected Trump’s argument that he had absolute immunity. I understand federal prosecutors across the country have been told to get ready for war, or resign.
This is likely to get contentious.
Moving on — there are a couple of article out this week that tell us the techbros are having second thoughts about being aligned with Trump. The first is by Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom and the former president, global affairs at Meta. In Getting Too Close to Trump Was a Mistake in The Atlantic, Clegg writes that associating with Trump looked smart in January 2005 but turned out to be a disaster for Big Tech and AI. “Anti–Big Tech, and (alas) anti-American, sentiment has never been higher in large parts of the world, and most major economies—including Canada’s, India’s, Germany’s, and Brazil’s—are now scrambling to have less, not more, of what Silicon Valley produces,” Clegg writes. See also The Tech Right Pivots Left by a bunch of people at Politico. Suddenly Democrats don’t look so lame.
But speaking of tech bros — the NVIDIA scandal looks to me like something that in the past might have brouight down a president, never mind Jensen Huang. It appears Trump was told multiple times that Huang was a security risk, and Trump brushed it off. He doesn’t seem to grasp what the security risk even is. Yesterday Trump said Huang told him he had “no idea” the person he was involved with was a spy, which seems to have excused the entire matter as far as Trump is concerned. He thinks it’s just a sex scandal. Lord knows the man understands sex scandals. National security, however, not to much. See also A Scandal at the Center of the Economy by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic.
Today is Armistice Day. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be Veteran’s Day, but I’m old school. Trump gave a speech that some thought was disgusting. And you can’t miss what happened at the Tomb ov the Unknowns today. A guard reprimanded Pete Hegseth and a group with him.