Chatter Alone

[HARDCORE]

5-12-2019

(Happy Mothers’ Day)

“Chatter alone isn’t worth two cents, and it will buy you even less!” Yet with all of this, and more, “We the People” still buy into the same old and baseless congressional rhetoric that has permeated the political spectrum over the past two-hundred or so years – why is that do you suppose?

So what is it going to take to get people to finally come to realize that with public office, also comes an awesome responsibility to deliver upon one’s solemn word - or is a person’s word no longer worth spit? For when a man or woman is granted the honor and responsibility of public office, this is not a costless gift! It is rather a solemn responsibility to deliver, or get the Hell out of the way, as politics, contrary to the opinion of some, is not a license to steal or to cheat? It is rather a pledge of service, and not a right to be waited upon in high fashion?

After all, and again contrary to the opinions of some, those whom we select to guide and to advance “Our Nation’s Future” are not gods, but rather they are public servants! And as such, they owe it to generations of Americans that are yet to be born, to help to enhance our system of government, and not merely to perpetuate the often failed mindsets of some of those who have left a trail of wreckage, mayhem and perpetually failed policies in their wake! So if it functions properly and equitably, then don’t constantly attempt to fix the damned thing? “But if (in your opinion) it doesn’t work, like some within Congress, then legally find something (or someone) that does work!”


Hardcore

[Boats]

What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath?
RE: https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-hap...residents-oath

For the full article go to the thread above;

Brief below:

Oath of Office : Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

So why the doubts? For one thing, Trump’s highly erratic statements and behavior include any number of incidents that seem to reflect a lack of understanding of his office or its weight. It’s not just the tweets. This is a person, after all, who suggested before the election that he might not even serve as president if he prevailed; who then said that he would accept the results of the election “if I win”; who made up a whole lot of voter fraud; who promised to prosecute his opponent; who, in his first public address following the inauguration, stood in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall and bragged falsely about the number of people who attended his inaugural ceremony; who has made use of the immense power of the bully pulpit to publicly complain about the “unfair” decision by a private retail company to drop his daughter’s fashion line; who approached the process of selecting a Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and nominee to the Supreme Court in a manner more fit for reality television than the office of the presidency; who refused to accept responsibility for the death of a Navy SEAL in a botched counterterrorism raid conducted on his orders, claiming instead that “this was something they [the generals] wanted to do,” before standing in front of Congress and apparently ad-libbing that the SEAL was looking down with happiness from Heaven because Trump received extended applause during his address; and whose most memorable quotation coming out of the presidential campaign was the inimitable, “Grab ‘em by the pussy”—a phrase he then dismissed as “locker room talk.”

Moral seriousness and respect for his office just isn’t his thing.

This is also a person whose campaign was rife with promises to commit crimes and to abuse the powers of the very office for which he then took the oath.

The combination of the sprawling nature of his business and the intentional obscurity of his finances is also a factor. A person who takes an oath yet maintains financial entanglements that create potential conflicts of interests—conflicts he refuses to acknowledge—and who shrouds the entire affair in a secrecy far in excess of predecessors whose finances presented far less complexity invites doubt. He invites questions about what else, other than his oath, may be guiding his behavior. This is particularly true when the financial relationship coexist with his bizarre solicitude for Russia—with which several of his aides have maintained financial and political relationships and regarding which rumors have swirled about his own ties. One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist, given these circumstances, to ask the question about Trump’s oath: What else is going on here?

Then there’s Trump’s strange and adversarial relationship with the truth—a matter about which one of us has written at length. While Trump produces a stream of obvious and easily falsifiable fabrications—and the Washington Post keeps a convenient tally of presidential lies since his inauguration, a tally which currently stands at 190—the President is less of a liar than a bullshitter, in the sense described by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt. A bullshitter in this technical sense is a person who does not aim to obscure the truth so much as operates without any relationship to truth whatsoever. The liar, Frankfurt says, must have some knowledge of the facts at hand, in order to conceal them. But to the bullshitter, facts are nothing more than an irrelevance.

In Frankfurt’s argument, this is what makes bullshit dangerous: the liar makes the key concession that “there are indeed facts that are in some way determinable or knowable.” Bullshit, on the other hand, glibly rejects the value and even existence of knowable facts.

Trump’s bullshit raised questions of its own when he was in the running for the presidency. But now that he has sworn the oath of office, we are forced to confront what it means for a bullshitter to have promised to faithfully execute the office of President and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the country’s larger legal system. Bullshit, after all, is kind of the opposite of law, which is an organized system of meaning.

There is a related concern about the Take Care Clause, which—echoing the oath’s requirement that the president “faithfully execute” the duties of the office—mandates that the president “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Can a bullshitter, whose entire method of engaging with the world is incompatible with the concept of fidelity and whose fundamental slipperiness and laxity in shouldering responsibility makes impossible the notion of “taking care,” really fulfill the requirements of this clause? But the Take Care Clause presentation of the problem necessarily presents the question in its specific, as-applied sense: Did the president take care in a particular instance that the law was faithfully executed? The oath presents the concern in general.

It makes us ask: What does it even mean for a person who contradicts himself constantly, who says all kinds of crazy things, who has unknown but extensive financial dealings that could be affected by his actions, and who makes up facts as needed in the moment to swear an oath to faithfully execute the office?

Oaths have a solemn obligation upon the minds of all reflecting men.... If, in the ordinary administration of justice in cases of private rights, or personal claims, oaths are required of those, who try, as well as of those, who give testimony, to guard against malice, falsehood, and evasion, surely like guards ought to be interposed in the administration of high public trusts, and especially in such, as may concern the welfare and safety of the whole community.

No man can well doubt the propriety of placing a president of the United States under the most solemn obligations to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution. It is a suitable pledge of his fidelity and responsibility to his country; and creates upon his conscience a deep sense of duty, by an appeal at once in the presence of God and man to the most sacred and solemn sanctions, which can operate upon the human mind.

The point is simply that when the bureaucracy doubts the president’s oath, that fact gravely frays the executive’s ordinary comparative unity. The people who work for the president no longer connect loyalty to the executive branch with the lofty goals to which the oath seeks to bind the president, so they become much more likely to act on their own.

We will still know that Chief Justice Taney was actually wrong when he wrote that “the elevated office of the President, chosen as he is by the people of the United States” necessarily instills a “high responsibility [its occupant] could not fail to feel when acting in a case of so much moment.” And we will remember that the court in Mott was at least a little naive when it wrote of “the high qualities which the Executive must be presumed to possess, of public virtue, and honest devotion to the public interests.”

That memory, we suspect, will haunt the presidency for a long time to come.

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Personal note: I 2nd HC statement: Happy Mother's Day - Mine is gone but never forgotten. Let her know you still care about her while she's alive - because once she's gone it's too late.

Boats