Inherent Contempt

by wj

No, this is not about the contempt for others, or contempt for the law, that seem inherent in the personality of certain public figures. At least not directly. Rather, it is about Contempt of Congress and how it plays out.

As you may be aware, the House Judiciary Committee is in the process of finding Attorney General Barr in contempt. The cogent question is: What happens next?

Normally, when someone is found in contempt of Congress, the United States Attorney takes them before a grand jury. But there is some reason to doubt that this will happen in this case. Which is unusual, but not unheard of the past few years. In which case, Congress usually moves to Plan B:

Alternatively, the Congress can launch a civil suit to compel compliance. This can result in a court order – something even the more recalcitrant individuals are generally unwilling to blow off. The down side is, if the defendant stalls and launches appeals, it can take months before the matter is resolved. And if the delay extends past the next election, the case gets dropped.

But, it develops, there is a third alternative. It hasn’t been used in decades, but there is solid case law, including Supreme Court decisions, upholding it. It’s called “inherent contempt”. In this, the House (or Senate) Sergeant-At-Arms (or his deputy) acts as a police officer to arrest and detain the individual in contempt. I’m not sure exactly where the Congress would detain him, but presumably they can find some place suitable.

But the question that leaps to my mind is this. Suppose the issue is the refusal of an individual to produce records in response to a subpoena. Does inherent contempt extend to having the Sergeant-At-Arms physically seize the subpoenaed records?

I can see where this would be straightforward, at least in principle, in the case of Congress wanting an unredacted copy of the Mueller Report. Finding a copy at the Justice Department shouldn’t be that difficult, and even at a few hundred pages it should be easy enough for one person to pick up and carry out. Getting Mr. Trump’s tax returns could be more of a challenge. But it should still be possible to find out where the IRS has them, rent a truck, and send a couple of guys to load them up. Wouldn't that be fun?

Open Thread (because we're overdue for one)

Comments

[CharlesWT]

The logic of tariffs often boils down to: "If you don't stop mistreating your citizens by selling their products below cost, we're going to mistreat our citizens by adding a tax to your price.

[John D. Thullen]

"The market has hit the skids"

Not yet. It's oversold technically at the moment.

This Fall should be exciting, however.

All of this is within the context that if p shot platoons of the OTHER dead every week day lunch hour on Fifth Avenue, this market would step around the rivers of blood coursing down the storm drains and declare the news irrelevant to the Market Gods, who shall be worshiped and sacrificed to as the ultimate super gods of brutal transcendent shareholder subhuman values.

If it enhanced shareholder to shoot Milton Friedman on Fifth Avenue, Friedman himself would shrug with excruciating rationality and whimper: "The market has spoken!"

In other words, I'm still making money in the market, so it can't be on the skids.

Nimble is the word.

[russell]

In other words, I'm still making money in the market, so it can't be on the skids.

In addition to public schools teaching every student how to write a business plan, I'd also like them to teach every student the rudiments of reading corporate financial statements. It's a life skill I know I wish I had, and IMO it would be beneficial to a lot of people. Most people, probably.

Not a political point, just an observation.

[John D. Thullen]

p also said the pro-lifers should wait to get rid of exceptions for abortions undertaken in the case of rape and incest, until he wins re-election and conservatives take back the House, and then he will sign an Executive Order legalizing rape and incest, regardless of the age of Falwell's daughters, obviating the need for the exception.

Right-wing Catholics cheered the tweet and said "Finally, we will be able to forgo shagging the choirboys as a form of birth control and instead return to preying on the female parishioners, as the Bible stipulated, thus going back to the time when priests never, never ... well maybe Spencer Tracy in Boy's Town and a couple of times, accidentally, in the Middle Ages... violated the choirboys."

[John D. Thullen]

cleek seeks WWF title for wrestling grotesque reality:

The link in his post:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/18/bleach-miracle-cure-uganda-us-pastor-robert-baldwin-sam-little

The "Pastor" will be a p Cabinet Secretary soon.

Come on, asteroids, aim for America.

[John D. Thullen]

The p Adminstration is now referring to women's uteruses as Tehran and threats to national security.

[wj]

It may be that, as Trump has said, he could gun down someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing his core supporters. But this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-republicans-distance-themselves-from-alabama-abortion-law/2019/05/19/d44036d8-7a3f-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html

Failing to embrace their fanaticism over abortion might be a way to turn them off. They obviously have no hesitation embracing someone who spits on the rest of their morality. But there are limits!

[John D. Thullen]

No, that is not what is going on.

p and otherwise radical republicans, fully on board with lacing the entire Fed court system with fanatical pro-life fake jurists are doing some kabuki here so that when their chosen hanging judges rule that is constitutional to hang women and their physicians for the crime of abortion, even in the event of rape or incest, they can present themselves as "moderates" on the issue despite it being the law of the land to force the bringing to term of a fetus conceived with the sacred sperm of a rapist, related to the victim or not.

And then we will be enjoined to worship their feigned moderation and send them money.

Just as p does everything: destroys markets for our farmers' crops and then ups their crop support payments ... see what I do for you, my subjects. Threatens to nuke his foreign enemy and then does not and expects them to tongue wash his perineum in rabid appreciation for sparing them. Threatens liberals and the press with violence at the hands of his thugs at his campaign appearances and then calls them off and lets them depart by force but not beaten up.

He seems all hat and no cattle but he owns all the hats and all of the cows.

In two to three years, as the vermin republican party and p dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and declare the debt ceiling violated and the Nation bankrupt except for the funding of its fascist military arsenal, there will emerge some republicans, hired actors all, who have all these decades signed on to pledges to do just that and attended all of the meetings at the fucking conservative think tanks as the radical conservative intelligentsia .... pool boys, grocery clerks, small town seance swamis, card sharks ..... have detailed the plans to accomplish all of these things over the past 40 years.

Janie knows the score.

It's all in the hopper.

Time to blow up and kill the hopper.

[John D. Thullen]

A corresponding rise in the death projections for conservative polluters and policymakers seems a reasonable response:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/climate/epa-air-pollution-deaths.html?via=newsletter&source=CSAMedition

[Nigel]

Because, wj, it is most likely pantomime to demonstrate his ‘moderation’.

The true believers understand the ongoing transaction - their votes for him ensure the appointment of judges who believe any restrictions on abortion constitutional.

[Nigel]

IOW what Trump actually believes, if anything other than his right to unrestricted ego gratification, is an irrelevance.

[John D. Thullen]

NYC should fine Steve Doozy $2000 for speaking trash into a FOX microphone while walking in their streets:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/steve-doocey-texting-walking-new-york

It's NYC. Why didn't someone cold cock him for harassing them on their way to real jobs.

It would have been funny if a self-driving Uber had flatcatted him as he walked across the street while flatulating into his microphone.

I might then declare self-driving technology suitable for widespread adoption.

[russell]

"Kathy" is obviously from out of town.

[John D. Thullen]

Just as p doesn't really give a crap about fetuses (especially once they grow up to vote socialist), nor do many pro-lifers, he doesn't really give a crap about immigration either:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/

E-Verify has been rejected by conservatives thru 20 years of bullshit immigration legislation rejection because what they really want is the perpetual imposition of cleek's Law.

How long can America go on being fucked without finally killing the fuckers?

[John D. Thullen]

A longish read, but if you like Marilynn Robinson's great novels and her musings on Calvinism in her essays, you'll like this:

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/is-poverty-necessary-marilynne-robinson/

Among historical, religious, and economic points dear to me to that she hits on is this observation, recently driven home to me during my reading of Chekhov's letters:

"We’re afraid of the word “collective” because of the history of the Soviet Union, though in fact postrevolutionary Russia resembles nothing so closely as prerevolutionary Russia, but with high-rises."

The Czar's and the Bolsheviks shared a rancid and brutal conservatism.

[Nigel]

Doesn’t marty still go on about Whitewater ?

According to Republican doctrine, such investigations are quite illegitimate...
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/20/congress-donald-trump-investigations-1331677

[russell]

Doesn’t marty still go on about Whitewater

Mostly emails.

[hairshirthedonist]

BENGHAZI!!!

[russell]

her crimes. all of them.

[bobbyp]

E-Verify has been rejected by conservatives thru 20 years of bullshit immigration legislation rejection because what they really want is.....

drum roll, please...cheap labor.

[Michael Cain]

Game of Thrones spoiler:

For the finale, I'll give the win to Tyrion on points. He went to what was supposed to be his trial for treason, and left Hand of a king that he chose and as I understand succession in Westeros the Lannister heir and ruler of the Westerlands. Sansa second, and a number of people with a claim to third.

[russell]

meanwhile.... looks like a change of careers for our pal Roger Stone.

Every day I wake up and wonder if it can possibly get weirder than it was the day before.

The answer is always "yes".

[CharlesWT]

Every day I wake up and wonder if it can possibly get weirder than it was the day before.

Easy explanation. We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.

[wj]

Or maybe The Eye of Argon.

[CharlesWT]

Or maybe The Eye of Argon.

I find that believable when I look at some of the grammar even on respectable news sites. :)

[wj]

Not just the grammar, but the word choice of Trump's tweets and the plot line of the administration -- to the extent there is one.

[Hartmut]

So,let's strive to reach at least Atlanta Nights levels of quality and consistency again.
(I have to admit that I love that book)

[Nigel]

My one beef with the adaptation of Game of Thrones is that grammar nazi Stannis Baratheon never ascended the Iron Throne...

[russell]

We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.

Mahayana Buddhism has elaborated a system of states or modes of consciousness called bardos. Your 'self' or 'mindstream' experiences the cycle of life and rebirth as a progression through these states.

When you die, they have it, you enter a brief-ish state where ultimate reality is present to you. You will be able to receive, and respond to, this to whatever degree your life has prepared you. If you have been mindful and compassionate, you may be able to receive and surrender to this luminous reality in its entirely. If not, not.

And if not, your consciousness moves on to the sidpa bardo. Untethered from your physical body, your consciousness now manifests its inner impulses as vivid hallucinations. Basically you are immersed in a reality constructed from your own inner life, good bad or indifferent. It may not be pretty.

There are many days when I could easily be convinced that we are all in the sidpa bardo. Especially in western first-world societies, where technology has freed us, and to a great degree isolated us, from the demands and intrusions of physical life. We don't even have to interact with other people, let alone non-human beings, as flesh and blood creatures all that much, if we don't want to. We're free to elaborate our fantasies and surround ourselves with manifestations and expressions of reality that align with and reinforce our own inner obsessions and urges.

I drive to work every day in a long stream of other beings, encased in two tons of metal and glass, each of us isolated in our own cocoon. Not just a metal and glass cocoon, but a cocoon constructed of what we choose to read, listen to, and watch, who we know and don't know, who we don't want to know or not know.

Never mind Philip K Dick. Maybe this is the sidpa bardo.

Hopefully we will all grab that brass ring of luminous reality next time around.

[John D. Thullen]

I'll put my money on the sidpa bardo.

As we know, investing in the stock market is one of my passions. Russell's sentence "your consciousness now manifests its inner impulses as vivid hallucinations" comes close to describing what is going on right now in the financial markets, which has happened before, of course, at previous levels of "euphoria" as market mavens life to call it, but this time around is something else, which I can't quite describe at the moment.

It's nuts, like one of of p's or Elon Musk's tweets.

I'm seeing stock "analysts", those well paid lying evangelists for the prosperity of their gospel, recommend a stock as a "BUY" with say a price target of $75, and the stock at that moment is trading at $82.

It's like Abbott counting out change to Costello, except the Costellos of our time dig the non-math.

You think: Whut?

The vividness of their hallucinations has me on edge and questioning my own sanity, but then my sanity is questionable at best.

charlesWT writes: "We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel."

And we're told libertarians never collectively do anything, let alone saunter.

Don't saunter then. Walk this way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK8iNBiO05M

[Girl from the North Country]

I don't know if this is the sidpa bardo or not, but russell's description @07.42 nonetheless reads pretty luminously and beautifully to me, despite the momentary worry that his supposition might be a sinister explanation for this strange hallucinogenic "reality" in which we find ourselves. However, as always, while having these kinds of images in mind, we still have to (as I know russell knows, and sapient will remind us) act as though we can change things, and muster our forces against the encroaching agents of chaos, oppression and destruction.

[russell]

we still have to (as I know russell knows, and sapient will remind us) act as though we can change things

lovingkindness and compassion free us from slavery to the cycle. us, and others.

so, things can be changed. and, will be. it's just up to each of us if we want to join in the fun.

and no, I'm not a buddhist, of any stripe. just be freaking kind. it does make a difference.

[wj]

"vivid hallucinations" comes close to describing what is going on right now in the financial markets

Think of it as a learning opportunity. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn't the "one true path" to a florishing economy.

Of course, a lot of devote libertarians will manage to rise above reality and not learn. But some may respond to the coming 2x4 up side the head.

[Tony P.]

My man Charlie Pierce agrees with me:

But the simple fact is that no bill produced by a Democratic House has a chance in Mitch McConnell's Senate. In this, impeachment is no different from Medicare For All or a Green New Deal or a big infrastructure package or humane immigration reform. If passage in the Senate is the sine qua non for doing something in the House, then Pelosi, Jeffries and the rest of their caucus simply should give up and go home for the summer. In addition, an impeachment inquiry, which is all Raskin and the others were asking for, can serve as a powerful educational tool for the general public. The cause of removing a reality-show president needs a reality show of its own—a real one, with witnesses and testimony.

A Republic if you can keep it, Ben Franklin said. Little did Ben know that Americans would someday decide it's not worth the fuss and bother.

--TP

[bobbyp]

TP,

It's not that the House leadership knows the chances of Trump's removal from office by the Senate is below zero, it's that they fear such an effort will make them "look bad".

Well, suck it up, Nancy. Be bad, go bad, do bad, get bad. The times of badness are upon us.

[wj]

I don't really think they are worried about "looking bad" per se. But I think they are concerned (rightly or not; I suspect not) that an impeachment which doesn't result in removal will somehow increase Trump's chances of winning reelection.

[bobbyp]

wj,
That's what I meant by "looking bad". If the Trump presidency is an existential danger to the body politic, then "looking bad" should be way low on the worry list, and constitutes political malpractice.

[russell]

A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn't the "one true path" to a florishing economy.

For the folks in question, the learning opportunity will be fine-tuning their intuition for when it's time to go short.

Some folks don't really care if they burn it all down as long as they get their piece. That's the lesson the rest of us need to learn.

Over and over and over again, apparently.

[russell]

A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn't the "one true path" to a florishing economy.

For the folks in question, the learning opportunity will be fine-tuning their intuition for when it's time to go short.

Some folks don't really care if they burn it all down as long as they get their piece. That's the lesson the rest of us need to learn.

Over and over and over again, apparently.