Tag: United States Constitution

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Ilhan Omar called for the application of “universal values to all nations.” According to Omar, only then, can we truly achieve world peace. Not only is much of what she argues based on a lack of evidence (e.g., climate change) but the other issues she addresses are so skewed in their presentation that they end up reading like a meaningless word salad. Omar survived a war in Somalia and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was just a teenager. It takes a lot of courage to make a decision to come to another country, but this courage and the desire for a better life must drive every immigrant who decides to become a part of America’s fabric. And this helps explain her perceived poor reception. But there is a great difference between acknowledging where America can improve and a denial of America’s greatness. This means that there is an internal obligation to live according to the principles of the Constitution of the United States and not actively work against them. Instead embracing an opportunity for a dialogue, given her unusual position of being both an American and a Muslim, Omar is so wedded to her Muslim identity that she uses Islam as a political football to gain points among the proponents of identity politics. People like Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, or Tlaib do not represent that American ideal. She lives near Buffalo, N.Y.

President Donald Trump says he plans to end "birthright citizenship" in the US by executive order. In an interview with Axios President Trump claimed that he was working on an end to birthright citizenship, the 150-year-old principle that says anyone born on US soil is an American citizen. You don't," Mr Trump said. 1) What is 'birthright citizenship'? In 1898, the US Supreme Court affirmed that birthright citizenship applies to the children of immigrants in the case of Wong Kim Ark v United States. Wong successfully argued that because he was born in the US, his parent's immigration status did not impact the application of the Fourteenth Amendment. 3) Can Trump end birthright citizenship by executive order? "Wong's parents were authorised or we might say legal immigrants. 5) Do other countries have birthright citizenship? 6) Who uses birthright citizenship?

Chief Justice John Roberts defended the independence of the federal judiciary in the wake of a tense confirmation battle for Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Roberts was at the University of Minnesota Tuesday as part of a lecture series with the law school, an appearance scheduled long before the hearings. But ahead of an interview with University of Minnesota law professor Robert Stein, the chief justice addressed what he called "the contentious events in Washington of recent weeks." He said the Supreme Court's role is clear — to be an independent arbiter of the U.S. Constitution. Asked if there was ever a chill in the room after a particularly divisive 5-4 decision, Roberts said no. And the way to do that is to get as many people on board as you can." Roberts said his bigger concern is ignorance about the court's role as an equal branch of government. "I think too many people think that when we reach a decision on a case, it's pretty much the same as Congress reaching a decision on a question of policy. Roberts said when he crafts opinions, he aims to write in a way that can be understood by people who are not lawyers or legal scholars. Even after the fight over Kavanaugh's confirmation, Roberts promised that the tradition of collegiality will continue, noting that all the justices shake hands ahead of every oral argument and before heading to the conference room to discuss the cases before them.

Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. That’s because if she wins, and other seats hold, control of the state legislature flips to the Democrats. Besides Colorado, there are a half-dozen states where Democrats are a few seats away from winning control of the state senate: • One seat away in New York, Maine and Minnesota. “For state legislatures, it’s the number one race in the country,” Ms. Winter told me in a phone interview this week. There has been lots of talk about the “blue wave” that could break over Congress, turning over control of the House to Democrats. Former President Barack Obama has made it a central political priority of his post-presidential years. A former city councilwoman, this is her fifth political race. Slavery is on the ballot in Colorado. Image On Politics will occasionally check in with The Times’s national correspondents, who live across the country and hear about local issues that might not otherwise rise to our attention. Amendment A, a question on the state ballot, asks voters if they’d like remove similar language in the Colorado Constitution and replace it with the following: “There shall never be in this state either slavery or involuntary servitude.” The amendment’s architect is Jumoke Emery, 31, an organizer I’ve known since 2016, when I interviewed him at a vigil for minority men and women killed by police.

A Republican political consultant linked to Paul Manafort and Cambridge Analytica has admitted to funneling $50,000 from a Ukrainian oligarch to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration committee. Patten, 47, admitted causing the Ukrainian funds to be paid to the inauguration committee, and to lying to a Senate committee investigating Russian interference in an attempt to cover this up. He pleaded guilty to one count of working as an unregistered agent for the oligarch’s Ukrainian political party, Opposition Bloc, which also employed Manafort, the former chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign. The charge was brought by the US attorney’s office in the capital, which took over the case following a referral from Mueller’s office. The court filings indicated that Patten had been in discussions with Mueller’s office for at least three months. Kilimnik, identified as “foreigner A” in the filings, has also worked extensively with Manafort, who was a consultant to Opposition Bloc in Ukraine. The tickets were used by Patten, Kilimnik, the oligarch and another Ukrainian. In all, according to the court documents, Patten’s firm was paid about $1m for advising Opposition Bloc and lobbying US politicians on its behalf. Kilimnik is charged alongside Manafort in a separate criminal case brought in Washington by Mueller. Patten also carried out work for Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct consultancy that is under scrutiny for its work on Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

The United States has long had a pathological relationship with guns. That is the logical outcome of the extraordinary decision of the State Department to cave in to the demands of a young libertarian who believes that everyone in the world should be able to make and use guns without any government control. In this case, it is the technology of 3D printing, which allows almost anything to be modelled in plastic using relatively cheap and widespread machinery operating under computer control. The case had been running since 2013, when Mr Wilson put on the internet his first instructions for making a gun which would be invisible to metal detectors and – because of the lack of serial numbers – untraceable by governments. In one sense this case is all shadow boxing. Mr Wilson argues that his software is protected speech under the first amendment of the US constitution. In a country with 10,000 gun homicides a year, it’s easy enough to get hold of an entirely legal weapon, even if US law enforcement worries about untraceable firearms. So the technology should not be suppressed, even if that were possible, which it is not. But it must nonetheless be controlled, like any other. It is the libertarian idea that individual rights must take precedence over any form of government control which makes American handguns uniquely dangerous.

CLAYTON • More than 100 people who want to get big money out of politics met Tuesday night to hear from experts and discuss whether an amendment to the U.S. Constitution could do the trick. Several candidates for Missouri congressional seats were in the crowd at the town hall at the Ethical Society of St. Louis, the second stop in a 50-state tour by American Promise. The nonprofit is garnering support for a proposed 28th Amendment that would seek to limit the influence corporations, super PACS, unions and other special interest groups have on politics and elections. Advocates say Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that corporations and unions spending money to influence elections is protected speech under the First Amendment, created an unequal playing field where big money has more say than individual American voters. “Corporations are not public citizens of the United States and we need to keep that line clear,” said Jeff Clements, a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general who founded American Promise in 2016. Magarian, who was an assistant to the Supreme Court justice who penned the dissenting opinion in Citizens United, said Supreme Court decisions over recent years had whittled the legal definition of “corruption” in campaign finance to only mean outright bribes, ignoring other ways powerful institutions can influence electoral politics. “We’ve got a Supreme Court now that takes an affirmative view that what you and I think of as corruption is American democracy at its finest,” he said. The group’s first objective is to get Missouri to join 19 states that have passed a formal resolution calling on Congress to propose an amendment that would in effect reverse the Citizens United decision, Potashnick said. Stuart Shadwell, who was in the audience for the Clayton town hall, said he considers himself a “First Amendment absolutist” and would support a 28th Amendment. “I believe in freedom of speech but not all speech is on an even playing field.

The most misunderstood institution in our constitutional government is the Electoral College. Let’s begin with the actual words of the Constitution: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the state may be entitled in Congress…” That’s all the Constitution says about how the members of the Electoral College are to be selected. On the right side of the political spectrum, opponents of reform confuse the current “winner take all” method of choosing electors in effect in 48 of the 50 states with the power granted to the states by the Constitution. 45, Madison described the power to appoint electors as an important state power, making the Federal Government “dependent” on actions of the state. Only three states used the winner-take-all method of selecting presidential electors in our nation’s first presidential election in 1789, and all three states repealed winner-take-all by 1800. So, those who claim the current system in effect in 48 of the 50 states was the “founder’s vision” are wrong. The states control how we elect the president, and the method each state chooses should be that method that enhances the state’s power to influence the federal government. Balance is achieved by making each state equally powerful in the process of electing the president. Do “winner take all” laws do that? When we start with identifying the real problem, we will reach the most rational and constitutional approach to a solution that makes every voter in every state important to every presidential candidate in every election.