#presidential term limits

[deadpresidents]

Do you agree with the idea that one of the more politically astute things Biden could've done in early 2021 was push for an amendment that limited presidents (including himself) to a single term?

I ask this as someone who feels that a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 is very much not in the national interest. Such an amendment would've guaranteed two different nominees next year, and more broadly, I think there are arguments for limiting presidents to just one term (second terms have been pretty awful in the modern era, if we consider Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and G.W. Bush).

Btw, I realize presidents don't have a formal role in the amendment process, but I think if Biden had gotten enough Dems behind it, there might have been enough support in Congress to send it to the states. In early 2021, the GOP would've almost been happy to have Trump term-limited, and ambitious Republicans like Scott, Cruz, and Rubio probably would've supported such an amendment.

That's an interesting question. From our perspective, I can totally understand the reasoning behind it, too. And that would have been a better time to attempt it for the reasons you pointed out.

However, I just think it's nearly impossible to amend the Constitution, especially in the political climate we've been living in for the past decade. It's also difficult to imagine any President actively seeking to impose further term limits on themselves. These are people who work practically the entire lives in order to get into that particular job, so it would require a superhuman act of selflessness to get them to advocate for changing the Constitution so that they only serve one term. We can't even get modern Presidents (or serious candidates for the Presidency) to voluntarily pledge to only serve a single term, so I just don't see any of them trying to change the Constitution to legally prohibit running for re-election. President Biden had been seeking the Presidency for at least 35 years, with three official campaigns for the job, before he finally was elected in 2020. I don't think there was ever a realistic chance of him voluntarily giving up a chance at a second term. And I wouldn't be so sure that ambitious legislators who have obviously been eyeing the Presidency for years would have supported a single term limit. You know how there are people who are opposed to raising taxes on the super wealthy because they are still holding out hope that they'll someday strike it rich? I'm guessing there would be a similar line of thinking and members of Congress with Presidential aspirations wouldn't want to support a single term limit just in case they eventually find themselves in the White House.

I've written about this before, but my personal opinion is actually in support of eliminating Presidential term limits altogether. As I've said in the past, the Founders did not explicitly place term limits on the President, and while most Presidents before FDR followed George Washington's tradition of serving two terms and retiring, term limits weren't imposed until after World War II. The Constitution was amended 21 times for over 150 years before Presidential term limits were finally instituted. And, even then, it was largely because Franklin D. Roosevelt won four straight Presidential elections. I question whether the Founders would see it as a proper balance of power to place term limits on the Executive Branch, but not on the Legislative or Judicial branches. So, my personal belief has been that there should either be term limits on the President, Congress, AND the Supreme Court, or there should be no limits at all. Of course, that might result in someone shitty, like Donald Trump, running for a third term, but it also provides options that voters otherwise wouldn't have. Imposing a two-term limit on Presidents may prohibit a terrible President from being elected a third time, but it also might prevent someone proven to be a good, responsible, popular leader from continuing in office.

Ultimately, the decision should be left to the voters, but I sure would feel better about 2024 if Barack Obama could be on the ballot again. We place limits on who can be candidates for what is arguably the most powerful and important job in the world, and then we complain because we don't like our choices. We prohibit the only people in the world who have actually DONE the job of President (and seemingly should have some understanding and experience on how to do that job) from being President for more than two four-year terms. Yet, nearly all of our Supreme Court Justices leave the bench by dying, and many of the most powerful legislators (in both parties) are alarmingly old and frail -- and probably running for re-election. Barack Obama has been term-limited from running for President since leaving office in 2017. Obama was 55 years old when he left office; he'll be 63 on the next Inauguration Day, in 2025 -- eight years after leaving office and sixteen years after his first inauguration. That's still younger than Ronald Reagan (69), George H.W. Bush (64), Donald Trump (70), and Joe Biden (78) were when they were first inaugurated as President!

So, if we're going to amend the Constitution regarding term limits, I say get rid of all of them or impose them on every branch of the federal government.

[filosofablogger]

A Prescient Warning From 227 Years Ago

Yesterday, a timely article in History.com caught my attention.  It delved into George Washington’s farewell speech in September 1796, just prior to the end of his second term in office.  At that time, there were no term limits and President Washington could have run for a third term and likely won.  But he had been in poor health for some time, and he felt that if he sought a third term, then…

[tomorrowusa]

« On Thursday night, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, reminded the US why he will never be president. His voice grates, his visage a cross between a squinted grimace and scowl. He looks like Manuel Noriega, the ex-Panamanian dictator, without the scarring. On a personal level, he lacks humor, warmth, wit or uplift. He is ham-handed, an awkward social warrior. »

— Lloyd Green, Department of Justice appointee under President George H.W. Bush, at The Guardian.

Ron DeSantis is term-limited as governor of Florida. Running for POTUS seems to be his solution for impending unemployment in early 2027.

It's a pity for him that he's been so mean to Disney. He blew his chance to get a job as a security guard at Disney World when his term ends.

[originalleftist]

A horrible thought:

SCOTUS's conservative majority isn't just slow-walking the Trump presidential immunity case because they're afraid to take a position or even to help him stall the case. They're doing it with full premeditation that their answer depends on who wins the presidency in November.

Ie, if Biden wins, they will rule shortly after the election that Presidents do not enjoy total immunity.

If Trump wins, they will rule that they do, the final piece for solidifying dictatorship slotting into place before there is any chance to challenge it.

Don't tell me this court wouldn't do it.

[closebutnotquitewright]

I feel like there’s probably folks on here who would appreciate seeing this campaign button from when the 22nd amendment was being debated.

[djedukenya]

Samson Cherargei speaks on his proposal to extend presidential term limit

Senator for Nandi county Samson Cherargei has broken his silence over the proposal he made to the National Dialogue Committee to approve the recommendations to increase presidential term limit.                       According to him, he wants a sitting president to serve for seven years instead of current five years before going to elections. This proposal brought a lot of debate among Kenyans…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

[zvaigzdelasas]

President Joe Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency,” according to a final report released Thursday by a Department of Justice special counsel.

But special counsel Robert Hur said he was declining to prosecute Biden over his handling of that material.

The FBI found that material in the garage, offices, and basement den in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home. It included documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and notebooks containing Biden’s entries about national security, the new report said.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur wrote.

“He knew he kept classified information in notebooks stored in his house and he knew he was not allowed to do so.”

But that evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” the special counsel wrote.

Hur in his nearly 400-page report wrote, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” the report said. [...]

Hur was blunt in detailing lapses in Biden’s memory when he was interviewed for the probe.

“He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’),” the report said.

“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” Hur wrote.

“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall,” the special counsel added.

Biden in a statement said, “I was pleased to see they reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach – that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed.”[...]

Trump was charged in June with 37 felonies, including willful retention of national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act.

Trump had hundreds more classified documents in his possession than Biden did — more than 300 in total, including 102 that were seized during an FBI raid on Trump’s Palm Beach resort home in August 2022. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Hur’s report Thursday said that the materials recovered from Biden spanned his career in national office from 1973 when he became a U.S. senator, and through his two terms as vice president under former President Barack Obama from 2009 through early 2017.

Biden during his career “has long seen himself as a historic figure,” and during that time collected papers and artifacts that were connected to “significant issues and events in his career,” the report said.

“He used these materials to write memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber,” Hur wrote.

Well we're officially never gonna hear the end of this one huh [8 Feb 24]

[phoward89]

Banner by me, dividers by @saradika-graphics

Based on this ask

Young!President!Coriolanus Snow x Innocent!Reader

Coriolanus Snow was the youngest president in Panem’s history. He was cunning, charming, and very, very smart. Which is why he's the youngest man to hold the presidential office.

But that's not truly the reason why he's President Snow at the tender age of 25.

No….

He's the youngest president because he's a ruthless man. An evil man.

A snake that strikes both friend and foe with poison.

Nobody was safe from Coriolanus’ poisonous fangs.

Well, nobody, except his First Lady.

And you just happened to be First Lady Snow. The president's sweet, innocent wife who never saw his true colors.

Coriolanus, who you often called Coryo and even Snowflake (he'll kill anyone if they giggle, laugh, or snigger if in ear shot of you using the term of endearment for him), made sure that you viewed him as a loving gentleman. He never wanted you to see the cruel side of him.

You met him when you were both kids, before he became tainted and corrupted by the harsh cruelness of the world. You never experienced the cruelness of the world, being a bit sheltered by your family.

You were innocent, like a little dove.

And that's what drew Coriolanus to you. Your innocence enthralled him, memorized him even.

He made it his mission to keep all the horrors of the world away from you, to keep you innocent and naive.

Hell, you truly believed that he helped Lucy Grey win during his mentorship because he cared. You had no idea that he was thinking with his wrong head; wanted to get under her skirts.

You didn't know that he was sentenced to 20 years as a peacekeeper for his crime of cheating during the 10th Hunger Games. You truly believed his bullshit lie of wanting to follow in his father's footsteps (his father, Crassus Snow had been a general).

So, sweet, innocent, naive little you always believed what your Coryo told you. He was your perfect gentleman, your Snowflake, and you had no reason not to trust him.

President Snow, for all his faults and evil deeds, loved you with every fiber of his overly obsessive being. It's why he's done everything in his power to keep you from being corrupted by the world.

It's also why he had, nicely, forbid you from entering his office. Coriolanus gave you the excuse that he didn't want to be distracted from his duties of ruling over Panem, but in reality he couldn't risk you walking in on him while he had business meetings.

Some of which almost always ended with his visitor slumped over a teacup.

Dead.

Today tho, well, you didn't heed his warning and decided to visit him in his office instead of waiting for him to return to the living quarters.

You found out very exciting news and wanted to share it with him right away.

You put on a pretty pink dress, pulled your hair half back into a large bow (the way he preferred it), and picked some roses from the prized rose garden for the special announcement.

You happily made your way down the hall towards his office. His staff ignored you, knowing better to even look at you twice.

The staff wanted to live to see the next Yule season, thank you very much.

When you opened the door, you saw that your husband had a guest in his office. The man, who was stout with black hair; wearing a powder blue suit, was slumped over on your husband's desk.

President Snow wiped at the corner of his mouth with his handkerchief (his beloved one that you made special for him, embroidered with a light blue snowflake and his initials in maroon red thread) his icy blue eyes flickering up to the door to see who had walked in. He gave his staff specific orders not to be disturbed. He was ready to chew out whoever had walked it, but any and all retorts he had in the tip of his tongue had died when he saw you.

His precious, innocent, little dove.

Before he could ask what’s wrong (he knew something was wrong because you knew his office was off limits and wouldn't just walk in unless it was an emergency), you pointed to the man slumped over the desk and asked, “Coryo, is he passed out?”

“Oh, my little dove, don't worry about him. He just can't handle his liquor.” Coryo told you, even though the glasses on the desk were teacups and not rocks glasses typically used for liquor.

But of course, you believed your husband. He has no need to lie to you, has he?

Coriolanus stood up from his desk, only to walk over to you. “You know you're not allowed in here while I'm working, Y/N.” He reminded you as he stopped right in front of you. Your husband towers over you, taking in how you were all dolled up and had a bouquet of roses in hand. Arching a brow, he asked, “Is something the matter?”

“Oh, Snowflake, I know I'm not supposed to bother you while you're doing your presidential work, but I was so excited to tell you something.” You honestly told him, a bright smile on your face, as you handed him the roses.

“I'm usually the one who presents you with roses, my love.” Coriolanus chuckled, only to take the offered bouquet. “What's this exciting news that couldn't wait?” He asked, placing his large, calloused hand on your cheek only to caress your cheekbone with his thumb.

“I'm pregnant!” You joyfully smiled up at him.

“That's wonderful news, my little dove.” Your Coryo cooed, pressing a kiss to your lips. He grabbed your hand, lacing your fingers together, and suggested, “Let's go celebrate this happy news with lunch in the sunroom.”

“Okay, but what about your guest? Shouldn't we wake him up?” You innocently asked, gesturing to the man lying dead on your husband's mahogany desk.

“I'll have one of the staff tend to him, Y/N.” Your husband assured you while leading you out of his office.

Little did you know what he really meant by that. But why would you, your husband's only ever showed you a soft, loving, gentleman. He's never shown you his true nature of being an evil, cruel, manipulative, murderous man.

Coriolanus is a snake, but to you he's Coryo, your Snowflake.

And he'll always be that to you since you'll forever be his sweet, innocent, little dove of a wife.

Tags: @kuroosbby001 @purriteen @poppyflower-22 @meetmeatyourworst @whipwhoops @bxtchopolis @readingthingsonhere ,@savagenctzen @ryswritingrecord, @erikasurfer, @tulips2715, @universal-s1ut, @thesmutconnoisseur, @squidscottjeans, @sudek4l, @wearemadeofstardust0, @mashiromochi, @gracieroxzy, @belcalis9503, @shari-berri, @aoi-targaryen, @whiteoakoak @spear-bearing-bi-witch @gisellesprettylies @loverandqueenofdragons @qoopeeya @mfnqueen1

[warningsine]

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in jail, the country’s prison service has said, in what is likely to be seen as a political assassination attributable to Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, 47, one of Putin’s most visible and persistent critics, was being held in a jail about 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle where he had been sentenced to 19 years under a “special regime”. In a video from the prison in January, he had appeared gaunt with his head shaved.

The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death.

In early December he had disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on extremism and fraud charges that he had called political retribution for leading the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s. He did not expect to be released during Putin’s lifetime.

A former nationalist politician, Navalny helped foment the 2011-12 protests in Russia by campaigning against election fraud and government corruption, investigating Putin’s inner circle and sharing the findings in slick videos that garnered hundreds of millions of views.

The high-water mark in his political career came in 2013, when he won 27% of the vote in a Moscow mayoral contest that few believed was free or fair. He remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin for years, identifying a palace built on the Black Sea for Putin’s personal use, mansions and yachts used by the ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and a sex worker who linked a top foreign policy official with a well-known oligarch.

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

Putin has recently launched a presidential campaign for his fifth term in office. He is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Joseph Stalin and could surpass him if he runs again for office in 2030, a possibility since he had the constitutional rules on term limits rewritten in 2020.

[deadpresidents]

Can the two terms for President be challenged today?

Only by amending the Constitution.

[anexperimentallife]

The US far right has been working on their plan since AT LEAST the 1960s, when I was a kid listening to evangelicals talking about their plan to take over the US, and eventually the world. It's called "Christian Dominionism," and it's a fascist ideology which goes hand in glove with the GOP's plans.

Although it was not expressed so much to the world at large, this plan was OPENLY and FREQUENTLY discussed in far right circles. We kids, if we asked about it, were told that it was "God's Will." Ask any exvangelical about it, and they'll confirm. (Part of why I know so much about these dangerous and deluded folks is I WAS ONE OF THEM in my youth.)

And where has that plan gotten them? Well, the GOP recently released a hundreds of pages long document filled with their intentions if they win--including a nationwide abortion ban and a repeal of anti-discrimination laws, among other things.

Trump has already signaled his intent to create a military dictatorship if elected, by repealing laws against using the military against US citizens on US soil sp he can deploy them against dissenters, etc., and if the GOP pick up a few more congressional seats, he can do it. The GOP has already pushed to repeal presidential term limits, and Trump has indicated he'd like to be president for life.

So I'm amazed at all the people who think withholding their vote and letting the GOP win is going to somehow fix things and "push the Dems left."

You wanna know how to push US politics leftward? You're not gonna like it, because it takes actual work beyond stomping your foot and pouting and performatively showing everyone how "pure" you are by refusing to vote.

You have to start the same way the far right did (and again, they've been OPENLY talking about and pursuing this plan since I was a kid in the 1960s, AT LEAST)--they started by getting the most extreme right wingers they possibly could into any position they could. Positions like school board member, police chief, sherrif, city prosecuter, city council member, municipal judge, mayor, governor, hell, fucking dog catcher.

They encouraged far right extremists to become police officers and military personnel and work their way up the ranks to the point at which even the famously-racist FBI reported that major city police departments across the nation were pretty much taken over by members of white supremacist organizations.

In formerly reasonable churches, right wingers pushed for the hiring and training of more and more right wing pastors and mire right-wing theology.

More affluent right-wingers bought local papers and broadcasters, and as their political power grew, they changed laws to make it easier for a single entity to control the news--until now a mere handful of entities own nearly every major media outlet in the US.

And then they used every victory as leverage for the next one, and worked their way up. I mean, there's more, like the capitalization on economic and social anxiety and their inentional exacerbation of same so they could take advantage of it, but that's intertwined with the rest.

Essentially, they got this far because they put the work in.

If the US left is going to turn things around (and if it's not already too late), we've got to do the same, but it takes RESEARCHING and PROMOTING your local and state candidates, attending city council and school board meetings, and shit like that. It's actual fucking work to fix a country.

And then, after you've done all that--and after you've shown up to primaries to try to get any non-authoritarian leftist candidate you can nominated--then you vote for the leftest folks you're able to in the general. If there are no remotely leftist candidates, you vote for the centrist or right winger who will do the least damage.

Again, that's what the US far right has been doing for decades. Taking action. Wherever possible, taking new ground, but when they couldn't do that, ceding as little ground as possible. If they couldn't win, they made damn sure to do everything in their power to try to keep actual decent human beings from winning.

Actually doing the work doesn't have the emotional satisfaction of a grand gesture, but it definitely shows who is serious about making a difference and who would rather let everything burn than sully their imagined purity by voting for anything less than perfection.

Listen, Trump is not going to end the genocide in Gaza--in fact he increased tensions between the Israeli occupation and Palestine. And the GOP will never be persuaded. Hell, they want to let Russia take Ukraine and declare open season on asylum seekers.

The Dems suck. But the GOP is far, far worse, and will do MORE damage, and kill FAR MORE innocents. And if allowed to do so, will make it even harder to change the system than it is now. They've already PUBLICLY ADMITTED that their only chance of victory is keeping people from voting. Don't play into their hands.

Under current circumstances, you know what the Dems are going to do if Biden and a bunch of other Dems lose for not being pure enough? You think they'll be all like, "Oh, no! The left sure taught us a lesson by handing the country to the GOP! We'd better shift to the left!"

No. They're going to sip champagne in their multi-million dollar mansions and have meetings about how they need to move FURTHER RIGHT to win elections, because the left doesn't vote.

And if the US becomes a military dictatorship, most of the high ranking ones will simply take their fortunes and leave.

Yup, it'd sure teach ol' Joe a lesson to force him to spend the rest of his days sipping cocktails on the Riviera.

Look beyond the single battle and think strategically. That's how the GOP keeps gaining power. And refusing to act strategically is why the left is losing. We cannot take the hill we want right now. But if we lose the hills we've already taken, we risk losing the entire goddamn war.

So fucking vote. Work to get every leftist you can in any office you can. And if you can't do that, support the one who will do the least harm.

And if it takes voting for that shitbag Biden to keep Trump and the GOP out, hold your fucking nose and pull the goddamn lever.

[wilwheaton]

The harm to the institution is entirely self-inflicted by Roberts and his ethically challenged majority. The court continues to take on flawed cases that have no business being heard, and making arbitrary rulings based on their political whims, dressed up in originalist fantasies. It has to be stopped That could include enforcing a code of ethics, legislation the Senate Judiciary Committee is going to take up after the July recess, and measures recommended by the Brennan Center, such as limiting justices’ terms to 18 years and ensuring that each president gets two appointments to the court per presidential term. It would create a revolving core of justices, giving those whose terms were up the chance to take senior status and still participate as needed either on the Supreme Court or on a lower court. All of that would be great, but what the country urgently requires is an expansion of the court to block this six-member wrecking ball.

The Supreme Court is out of control and must be reformed

[originalleftist]

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will decide whether Trump is disqualified from office as an insurrectionist under the 14th Amendment, and whether he has presidential immunity for the insurrection.

In short, the court is set to effectively decide whether the President has immunity to commit Treason. Which is not so far off from ruling on whether the President is a King.

When they deliberate and vote on this decision, three of the nine justices will have been appointed by the defendant. And another will be married to an (as yet) unindicted co-conspirator.

At least 4 of 9 justices on perhaps the most consequential Constitutional question in American history should recuse themselves. Should, but won't.

I wonder if it will occur to them, as they deliberate, that placing Trump above the law would also place Biden above the law?

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday will honor Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument across two states.

Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, four days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His body was dumped in a river.

The violent killing put a spotlight on the U.S. civil rights cause after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, held an open-casket funeral and a photo of her son's badly disfigured body appeared in Black media.

The national monument designation across 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) and three sites marks a forceful new effort by the President to memorialize the country's bloody racial history even as Republicans in some states push limits on how that past is taught.

"America is changing, America is making progress," said the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, a cousin of Till's who was with the boy on the night he was abducted at gunpoint from the relatives' house they were staying at in Mississippi.

"I've seen a lot of changes over the years and I try to tell young people that they happen, but they happen very slow," Parker said on Monday in a telephone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the signing ceremony at the White House as one of approximately 60 guests.

Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral took place.

The other selected sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, close to where Till's body is believed to be have been recovered; and Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where two white men who later confessed to Till's killing were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Signs erected at Graball Landing since 2008 to commemorate Till's killing have been repeatedly defaced by gunfire.

Now that site and the others will be considered federal property, receiving about $180,000 a year in funding from the National Park Service. Any future vandalism would be investigated by federal law enforcement rather than local police, according to Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.

Other such monuments include the Grand Canyon, Statue of Liberty and the laboratory of inventor Thomas Edison.

Biden, an 80-year-old Democrat, will likely need strong support from Black voters to secure a second term in the 2024 presidential election.

He screened a film recounting the lynching, "Till," at the White House in February. Last March, he signed into law a bipartisan bill named for Till that for the first time made lynching a federal hate crime.

A Republican field led by former President Donald Trump has made conservative views on race and other contentious issues of history a part of their platform, including banning books and fighting efforts to teach school children accounts of the country's past that they regard as ideologically inflected or unpatriotic.

"This is an amazing, teachable moment to talk about the importance of this story as an American story that everybody can share in now, particularly at a time when people are trying to rewrite history," said Christopher Benson, president of the non-profit organization the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute in Summit, Illinois.

“We have a memorial now that is not erasable. It can't be banned and it can't be censored, and we think that's a very important thing.”

[decolonize-the-left]

I just found out about Jasmine Sherman and they look really cool. Like, the policies that they say they’re going to do? The fact that they have an audiobook option for people to listen to what the policies say on their platform? (If people don’t have JAWS or screen readers on their devices, JAWS for computers.) I really hope they get far enough in the presidential race.

vid source

It's time to actually put the people in America first. We do that by meeting everyone's basic human needs. This includes guaranteed housing, universal healthcare and education, UBI, and environmental/infrastructure reform. In doing this, we give people a fighting chance to create a more sustainable model for society that ensures the general welfare of people within our borders for generations to come.

1) Housing- Decommodify housing and eliminate rent, mortgages and property taxes 2) Healthcare- 100% coverage including vision and dental 3) Education- universal education up to and including doctorate level studies 4) UBI-a monthly disbursement based on the cost of living in a resident's state 5) Environment/Infrastructure reform- Abating the damage caused by climate change through sustainable development and creating an infrastructure that fosters community

The Jasmine Sherman for President campaign envisions organizing through various strategies. They aim to leverage social media and technological advancements for rapid outreach to a wider audience. Direct action and mutual aid will be prioritized to attract like-minded individuals and build a strong support base. The campaign will also focus on nurturing relationships established through past coalition-building efforts, aiming to strengthen connections and amplify the campaign's impact. By combining these approaches, Jasmine Sherman's campaign aims to effectively engage, mobilize, and expand its reach in pursuit of its organizing goals

Source on ballotpedia

Their campaign site:

MISSION STATEMENT/ Political Views

Jasmine Sherman wants to help the at-risk and vulnerable communities by providing Guaranteed housing, Landback, Universal basic income, Free Education, and Universal healthcare, for all. They also believe in the rights of the child, the rights to gender affirming care, ending the disability restrictions, restorative justice, abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, triple bottom line accountability for corporations, reparations, a progressive tax, an index living wage, immigration policy reform, sustainable energy, decriminalizing all drugs and sex work, age caps and term limits for all elected officials, and rewriting the constitution.

••••

They seem like a very good candidate and I hadn't heard of them before, tysm for bringing them to my attention!

Looks like the Green Party has ballot access in 46 states as well! Additionally, The Green Party will host a primary debate on May 11th. Definitely something to pay attention to!