Lawsuit on the way
Good; it begins.
A team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers intends to file a lawsuit Monday morning alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments.
The lawsuit is among a barrage of legal actions against the Trump administration that have been initiated or are being planned by major liberal advocacy organizations. Such suits are among the few outlets they have to challenge the administration now that Republicans are in control of the government.
In the new case, the lawyers argue that a provision in the Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause amounts to a ban on payments from foreign powers like the ones to Mr. Trump’s companies. They cite fears by the framers of the Constitution that United States officials could be corrupted by gifts or payments.
I hope it’s not only liberal advocacy organizations. I hope conservatives too are opposed to corruption and flagrant conflicts of interest.
The suit, which will not seek any monetary damages, will ask a federal court in New York to order Mr. Trump to stop taking payments from foreign government entities. Such payments, it says, include those from patrons at Trump hotels and golf courses, as well as loans for his office buildings from certain banks controlled by foreign governments, and leases with tenants like the Abu Dhabi tourism office, a government enterprise.
You don’t want a president who has financial motivations that could easily displace the motivations that are supposed to operate – the public good and the national interest, basically.
But…the cheaters have a way to shut that whole thing down.
The lawsuit may run into trouble, other legal experts said, given that CREW, as the organization is known, must demonstrate that it would suffer direct and concrete injury to give it standing to sue.
That pisses me off, because we shouldn’t have to demonstrate that we personally will suffer “direct and concrete injury” in order to stop a president being grotesquely corrupt. That shouldn’t be how any of this works.
Yeah, they’ve been using that ‘standing to sue’ to shut down Establishment cases and cases against Faith Based everything.
But when the president is this corrupt, everyone loses – especially Richard Nixon, who loses his position at the head of the pack of corrupt presidents in our lifetime.
“I hope it’s not only liberal advocacy organizations. I hope conservatives too are opposed to corruption and flagrant conflicts of interest.”
I’m afraid this country no longer has a conservative party in any meaningful sense consistent with that hope. Honest, consistent, and principled Republican opposition to corruption and flagrant conflicts of interest — always very thin on the ground — completely died the day Ford pardoned Nixon, if not years before. There is no real opposition to bad conduct in the absence of anyone being held accountable for it.
Of course, modern Republicans talk a great deal about “accountability”: They want teachers to be held accountable for student performance (which makes no bloody sense), they want individual recipients of any kind of public aid to be accountable for their conduct (to the point of demanding pointless drug tests for welfare recipients), and so on. But they clearly don’t want employers to be held accountable to employees, corporations to be held accountable for pollution (or bribery, or paying their fair share of taxes, or any other damned thing), or politicians to be accountable for obstructionism, deceit, and corruption. Accountability is for the little people: For the powerful, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Maybe if he gets a blow job in the Oval Office, and leaves a stain on a blue dress…no, wait, sex scandals only apply when it’s Democrats, right? He’s already been divorced twice, grabbed countless women by the pussy, and probably cheated on at least one, if not both, of his other wives, so I guess it would be difficult to shock…and then, the golden showers…no, Democrats must be held accountable. The laws, rules, and good conduct standards don’t apply to Republicans.
I could see the current SCOTUS running this through… none of them have anything to lose by doing so…
I agree with you, in that a president who’s willing to behave in such a manner should never gain the office in the first place. And if he does, Congress should be willing to do something.
But unfortunately, that’s where we are. Standing to sue is an important restriction on the courts. It keeps people from being able to use the courts to air every generalized grievance or moral objection to someone else’s conduct. I think this suit is also probably subject to dismissal based on the political question doctrine.
It’s an important restriction on the courts from the point of view of reactionaries. This is one of the 5-4 splits on the court – the conservatives have been turning the screws on standing for years. Don’t go thinking it’s some neutral public-interest ideal.
Right. And standing to sue has been being used almost exclusively for reactionary purposes. It has been being used to knock out most Establishment cases, even though the court had declared a few decades ago that these cases were different, because of the nature of establishment law violations and the way they affect us without seeing a direct effect. This current court decided otherwise, and now standing is used to shoot down everything that tries to move us in a more secular direction.
I may be splitting hairs here, but: conservative and liberal justices (and legal scholars and commentators) may differ on what, exactly, is sufficient to confer standing, with conservatives generally taking a narrow view and liberals a broader one, but there’s not a lot of disagreement that there is a line to be drawn, i.e. that standing is a bona fide requirement for Article III jurisdiction. It’s not something that “reactionaries” made up that nobody else supports.
That is from Justice Brennan (who I trust I can safely call a non-reactionary), dissenting in Valley Forge College v. Americans United, 454 U.S. 464 (1982), which is one of the Establishment Clause cases iknklast correctly describes. (And for what it’s worth, I agree with iknklast and Brennan that Valley Forge should have come out the other way.) Just note that even Brennan isn’t disputing that there’s a test to be passed.
Perhaps a better example is Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 410 U.S. 614 (1973), another standing case from which Brennan dissented, but the majority opinion was authored by his fellow non-reactionary Thurgood Marshall.
And while on average standing issues tend to break down on liberal/conservative lines, that may be as much a matter of historical artifact as anything else. As we saw during the Obama administration, conservatives no longer have any compunctions (if they ever did) about accomplishing their political goals through lawsuits. If all standing requirements were removed by the Supreme Court, you’d see just as many lawsuits from conservative groups as liberals, challenging everything that gives conservatives sad feelings. (In fact, many of the lawsuits that birthers brought to challenge Obama’s birth certificate were dismissed on standing grounds.)