Inherent contempt charges being discussed after Trump refuses to allow election security briefings by the IC to Congress. This will change things fast
Far from toothless. I.e. there is never a matter of guaranteed safety, especially after 2016, but anyone who thinks this is toothless has no idea of what "inherent contempt charges " stands for. It is a big deal. The Ted Lieu statement is followed up by the National Constitution Center
For the record, what Trump is doing is trying to Gaslight the USA into forgetting very actionable remedies to this tyranny he is exhibiting.
As the psychology Today article stated below: AND IT IS LAST
Quote
Gaslighting on a national level is terrifying, but the best thing we can all do right now is stay calm, collected, and confident in our reality and direct experiences. When someone is making statements like, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” red flags should immediately go up, because those are the words of an intentional gaslighter.
end of quote
Fortunately I and others are providing a work around this mass scale gaslighting of the nation. Fight back.
THIS is NOT inevitable if we refuse to accept Trump gaslighting
If we stop the Trump gaslighting, the above horror does NOT have to be our future
First what Ted Lieu stated:
https://www.politicususa.com/2020/08/30/ted-lieu-inherent-contempt-trump.html
SUN, AUG 30TH, 2020 BY JASON EASLEY
Ted Lieu Calls For Possible Criminal Penalties If Trump Refuses To Provide Election Security Briefings
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said that the House should pass inherent contempt legislation if Trump refuses to provide Congress with election security briefings.
ADVERTISING
Rep. Lieu said on MSNBC:
The director is simply lying when he puts China and Russia at the same level in terms of election interference. Russia is interfering in our elections and they’re going to do so again. Public reporting on China isn’t the same so he needs to stop making that false equivalence.
Advertisements
Second, what is the Trump administration hiding from Congress and the American people? Basically, he just doesn’t want to be asked questions and that is the whole point of oversight is to ask questions of the ODNI
Director. And third, when he does these written finished products, that takes time. We’re not going to real-time information. With the election sixty-some days away, it’s critical he does these briefings or his subordinates do these briefings in-person to Congress and if he doesn’t, I believe we should consider subpoenaing some of those officials then we need to put inherent contempt legislation that gives teeth to other congressional subpoenas.
Video:
Rep. Lieu was correct. The Trump excuse of only offering written briefings is not good enough, because who knows if the administration will ever provide the briefing before the presidential election? The Trump administration is trying to keep information about election interference from the American people, so it is one hundred percent likely that they will not be providing information to Congress about the activities of Russia to help Donald Trump.
If the House began imposing civil and potentially criminal penalties on the members of the administration who are refusing to provide vital election security briefings, things might change fast. A subpoena by itself is going to go nowhere. Democrats have to put some muscle behind their actions and make Trump for trying to keep the American people in the dark.
For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.
Follow and Like PoliticusUSA on Facebook
end of quote
Now for what it means:
The House’s contempt powers explained
May 7, 2019 by Scott Bomboy
2k
Shares
701 1.1k 36
The current dispute between Democrats in the House of Representatives and Attorney General William Barr could result in contempt proceedings. So what contempt powers does Congress possess and can they be used against a member of the Executive Branch?
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler is considering issuing a contempt citation against Barr if the Justice Department does not give his committee an unredacted version of the Mueller report. In turn, the Justice Department claims the House subpoena for the report does not serve a legitimate legislative purpose.
Based on precedent, statutes, and court rulings, the House and the Senate each have the power to invoke three types of contempt proceedings if a committee believes someone is obstructing its investigative powers.
The Congressional Research Service described each of these powers in a detailed March 2019 report. The first type of contempt power is a citation of criminal contempt of Congress. This power comes from a statute passed by Congress in 1857. Once a committee rules that an act of criminal contempt has occurred, the Speaker of the House or Senate President refers the matter to the appropriate U.S. attorney’s office, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” However, the Executive Branch in prior situations has claimed that it has the discretion to decide if a grand jury should be convened to hear the charges. But if the case goes to a grand jury, fines and a jail term could result from the ensuing criminal prosecution.
The second type of contempt power comes in the form of a civil lawsuit brought by the House or Senate, asking a court to enforce a subpoena. The Senate and its committees are authorized to bring such a lawsuit under a federal statute. There is no similar statute that applies in the House, but the federal district court in Washington, D.C. has decided that the House can nevertheless authorize its committees to bring a similar civil suit for enforcement of a subpoena. In either case, an executive branch member can contest the subpoena “based on a governmental privilege or objection the assertion of which has been authorized by the executive branch of the Federal Government,” the CRS said.
The third type of contempt power—Congress’s dormant inherent contempt power—is rarely used in modern times. Inherent contempt was the mode employed by Congress to directly enforce contempt rulings under its own constitutional authority until criminal and civil contempt statutes were passed, and it remained in use into the twentieth century. Under inherent contempt proceedings, the House or Senate has its Sergeant-At-Arms, or deputy, take a person into custody for proceedings to be held in Congress.
Although these powers are not directly stated in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that they are implicit as an essential legislative power held by Congress.
Justice Willis Van Devanter made perhaps the most famous statement of these powers in McGrain v. Daugherty, a 1927 Supreme Court decision about Mally S. Daugherty, the brother of former Attorney General Harry Daugherty. A select Senate committee issued a subpoena for Daugherty to testify and to also surrender records from an Ohio bank. When Daugherty refused to comply after a second subpoena, the Senate passed a resolution issuing a warrant and authorizing a Senate deputy to take Daugherty into custody. Daugherty filed a habeas petition against his detention. A lower court ruled that the Senate exceeded its powers by detaining Daugherty, freeing him. However, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, holding that under the Constitution, Congress has the power to compel witnesses and testimony “to obtain information in aid of the legislative function.”
“Each house of Congress has power, through its own process, to compel a private individual to appear before it or one of its committees and give testimony needed to enable it efficiently to exercise a legislative function belonging to it under the Constitution,” Van Devanter said. “This has support in long practice of the houses separately, and in repeated Acts of Congress, all amounting to a practical construction of the Constitution.”
Another interesting dispute over inherent contempt citations took place in 1917, when a House subcommittee had United States attorney H. Snowden Marshall cited for contempt because he used insulting language in a letter to Congress. After federal judge Learned Hand denied Marshall’s habeas petition, the Supreme Court said in Marshall v. Gordon that the letter’s language did not obstruct the subcommittee from performing its legislative duties and it ordered Marshall discharged from custody.
In recent battles between Congress and the Executive Branch over contempt charges, executive privilege claims originating from a presidential directive or a Justice Department decision to not convene a grand jury have stopped criminal contempt proceedings from advancing. Civil contempt cases involving the executive branch have remained in the court system for extended time periods.
In all, the House has brought four criminal contempt and three civil contempt actions against Executive Branch officials since 2008. In each instance of a criminal contempt citation, the executive branch declined to refer the charges to a grand jury.
In the three civil cases, the Congressional Research Service said “the committees involved eventually obtained much of the information sought through those lawsuits, but only after prolonged litigation.” For example, as of March 2019 the dispute over contempt charges in the “Operation Fast and Furious” subpoena involving President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had still been pending resolution in court for six years.
If Attorney General Barr were to face a contempt citation, he would be the fourth Attorney General since 1980 to become involved in a contempt dispute with Congress. In addition to the Holder contempt citation filed by the House in 2012, a Senate committee filed a contempt citation against William French Smith in 1984 and a House committee took similar actions against Janet Reno in 1998. The Smith citation never gained full Senate approval, while Reno’s dispute ended when the 105th Congress concluded its session without acting on the committee’s recommendation of a contempt citation.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
Filed Under:
End of quote
Now for the problem.
Quote
Trump Is Gaslighting America Again — Here’s How to Fight It
The president wants the nation to reject their direct experience of reality.
Posted Aug 31, 2018
THE BASICS
Source: AFP/File/Olivier Douliery
In late July, during a speech given to veterans at a Missouri convention, President Donald Trump had a clear message for supporters that drew many comparisons to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 about a totalitarian regime that wields ultimate power over its people through psychological manipulation: “Just remember—what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” Once again, Trump is back in the headlines claiming that a video of him from an NBC interview is somehow not what it appears, due to "fudging my tape on Russia," suggesting that the video was somehow doctored using advanced technology to make the president look bad. This is despite the fact that NBC had put out a full transcript of the interview accompanied by a full video of it uninterrupted.
This tactic of getting people to question their direct experience is a type of psychological manipulation scientists call “gaslighting.” A person who is gaslighting an individual or group that they have chosen to target does so by getting them to doubt their own memory, perception, and reality. Through persistent lying, misdirection, and contradiction, the gaslighter attempts to delegitimize the victim’s beliefs by confusing and destabilizing them. Gaslighting is a tactic commonly used by sociopaths and narcissists.
This is by no means the first time Trump has used gaslighting to manipulate his supporters into doubting their reality. Calling Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election “fake news” after intelligence agencies have proven it beyond doubt, and claiming to have a record-breaking crowd size at his inauguration, are just two examples that immediately come to mind, although at least a dozen more have been documented.
The term “gaslighting,” which is a well-established psychological phenomenon, comes from a 1938 stage play called Gas Light, about an abusive husband that tries to convince his wife she is insane by changing small elements of their environment and insisting she is having memory lapses or delusions when she notices them. While this scheme was particularly vile, it is hardly as nefarious as a state leader attempting to do the same to a whole country.
The president’s gaslighting is clearly working, and he knows it. So what can be done to inoculate against this potent psychological maneuver? Well, first off, one must become aware of gaslighting in order to recognize the manipulation. Once you know it exists, it becomes easier to hold on to your reality when you feel confident in what you hold to be true.
But this is easier said than done. Trump has led his supporters to be suspicious of what scientists or psychologists have to say. The president knows that it’s his word against the “fake news media.” If his followers did become cognizant of gaslighting as a political tactic, he’d likely just flip the script by telling them that it is the journalists, pundits, and intellectuals who are trying to gaslight them. While this might sound absurd to some, the confusion can shake others' confidence, sowing seeds of doubt that can set them down the path of questioning their entire reality.
Gaslighting on a national level is terrifying, but the best thing we can all do right now is stay calm, collected, and confident in our reality and direct experiences. When someone is making statements like, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” red flags should immediately go up, because those are the words of an intentional gaslighter.
A similar version of this post was originally published at Raw Story.
end of quote
Summing up:
Far from toothless. I.e. there is never a matter of guaranteed safety, especially after 2016, but anyone who thinks this is toothless has no idea of what "inherent contempt charges " stands for. It is a big deal. The Ted Lieu statement is followed up by the National Constitution Center
For the record, what Trump is doing is trying to Gaslight the USA into forgetting very actionable remedies to this tyranny he is exhibiting.
FTR
what we can do as a nation. Do not accept what is happening as remotely normal or acceptable and fight back
What are we waiting for ? It is right in front of us to use. Just DO IT.
Andrew Beckwith, PhD