• Trump Under Fire And The Cannon Decision

    July 16, 2024
    Aileen Cannon (L) and Jack Smith (R), Public Domain

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    Before he was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that preceded the opening of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump had been for years under unremitting attack from his political enemies.

    Some usually over-cautious news reports referred to the most recent attack on Trump as an “attempted assassination.” But there were some pedants. First reports tended to avoid the term “attempted assassination,” settling on the term “alleged assassination attempt.” This level of prudence was unnecessary, as unfolding events made plain.

    The assassination attempt failed – sort of. The victim, Trump, was left with a torn ear, and many commentators noted that, by the grace of God, Trump survived. As the shot was fired from a commanding height about 130 yards distant from the rally podium, Trump had turned his head slightly, spoiling the mark of the disappointed and, later, dead assassin.

    Trump was well protected at the podium and later hurriedly whisked away, but not before raising his arm above a crowd of security agents and shouting, “Fight, fight, fight…!”

    Later, Trump wrote in a text message to his supporters, “I will never surrender.”

    Neither will President Joe Biden surrender.

    Following a disastrous debate with Trump during which his obvious frailties were vividly on display, some leading lights in the Democrat Party have since called upon Biden to abandon the race for the presidency and leave the spot open to a new and less frail crop of younger ambitious Democrats. Others, U.S. Senator from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal among them, are hungry for more data. Why not, in the ringing words of President John F. Kennedy, “pass the torch to a new generation,” as Biden had promised to do when, during his first successful presidential campaign, he had identified himself as a one-term, caretaker president?

    The short answer to this question among Biden and his supporters appears to be 1) Biden has left things undone during his first term in office and who is better able than he to complete the necessary work that lies before the nation? 2) It would be dreadfully inconvenient at this point to choose someone else to spearhead Biden’s neo-progressive attempt to refashion the future face of the nation. And, of course, the Democrat Party would surrender money and delegate votes by so doing.

    Democrats, some critics have noticed, have become visionary because they find it counterintuitive to defend Biden’s failed policies, domestic and foreign. In American politics, if you cannot defend current policies, you talk in glittering terms of the future, and you paint your political opponent with a broad, tar-filled, Senator Joe McCarthy brush as “an enemy of the people” and “a threat to democracy.” All such claims should be taken, in Mark Twain’s formulation, “with a ton of salt.”

    Democrat attempts to jail the felonious Trump have encountered some speed bumps, the latest being a decision rendered by United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon who tossed in the ashcan of history the case against Trump brought by fantasist Special Counsel Jack Smith.

    "Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the Motion, the Court is convinced that Special Counsel Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme – the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law," Cannon wrote in her lucid, carefully crafted decision.

    "The Framers gave Congress a pivotal role in the appointment of principal and inferior officers.  That role cannot be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere – whether in this case or in another case, whether in times of heightened national need or not," she noted.  "In the case of inferior officers, that means that Congress is empowered to decide if it wishes to vest appointment power in a Head of Department, and indeed, Congress has proven itself quite capable of doing so in many other statutory contexts.  But it plainly did not do so here, despite the Special Counsel’s strained statutory readings." Cannon added.

    "In the end, it seems the Executive’s growing comfort in appointing ‘regulatory’ special counsels in the more recent era has followed an ad hoc pattern with little judicial scrutiny," she concluded.

    The wheels of justice – which hold that no one is either above or below the law – grind exceedingly slowly. The most we can expect of judicial decisions is that they are deliberative and just. Cannon’s decision is both. Any decision upholding Smith’s unconstitutional case against Trump would have resulted in future judicial anarchy.

    It’s always best to stop the Titanic before it hits the iceberg.

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    Author

    Don Pesci

    Don Pesci is a political columnist of long standing, about 40 years, who has written for various state newspapers, among them The Journal Inquirer, the Waterbury Republican American, the New London Day, the Litchfield County Times, the Torrington Register Citizen and other Register Citizen papers. He maintains a blog, among the oldest of its kind in Connecticut, which serves as a repository and archive, for his columns; there are approximately 3,000 entrees in Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State, virtually all of them political columns stretching back to 2004. He also appears once a week Wednesdays on 1080 WTIC Newstalk radio with Will Marotti.

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