Name: Ron Johnson's desperate COVID relief bill stunt just blew up in his face
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Ron Johnson's desperate COVID relief bill stunt just blew up in his face

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--Sen. Ron Johnson speaks to Fox News (screen grab)(R-WI) this week forced a reading of the on the Senate floor, which took up more than ten hours and didn't conclude until early on Friday morning.However, CNN's Lauren Fox reported on Friday that Johnson's stunt backfired spectacularly, as it resulted in giving Republicans a far shorter period of debate for the bill."They finished in the middle of the night and in the end, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from the state of Maryland, rose to ask for some consent to restart this debate beginning at 9 a.m. today in the U.S. Senate," she said.The key, Fox explained, was that Van Hollen asked for three hours to debate the bill instead of the expected 20 hours of time.Johnson was not in the Senate at the time of Hollen's proposal and could not object to it -- and so it was adopted."In the end, instead of having 20 hours of debate, because there wasn't a Republican there to object at the end of this process, they are now just going to have three hours of debate," she said. "Then they will start at noon with this vote-a-rama."Watch the video below.Report typos and corrections to: .According to criminal defense attorney Shan Wu, the recent legal filing from lawyers objecting to the Department of Justice's counter-argument on appointing a special master and what constitutes a "classified" document is . In , the attorney who specializes in white-collar crime claims that, from what he has seen from the dueling motions, the former president's lawyers are overmatched and have no clue how to defend their client.Summing up the new filing, Wu asserted that it "smacks of an extremism and desperation perhaps born of having been maneuvered into a legal corner by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department."Using his own experience, Wu suggested that the tactics being used by Trump's lawyers are laughable -- such as arguing facts that are indisputable -- and are signs that they have no defense."These aren’t the usual ways of trying to head off criminal charges," he argued. "The usual way of defending against criminal investigations is for defense lawyers to do their own investigation and try to convince prosecutors that they are barking up the wrong tree."RELATED: "The DOJ’s clever response out-maneuvered Trump’s team by focusing on the fact that a criminal investigation involving national defense cannot take place without access to the materials implicating national defense and asking simply that the investigation be allowed to continue even as the parties fought over whether a special master was necessary and the exact scope of what the special master might oversee," he wrote before adding, "This focus also offers Judge Cannon a compromise by which she can still preserve a victory for Trump in seeking a special master for the ostensible purpose of promoting public faith in the investigation while also reducing the risk of a humiliating slam-dunk reversal on appeal."Wu also suggested that Garland having served as a judge has given the DOJ an upper hand."Ironically, one of the perceived potential weaknesses of Attorney General Garland is that he has spent the majority of his career as an appellate judge and may have lost whatever combative prosecutorial instincts he might have possessed earlier in his career. But here, as the DOJ navigates uncharted legal territory with historically high stakes, Garland’s 20-plus years’ experience as an appeals judge may give the DOJ a big advantage," he wrote before wryly noting, "After all, who knows better how to fashion a judicial solution than a former judge?"You .Former Vice President Mike Pence touches on his emotions during the Jan. 6 insurrection, when violent supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol .The former vice president, who refused to overturn Trump's election loss as part of an unconstitutional scheme under investigation by the House select committee and Department of Justice, is publishing a new memoir Nov. 15 that discusses what he was feeling during the siege, ."I was not afraid," Pence writes in So Help Me God, "but I was angry."Most of the book is devoted to Pence's faith, and also dwells on his behind-the-scenes pushes on abortion, regulations and national security, but he devotes some of the final chapters to the insurrection.READ MORE: "I was angry at what I saw, how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else," Pence writes on the back cover, which was obtained by Axios.Judge Aileen Cannon stopped a criminal investigation by ordering a special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.This court-appointed official will probably be charged with reviewing the seized materials to see if they are protected by executive privilege.It’s unclear who that official will be, what criteria they will use or how long this process will take. The judge’s ruling is a gift to Trump.READ MORE: Faced with overwhelming evidence of their client’s guilt, his lawyers can only hope to drag the process out as long as possible.On Thursday, the feds to let them keep working with only the classified documents, because those couldn’t possibly be privileged.Asking for a subset of the documents was a savvy tactical choice by the feds. But it’s obvious that Donald Trump has no claim to executive privilege over any of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.The Supreme Court that Richard Nixon had to turn over the White House tapes to the special prosecutor who had indicted seven of Nixon’s closest aides in the Watergate investigation.READ MORE: Nixon’s lawyers argued that the president’s Oval Office conversations were off-limits. Advisors need privacy in order to give candid advice, they said.But Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion held that for privacy “[could not] prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law.” The tapes were handed over. Nixon resigned shortly thereafter, leaving behind millions of pages of presidential records and hundreds of hours of tape recordings.This case established not only that a president’s assertion of privilege could be tested in court, but also that the government’s need for evidence in a criminal case outweighs the president’s need for privacy.The parallels to Trump’s situation are obvious.If anything, Trump is in a weaker position than Nixon was in, because he’s the former president, and he’s the one facing indictment.After Watergate, Congress passed a law that made presidential records public property and tasked the General Services Administration (GSA) with archiving them for posterity.Nixon sued for control, again citing privilege. Justices rejected the claim by a vote of 7-2, noting that, since the doctrine of executive privilege is based on the separation of powers, Nixon couldn’t invoke it to thwart the GSA, which is also part of the executive branch.The Department of Justice cited this precedent in Trump’s case. Trump is trying to invoke executive privilege against the DOJ, which is, like the GSA, part of the executive branch. Evidently, Judge Aileen Cannon ignored this seemingly decisive objection in her ruling.It’s unclear whether a former president can ever claim executive privilege, let alone whether he can overrule a sitting president in a privilege fight.Executive privilege is supposed to further the public good through the smooth operation of government. Privilege exists to protect the executive branch’s ability to fulfill its core constitutional functions. It’s not a perk for the office-holder.A sitting president has core constitutional functions to uphold, like safeguarding national security and upholding the rule of law. A former president has no constitutional function whatsoever.In a privilege fight between a sitting president and a former guy merely defending himself, the former guy should lose every time.One of the bedrock principles of our democracy is that powers and privileges are vested in the office of the president, not in the person.That makes it difficult to see how a former president, who is (legally speaking) just some guy, could wield executive privilege, let alone privilege strong enough to overrule that of the sitting president.Proponents of executive privilege for former presidents have to resort to pretzel logic to explain why some guy should be able to overrule the sitting president of the United States: The former president has executive privilege, they say, because every current president is a future former president. The current president won’t be able to get good advice if his advisors are afraid that their deliberations could be made public by a future president.The Supreme Court recently dodged the question of former-guy privilege. A lower court ruled that Trump must hand over documents to the J6 committee. Trump tried to invoke executive privilege, even though actual President Biden waived his actual privilege.The lower court ruled that Congress’s claim was so strong that Trump wouldn’t have been able to invoke executive privilege even if he had been president. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Trump’s motion to block NARA from handing over the documents, which now reside with the J6 committee.Judge Cannon’s decision to freeze a criminal investigation to check for executive privilege is frivolous. It’s doubtful that former president Trump has executive privilege at all, but even if he did, the Supreme Court held unanimously that executive privilege must yield to the demands of an active federal criminal investigation.Moreover, executive privilege can’t be wielded by one part of the executive branch against another. So, executive privilege would not justify withholding information from the Department of Justice.READ MORE:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Copyright © 2022 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | | | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com. | {{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}

--Sen. Ron Johnson speaks to Fox News (screen grab)(R-WI) this week forced a reading of the on the Senate floor, which took up more than ten hours and didn't conclude until early on Friday morning.However, CNN's Lauren Fox reported on Friday that Johnson's stunt backfired spectacularly, as it resulted in giving Republicans a far shorter period of debate for the bill."They finished in the middle of the night and in the end, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from the state of Maryland, rose to ask for some consent to restart this debate beginning at 9 a.m. today in the U.S. Senate," she...

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Brad Reed

The Raw Story (also stylized as RawStory) is an American online tabloid founded in 2004 by John K. Byrne. It covers current national and international political events and publishes its own editorials which tend to advocate for progressive positions. The Raw Story is a news site, bringing attention to stories that it sees as downplayed or ignored by other media outlets.

Ron Johnson's desperate COVID relief bill stunt just blew up in his face

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