An appeals court appeared reluctant Monday to force the Trump administration to produce certain emails from its disbanded voter fraud commission.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1263097
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1263097
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Yep. I just reached peak disgust. I gotta take a break or find me a cute animal gif or something…
Merrick Garland???
Whoa. Up is down today.
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“The question is, how wide do you open it?” Williams interjected"
Enough to get to the truth. All of it.
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Not everything is open. Privacy is an important consideration. HR decisions are generally not available to the public at large. I think the commission member might lose this one.
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It is a tricky question…there are certain things that presidents should be able to keep secret, at least for X years, in their organizing and discussing how to do things. They shouldn’t be absolutely secret forever, as historians should get access, but they do need the space to plan without worrying that their plans will become political footballs (or that people are so scared of that that they won’t participate).
There should also be limits on this process…if an organization is being set up with ill intent, then we need to see how that happened and why, so that it can be stopped in the future. Any actions of the administration should be for the American people, not for the benefit of the president or their party. Designing this committee to leave out voices aside from far right conspiracy theorists should cross over that line…hopefully the argument was made today.
The judges should question this one hard, as it was the process of setting the committee up and not the actual committee work, but they also should be pointed to the bad intentions behind how the committee was set up. Maybe the law can’t handle this now…that will make it something that Congress needs to deal with in the future, where the intent and makeup must be good intentioned or it violates the law.
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This is what happens when you have corrupt bad-faith actors at many levels of the executive branch. The appeals court (including Garland) is wary about opening this door because it means that in the future any republican thrown off a commission for bad behavior will be able to dissect and publicize every last turn of phrase of the people staffing the commission, and serious vetting will almost always disclose something that can be twisted into a “scandal”. (Richelieu and his six lines have nothing on the wingnut noise machine.)
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I suggest that the Court needs to be reminded of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or of what the Washington Post reminds us:
Democracy Dies in Darkness
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“In this context, personnel is policy,” Sandick responded.
And the context includes the overtly political and crooked nature of the Voter Fraud Commission itself. This isn’t the SEC we’re talking about. This is a government body set up to investigate a nonexistent problem for clearly partisan purposes. Bearing in mind those purposes, questions of personnel are clearly substantive, not procedural.
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Exactly. You can certainly understand and support a court’s decision to allow for deliberation about appointments to certain commissions to have some level of privacy to allow for candid discussion. However, all you have to do to uphold that principle here is to recognize that THIS process and THIS commission have been found to be inherently corrupt and that the administration has repeatedly misrepresented underlying facts to the court – so game on.
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I think Merrick Garland should add to every opinion: “P.S. F*ck you Mitch McConnell.”
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A February 2017 email released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that von Spakovsky — with Adams cc’d — complained to close allies of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the plans to make the commission “bipartisan” and to “include Democrats.”
I think once this cat was let out of the bag the other emails should be examined and the commission can then be shown for what it was, not to address voter fraud as in stamping it out, but how to commit more of it.
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sigh…
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WTF??? You want to withhold emails because you don’t want the public to KNOW what corrupt motherfkers were trying to pull? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???
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“The question is, how wide do you open it?” Williams interjected.
No. That’s not the question. The Act mandates transparency. If these authors of the Act wanted to qualify that transparency they would have done so.
An “originalist” should know that.
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"Christian and I are concerned that this commission is being organized in a way that will guarantee its failure.”
To be fair, it was.
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I posit that a body organized under false pretenses is not shielded by any privileges that would apply to legitimate groups.
Lying about your organization’s purpose, its process, and its activities, or attempting to block full members from full participation, are probably all very good indicators that an organization is not above board, and that it thus does not enjoy the protections we afford honest people doing honest work in accordance with the law.
Government won’t enforce an illegal contract, and this strikes me as strongly analogous. Same with piercing attorney-client privilege when it comes to mafia lawyers. There are normal activities that the law refuses to respect when undertaken as part of a crime.
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Bingo.
Anyone who has ever participated in any group-based activity knows WHO sits in those meetings is as important, if not more so, than WHAT was discussed. Often times, the outcome of a meeting can be manipulated by who was put in it.
Garland should know better…
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So Spakovsky and others were arguing for a commission that was composed solely of extreme right-wing voter suppression conspirators.
I think Sandick is right. In this case, personnel discussions reveal a strong political bias and hidden, though not particularly well-disguised, partisan aim that’s counter to the ostensibly non-partisan end-goal of more secure elections - and provides prima facie evidence of an intent to inhibit and ignore the contributions of any commisioner to the left of Joe McCarthy or David Duke.
If there’s potential corruption, then wide enough to expose it and let voters decide.
FYI, Judge Stephen Williams was appointed by Reagan.
Garland was selected as an older moderate who could represent the center and wouldn’t be there that long, to potentially garner some GOP votes for Senate approval.
It was wrong and blatantly un-Constitutional for McConnell to ignore the Senate’s Article 1 duties to advise and consent, but let’s not pretend we lost a liberal savior when Garland was denied an up-or-down vote and any Congressional consideration at all. Garland was never intended to be a liberal lion, and President Obama didn’t pick him for that purpose.