It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, the squatter in
the White House continues to violate his oath of office to protect and defend
the Constitution by adding three new attempts to violate the Constitution to his
already lengthy resume. His first violation occurred immediately upon taking
office and the court case continues on his violation of the emoluments clause
prohibiting a sitting president from accepting things of value from foreign
governments, something Trump does every day as his Washington, D.C. hotel rents
rooms to ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries. Now in the wake of
declining poll numbers he’s on a tear.
The most recent three started when Trump called for
re-opening the economy as he also demanded that churches be allowed to hold
services with no restrictions on attendance and insisted he could force
governors to do his bidding thus proposing to violate the Tenth Amendment which
states: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to
the people. Since nowhere in the Constitution does it give the president or
congress the right to force states to act in a manner contrary to their need to
protect public health Trump doesn’t have that power. Any attempt to assert such
control would be a violation of states’ rights. Given that the conservatives often
much spurious claims that Democrats especially President Obama don’t recognize
the Tenth Amendment I find it curious they haven’t made strong statements
opposing Trump’s claims.
In Trump’s response to violent protests following the murder
of George Floyd by Minneapolis police he stated “…when the looting starts the
shooting starts” indicating that police should shoot protestors a looting
sites. Here Trump indicates his willingness to violate the Fourth Amendment
which the Supreme Court said in the 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner “…a police officer may use deadly force to prevent
the escape of a fleeing suspect only if the officer has a good-faith belief
that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury
to the officer or others.” Aside from constitutional considerations a president
who was truly a leader would be acting to calm the situation and address the very
real concerns of the protestors, not seeking to inflame tensions with
incendiary language and threats of official violence.
And then Trump made threats to shutdown Twitter when they
marked two of his tweets with fact checks showing that claims he made in those
tweets weren’t truthful. Taking official action against Twitter in such a case
would be a violation of the Tenth Amendment protections of freedom of
expression which is oddly enough what he claims Twitter violated by showing the
public he lied. Since Twitter is a private company and not a government agency
nothing they could do would ever violate the Tenth Amendment as it only
prohibits government censorship. Just the act of threatening to shutdown the
company is in itself a violation of Tenth Amendment protections as such threat
of official action can have a chilling effect on public discourse.
Sadly you won’t hear either Senator Cornyn or Senator Cruz
calling out Trump for failing his oath of office or attempts to violate the
constitution and that means that at least in spirit they too have violated
their oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Remember in November and vote both Trump and Cornyn out of office.
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