YHK - yet another hacker news clone

It’s not “proper”, but it’s legal. POTUS could just declassify everything and not be held accountable because it’s an official act.

Grump will cry foul on anything, because that's what he does. Normally for someone at his point in life, this would be confined to yelling at nursing home staff for the food being too cold and having the wrong color skin. But unfortunately, there are way too many gullible fools in this country who felt validated by his crying.

It's less about who is doing it rather than that a US president is doing it at all. Obviously, once you find the right person, things can change quickly. Finding the right person when the other two branches of government are controlled by the same party, you can speed run the end of democracy. This is the part that's really shameful to me more so than just a single megalomaniac POTUS. The fact Congress has just capitulated its duties while overtly corrupt members of SCOTUS flaunt jurisprudence is something I thought we'd never have to see.

It makes me happy every day that his clock is running out. Clocks. All the clocks running out.

But we need to do some serious rethink and work on curbing the power of the POTUS.

The question is not around classification but of ownership and especially of the ownership of the documents after the president leaves office. The argument is that the documents generated during the presidency are the personal property of the president.

Congress created the laws which allow classification & declassification. The president is the authority over what gets classified, but should still be required to follow the procedures for doing so.

Declassifying documents is completely within Trump's purview, but surely selling classified documents runs afoul of the emoluments clause in Article II, Section 1.

The results of that investigation were squashed by Judge Eileen Canon in Florida claiming the special prosecutor was not legal. Jack Smith has bent over backwards to not release information based on the court's decision to bar its release.

However, Trump's case against the BBC has become an interesting one. The judge overseeing this case recently stated that the BBC can call Jack as a witness potentially allowing an end run around Judge Canon's release of Jack's report.

Let's be honest here, this calvinball only applies to one political party. The other can't wear a tan suit or forgive a small fraction of student loans.

So national interest doesn't exist? It's all at the whim of a demented money grabber, just because a small majority of the voters (if there really was a majority) got riled up?

I know this isn’t an argument but when I read this my first thought was: How can a real person hold this opinion?

> The point of secret classification isn't to restrict trusted people - but to restrict unathorized access. And highest person in chain of command naturally has full authority to do as he sees the situation fit

First of all -- what? The exact legal authority between the President and Congress here is murky, yes (see https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS21900). But it's completely ridiculous to claim that the only criterion for authorization is that someone thinks a person ought to be authorized.

This is unitary executive thinking, grounded in the principle that, because the president is the sole and chief authority and executor of the law, the president may do just about anything in that capacity. It's utter unconstitutional nonsense, no matter what our (openly compromised by lobbyists) Supreme Court justices say.

The latter point is "not accentuated enough" because it's secondary to the primary point, which supersedes it. No the president's whim is not the same as executing the federal laws created by Congress within the framework of the constitution. It a mind-bendingly anti-American, anti-Constitutional line of reasoning on display here.