We begin today’s roundup with Mark Joseph Stern at Slate who argues that Donald Trump’s decision to award himself the multimillion dollar G7 contract is an impeachment offense all on its own:
The president’s decision to exploit the G-7 summit for personal enrichment is so obviously corrupt, so shameless and extortionary, that it seems strange to debate whether it is also unlawful. And yet, from the start of Trump’s tenure, his opponents have struggled to find an effective line of legal attack against his self-dealing. Government watchdogs have sued him in federal court, but their efforts have stalled—in part because judges have struggled with the unprecedented nature of the offense: No other president has bilked his office for so much cash. It seems implausible that the Constitution would provide no mechanism to halt such brazen corruption. And yet, here we are, well more than halfway through Trump’s term, and the president’s heists are only getting more blatant. Can anything or anyone stop his raid on the public fisc?
Helaine Olen at The Washington Post:
One of the many lies of the Trump presidency is the idea that the president is so rich, he can’t be tempted by the conflicts of interests and penny-ante corruption other mere mortals couldn’t resist. This has almost certainly turned out to be the opposite of the truth, never mind Mulvaney’s claim that Trump has never profited from the presidency. Trump refused to put his holdings in a blind trust. Trump laughs in the face of lawsuits alleging violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause and any claims resembling conflict of interest. He’s traveled to and stayed at properties he’s owned well over a hundred times since he moved into the White House, running up monster bills every step of the way. Lobbyists flock to the Trump hotel in Washington, while others ranging from conservative interest groups to payday loan lenders book events at Trump properties around the country. This past summer, Vice President Pence, on an official state visit to Ireland, felt a compelling need to stay at the country’s Trump golf resort even though it was located more than 100 miles away from the site of his meetings. The president, his staff told the press, made the “suggestion” he stay there.
Bloomberg’s Andrew Harris has a good rundown of the Emoluments Clause and the pending litigation:
Though he stepped away from day-to-day operations of his businesses, Trump retains ownership in companies that do business with foreign diplomats, state-controlled companies and state-owned television channels. He selected his own Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami to be the site of next year’s Group of Seven summit, which the U.S. is hosting. One of his golf resorts, Turnberry in Scotland, has gotten business from U.S. Air Force crews overnighting while their planes were refueled. The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. gets business from foreign governments and their representatives, and it’s housed in a building that Trump’s company leases from the U.S. government. That raises another issue: A second constitutional clause -- in Article II, Section 1 -- says the president receives a salary while in office but “shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
David Graham at The Atlantic calls it a “shameless act of profiteering”:
The timing is either inauspicious or audacious, coming just two days after a federal appeals court revived a case against the president under the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bars federal officials from profiting from foreign governments. Mulvaney wrote off any concerns about the arrangement as simple misunderstandings of branding. [...]
Recent summits have been held at semi-isolated locations, the better to provide safety and security to the visiting dignitaries. Doral is in the middle of metro Dade County, in the flight path of the airport. (Trump even lied about the length of the trip from the airport to the resort in a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.)
Eugene Robinson says it’s time to address how the president is “spinning out of control”:
The most powerful office in the world is occupied — and being abused — by a man who is entirely unfit and is spinning dangerously out of control. Everyone needs to stop pretending otherwise.
And it’s all getting worse.
On the topic of foreign policy, former commander of the United States Special Operations Command Admiral William H. McRaven pens a powerful op-ed in which he says Trump is unfit to be commander in chief:
It is easy to destroy an organization if you have no appreciation for what makes that organization great. We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.
But, if we don’t care about our values, if we don’t care about duty and honor, if we don’t help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice — what will happen to the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?
On a final note, don’t miss this tribute to the great Elijah Cummings by John Nichols over at The Nation:
Even as he was ailing in the past year, Cummings would show up with his walker to march with workers. It was a passion of the lawyer and former state legislator who spoke often of the work of African American labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph to link the struggle for worker rights with the struggle for civil rights.
When workers and their unions were under attack, Cummings used his increasingly powerful position in Congress to highlight their struggles and to assure that they were treated fairly. It was his purpose to restore a measure of equal justice under law to a Congress that is too often biased in favor of corporate interests and their powerful political allies. [...]
The representative’s work on impeachment has been vital, and he should be remembered for it. But he should also be remembered for the fights that were perhaps not so well noted but that spoke to his passion for worker rights.