Standing Orders

Photo via Reuters Money Control.

....serving and doing a great job as your President (including accepting Zero salary!).

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2019

Typical Donald. His "donation" of his salary, $400,000 annually while his sole proprietorship businesses make $434 million (according to the 2018 report), amounts to less than one thousandth of his income (0.09%). It's a casual tip to the nation, like John D. Rockefeller's dimes. The America First Action PAC alone spent more than that, $427,000, holding campaign events at Trump properties, which he wouldn't have earned if he weren't president. We went through some of that, and the money taxpayers provide for government officials and White House aides to spend in his properties, last month. To say nothing of the money taxpayers spend on his air travel to visit his properties with his entourage every weekend or golf carts for him and the secret service to toddle across the greens in.

Trump's own argument seems to be that it would be "ridiculous" for him to obey the Constitutional strictures on foreign and domestic emoluments because that would be bad business practice: "I'm taking a loss as it is!"


As if the Constitution said you couldn't accept gifts, emoluments, offices or titles from foreign states and monarchies unless you really couldn't afford to pass them up.

That is of course not even a somewhat relevant issue, and it's not the issue the Fourth Circuit (in Richmond, Va.) just ruled on: their issue, as you'd have expected, was the standing of the plaintiffs, the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia, to make the complaint (that Trump's disregard of the Constitution in accepting foreign payments deprived their citizens of the money-making opportunities Trump has snatched for himself at his hotels and resorts). This interest was so "abstract", the panel held, that they felt the need to complain about being asked to even think about it:

“The District and Maryland’s interest in enforcing the Emoluments Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case readily provokes the question of whether this action against the President is an appropriate use of the courts,” the panel wrote in its decision.

At the same time they felt the case was extremely urgent and needed to be decided right away:

The judges said that the complaint was extraordinary and of national significance, justifying their intervention at an early stage in the case, before evidence-gathering begins.

Gods forbid anybody should start gathering any evidence on this!

So they essentially stuck their fingers in their ears and began crying "Na na na na I can't hear you!" Which may not bode well for the other emoluments suit, being heard in DC district court by the cranky judge Emmet Sullivan, where the plaintiffs are Democratic members of the House:

The Democratic lawsuit alleges that the president has violated anti-corruption emolument clauses of the Constitution that restrict the ability of federal officials to reap financial benefits other than their salaries.

What legitimate interest could they possibly have in making the president comply with his oath of office?

Well, there's one judicial arena, as a matter of fact, where congressional representatives always have standing whenever they say they do, and that's the House of Representatives, where impeachments are prepared and voted on. What I can't get over in the current situation is not the Russia conspiracy, ghastly as that is, or the utter unfitness of Trump for the job, so much as just how the president keeps breaking the law and nobody is able to make him stop.

Because nobody has "standing" to stop him, neither citizens to sue, nor the Department of Justice to indict, nor the state and municipal authorities that seem to be waiting for him to leave office. They're paralyzed, and Trump's breaking the law nonstop. It's not just the taking of emoluments, either. It's the casual corruption with which he takes them, from getting permission from the General Services Administration to hold a hotel lease that he's obviously legally forbidden to hold to making and concealing enormous unreported campaign contributions to himself to buy the silence of unseemly former sex partners, self-dealing from his personal "charitable" foundation and funds collected on his behalf for the inauguration festivities, abusing power with his misbegotten use of the pardon power, persecuting political opponents in his use of the Justice Department to investigate everybody he doesn't like from Hillary Clinton to Bruce Ohr, abuse of power on the grand scale in the criminal mistreatment of asylum seekers and their young children on the Mexican border. These are crimes he commits every day.

And I don't think they're as difficult to prove as conspiracy with Russia either. But impeachment on whatever grounds, the more the merrier, seems at this point like the only route there is to putting an end to it, poor as the chances of success may be.