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Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know
In the category of: Uh oh…
“Each House of Congress is specifically empowered to compel testimony from witnesses and the production of evidence in service of its constitutional functions, and the recipient of a subpoena is obligated by law to comply,” the court held in the majority opinion by Judge Judith Rogers.
“The ordinary and effective functioning of the Legislative Branch critically depends on the legislative prerogative to obtain information, and constitutional structure and historical practice support judicial enforcement of congressional subpoenas when necessary,” the opinion adds.
The Justice Department, representing Trump and his Cabinet, had argued the courts should stay out of the disputes, letting Congress use politics and legislation to force the administration into compliance if it must.
The administration will continue their effort to stop McGahn from appearing.
In the category of: Fixer-upper
It’s looking like 1980 again, a crossroads when Ronald Reagan helped reengineer the economy and steer America right. But there may be another way forward in post-Trump America, says author Kurt Andersen.
This week on Inside the Hive, author Kurt Andersen joins Joe Hagan to discuss his new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, which is both the story of how the Republican Party spent the last 50 years reengineering the economy to favor big business at the expense of the working class, and also a crucial primer for the 2020 election. Andersen argues that we’re at a crossroads not unlike 1980, when Reagan ushered in the rightward tilt of our economic lives, selling the idea that unfettered greed would magically lift all boats. The plan was long in the making, a counterstrike against the 1960s, and it was all too successful. To understand what must be done in a post-Trump America—which is the only America with a future—you have to understand the crucial history that brought us here.
Click here for the podcast
In the category of: Non-answers
It was not supposed to be a trick question, or even all that tricky. For any other candidate, it would have been the softest of softballs, the slowest of pitches. But when the Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt asked
Donald Trump the other morning, “Mr. President, what is your second-term agenda? What are your top priorities?,” his inability to answer was one of the most revealing moments of his reëlection campaign so far. “I want to take where we left,” Trump said. “We were better than we were ever,” he added, wistfully conjuring the booming pre-pandemic America of his fantasies, where everybody had a job and the stock market was great.
Facing uncontrolled death from the
coronavirus and an economy that is cratering because of it, Trump is desperate for a do-over. Other than that, he had pretty much nothing to say about why he should be elected to a second term, although he took more than three hundred words to say it. The bottom line seemed to be that Trump is promising four more years of “jobs” and of stopping U.S. allies, especially Germany, from “ripping us off.” And that’s it.
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