Thursday, April 27, 2017

If only Trump knew anything about anything!

If only Trump knew anything about anything. In the last couple of days, Trump has decided that we do not need to get out of or renegotiate NAFTA. I never liked NAFTA, because of the jobs it took from the US, but then I never ran for president with one of my key promises being to get out of or renegotiate NAFTA. Trump did. Then he spoke with Mexico and Canada and changed his mind.
Today, furious that he cannot get his way on defunding federal grants to what he calls sanctuary cities, he is calling for the breakup of the US Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit. Two problems there. The first is that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did not hear the case on sanctuary cities. The second is that the president has no authority to break up--whatever the heck he means by that--and US Court of Appeals.
But wait! There is more! If you order now...Trump obviously has no idea what sanctuary cities actually are. They are cities in which the local police are told not to help federal authorities with catching and detaining illegal aliens. But local police have no legal authority to do that, anywhere. That is a federal responsibility, and laying it on localities to enforce those federal laws is not even legal. So there is that.
Trump went even further to expose his complete lack of knowledge of how things work when he declared that both his Muslim travel ban (which was heard by the 9th Circuit Court) and the Sanctuary Cities funding ruling (heard by a district court in San Francisco) were opposed by judges because lawyers suing to stop his executive orders "judge shopped" [actual phrase "judge shopping"] to find judges sympathetic to their cause. This did not happen. The lawsuit against sanctuary cities' defunding was filed in San Francisco, so it was heard by the district federal court there; the 9th Circuit heard the Muslim-travel-ban case because that was initially heard in Hawaii, and automatically went to the 9th Circuit on appeal by the US Government.
Trump went even one step further than that when he declared "...Ninth Circuit, which has a terrible record of being overturned (close to 80%..." SHEER LUNACY. According to the Washington Post, while it is true that 80 percent of the 9th Circuit cases taken up by the US Supreme Court in 2015-2016 were overturned, the Supreme Court only heard one-tenth of 1 percent of their cases for 2015-2016.
There is more, but if I keep thinking about Trump and his complete lack of understanding of any and everything in the world, my head will explode.

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