welcome to on contact today we discuss the death of our constitutional democracy with scholar bruce fein assassination presidential assassination which by the way also violated an executive order which prohibits presidential exist and agents went to triple 3 they continue on a scale that we don't know about because the congressional oversight power has completely collapsed so these people just disappear and we never even know about them or we tribute them somebody else the israelis did it my side let's assign that to them because how many times you know people just disappear out of the in that we

no longer see them and we know that the executive branch is inclined any time you're in warfare all the history going back 100 years or more is the executive branch lies lies lies the u.s.'s me mexican american war you listen to us as greer a gulf of tonkin resolution every time so we know they're probably lying about this stuff. bruce fein a former senior official and department of justice and a constitutional scholar has identified 12 impeachable offenses committed by donald trump but as he notes many of these constitutional violations are not unique to the trumpet ministration they have been normalized by democratic and republican administrations these longstanding violations for this reason were ignored by the democratic party leaders seeking to impeach the president they chose to focus exclusively on trump's attempt to get the ukrainian president to open an

investigation of joe biden and his son hunter in exchange for $400000000.00 in u.s. . military aid and a visit by the ukrainian leader to the white house ignoring these institutional violations during the impeachment inquiry fine argues legitimates them and accelerates the death of our democracy joining me in the studio in washington to discuss the multiple failures of the impeachment process is bruce fein so as this was beginning. you and louis pitcher and ralph nader sent a letter to nancy pelosi. and you warned that trump is you right shattering our entire constitutional order and you list the most serious constitutional violations we're going to go through them 12 of them and yet despite your emphatic warning the democratic party chose to prosecute

or attempt to impeach trump on the most trivial offenses and i think now that we finish the impeachment process essential as you had pointed out what we have done is normalize these agree just constitutional violations but talk about the the danger that i think you correctly you know raised well 1st chris i want to elaborate having been up in those congressional quarterly's of power well the issue is how serious charges to launch 'd against mr trump the calculation was a purely political one by the house speaker pelosi trying to save the seats of the half dozen or dozen democrats who won districts that otherwise voted for trump and there was no principle to the standards or the decision making whatsoever but also when we confronted big headwinds was precisely when we started to focus on charges

that democrats and republicans were complicit in flouting the declare war clause flouting the oversight power flouting the treaty authority flouting the appointments clause flouting the appropriations clause all those kinds of things nancy pelosi yourself was complicit in some of those for example saying nothing when mr obama went to war with libya on his own expanded the war in syria on his own did what was really should have been a treaty with iran to constrain their nuclear ambitions without a treaty but just an executive agreement. which i would treat as was supposed to be approved by the congress exactly by the orders there is what is already declared absolutely and the reason why it was very disappointing a couple one these other agreed just violations the huge implications are warfare state we're now involved in least 9 presidential wars the absorbed it's staggering amount of money aside from the lives that are shattered in liberty that's curtailed trillion dollar plus every single year and it makes us less safe what does that

mean we don't have money for the roads the schools the hospitals the social welfare programs can cleaning up environmental contaminated sites and things of that sort so the consequences are huge over a trillion dollars most all of our discretionary spending outside of social security is the military budget for what we are say and the military comes back every year and says oh after we spent a trillion dollars now the world is more dangerous than it was before these are what are we spending this money for but the 2nd thing i think this is equally important chris was totally overlooked by the democrats and indeed the republicans too remember the framers adopted impeachment they said it was a surrogate for tarana side bill civilized way you remove somebody who's not a trustworthy steward of our liberties and think of 789 and how much trivial power the president had as opposed to today the ability of george washington buz his powers was nothing you know he had a budget maybe of

a couple $100000.00 he didn't have any standing army he had 3 cabinet members you know now look at the current incumbent almost 5 trillion dollar budget the most terrifying arsenal in the history of the world so since the ability of the prez. if he's trustworthy to destroy the whole country in the world is so much greater the standards of impeachment should be even more strict because you don't want to rule dice not only with the nation but with the tire species and yet they're arguing like we're back in 70 needed 9 and they charge these little kind of offenses if you will and the democrats didn't want to sell arms to ukraine when obama was there so little time hypocritical now you're denouncing to do we want so the whole thing was a complete disaster so all these huge violations now become more permanent embedded in our practice in our precedents so i mean one of the things that we saw and i think what we're going to talk about is complete breakdown of the rule of law and

constitutional protection but just this open decision by the white house to repeatedly ignore subpoenas and. if i have that right when they impeached nixon it was one subpoena nor one subpoena right yes and now it's indiscriminate in it's very important things just in the last week the administration has denied congress 3 critical pieces of information one they would never tell congress what was the foundation for killing general sula money runs head based upon 4 embassies allegedly subject to imminent attack say no we're not going to tell you if they really backed away and they wouldn't give that information to congress if congress funds the defense that are secondly they said they will not share with congress the intelligence community's findings is who are the responsible parties for assassinating jamal khashoggi because it was saudi arabia and trump wants to continue selling these huge non arms then then most recently.

the congress of the united states was asking for this information relating to one of our of our the forgot the 3rd item here. but the congress simply said we are not. who would supply any information that we believe should be held secret this is the taliban deal to peace deal with alabama so that the congress and what we need to know what the terms and conditions of the peace deal will tell and we said no we aren't going to tell you taliban can know but not you and those are just the tip of the iceberg chris over and over and over again they will not tell congress where we have these secret military bases special forces members of congress wake up and that we had a soldier die in bali this year or even know that they have the troops stationed there and so when congress basically is brain dead they don't know anything that's going on in the executive branch they're totally feeble and able to police wrongdoing in abuses and that's where we are today. essentially what we by giving

trump a pass now is complete impunity you can use using it he's purging the us government and him and making appointments based on. personal loyalty to him rather than incompetence. before we get into what we've normalized in terms of constitutional violations in your list. what is the. what are the consequences of the failure on the part of the senate to uphold the rule of law with the consequences are we now have basically a limitless power in the executive far greater than king george the 3rd who provoked american revolution exercised over the columnist i mean this president now goes to war on his own decides whether or not he's going to share information on his own he surveils he spies on his own he spends money on his own he decides to appoint members to his cabinet on his own senate confirmation is out the window 'd he doesn't have any obligation to take care that the laws are faithfully executed

and he doesn't like a law he just says well i just don't feel like i want to enforce it whatever so all those kinds of things shows that we're really off the charts with regard to should general constraints that the constitution in place imposes on the chief executive. let's go through the list 12 impeachable offenses committed by. the democrats their contempt of congress yes the contempt of congress is the flouting of congressional subpoenas the obligation to testify and memory even at the time when the house was considering a contempt article they had donald again john bolton all these people say no that they don't want to testify or they wouldn't testify under oath all of his cabinet members pompei o wasn't going to know that i had to testify have all been. the ones that testify truthfully are the ones who lost their jobs the ones who flooded the congress mick mulvaney a member nick used to be the chief of staff and he said about the ukraine deal well of course you get to get over it we always do these things so we obviously would

have undercut the president's killing that nothing was wrong done here you know i'm not going to testify i don't want to say anything about this now when you have national security assessments that are supposed to be available to the congress of the united states since they fund the trillion dollar plus national security budget no we don't want to tell you all the secret off the record we need to have all of this their own so that contempt of congress is a huge issue abuse of the powers of the president abuse of public trust yes this is the abuse of public trust of the powers the present with regard to his obstruction of justice he did cooperate in the moeller investigation at least 5 or 10 times he attempted to obstruct it by asking his subordinates to have mr molder fired to have mr sessions the attorney general on recuse himself to suggest that he may offer pardons to people that go along with them so that he can some sense kind of coach testimony he would permit donald began to testify about the overtures that he made to mr began to have mr molder fired he's not faithfully execute the laws he's

obstructing those laws and then you can move to other areas like the immigration laws and the consumer welfare laws the consumer finance protection bureau if you don't like a law the president to ask for it to be repealed to remove but he just can't stand . well they have we don't want to enforce these laws anymore we'll just ignore them and let all of the protections that have been built up by prior administrations become de facto no one void by simply inaction i say we have a process by which a president can change the law it means going to congress and get the laws changed he's doing this by unilateral decree i mean one example i want to underscore chris is this wall issue he asked congress 15 times over i want money to build the wall he shut the government down for and then he says you know what i got the money i can spend the money anyway for the pentagon budget yeah i'm not a legal i don't think it is the anti deficiency act provides a criminal penalty if you spend money that's not been appropriated for that purpose

by congress now he's not can force the act against himself obama however did the same kind of problems were congress said you can't spend money to release any money at guantanamo bay in this you give congress 90 days notice because they may want to do something obama did that bernie swap with going to go didn't give any notice that all that oh and the g.a.o. found that a violation of that spending caught many of these violations you know the democrats . engaged in much the same kind of activity it's true that trump in some cases take a new level but the fact is chris no president has ever surrendered power back no matter how violently it's been usurped by the predecessor haganah day and that that precedent and just move it to a new level whether it's republican or democrat when we come back we'll continue our conversation about the impeachment process and constitutional violations with

legal scholar bruce fein. i. this is a story of women women with troubled histories and complex court cases you know some of us did leave who lives out there. who were not. the person that. the cheesiness of be considered the most dangerous of criminals she's in a still. 23 hours of the tell me that is not enough in this. world of women on death row. welcome back to on contact we continue our conversation about the impeachment

process and the normalization of constitutional violations with legal scholar bruce fein so we were speaking about the. 12 principle constitutional violations that have now been normalized and it looks like we're not going back and let's continue with that appropriations clause revenue because yes appropriations and revenue is let's talk about revenues 1st the constitution clearly provides that any measure to raise money for the federal government must originate in the house of representatives let's think about all the 10s of billions that mr trump is raising by unilaterally imposing tariffs quotas on foreign goods and this is money that had been appropriated by congress it obviously didn't originate in the house in originated in the white house and so we have all this money now is a pool that mr trump is been able to raise like the former king of england without

any input and origination in the house that's clearly a violation then on the appropriations clause to he spends money that hasn't been appropriated for the purpose that he's spending that's a the most egregious example is the wall but there are other measures as well where he was. pending money to keep certain when the government was shut down to keep certain services open even though congress made clear no when it's a shutdown there isn't any money for these kinds of purposes and remember it was james madison fall of the constitution that the power of the purse is the it's the keep it is the fire wall against abuses the executive branch because you can't do anything without money and now congress has given up the power of the purse to the president. the emoluments clause boy he certainly violated the one 0 yeah i mean he's he's so obviously you don't want to federal government as a hall inauguration parties run the drum. and for governor the emoluments was basically says for the audience that if the united states a state of the united states or a foreign government provides you some kind of monetary or other benefit and

congress hasn't consented then you violated the more humans clause the trump international tell is a walking living room breathing violation of the most humans or. declare war cause yes we now president. is engaged in continuing and expanding 9 presidential wars it is very clear from the very beginning of the constitution that the americans who wrote the document never trusted the president the executive to go to war because during that period everything flows to the center the money the power the secrecy the fame and that the president would be inclined if he had the war power to concoct excuses because everyone wants to aggrandize power of their own politics so they made clear everybody and i mean all the delegates of constitution convention everybody participate in the ratification beats all said only the congress can take us from

a state of peace to war not only did they do that during the convention and ratification process george washington said thomas jefferson said it james madison said it alexander hamilton it everybody totally uniform understanding and now presidents go to war on their own he stands up mr trump and he's not unique obama no mo bomber did it obama say i'll decide whether to go into iran and or to try to bush or north korea and bush w. bush did the same in member will clinton in his administration he asked congress for a declaration of war against serbia congress voted it down so he said ok i'll do it anyway. the. take care clause presentment clause yes the present clause go back in reverse it goes building on the precedent set most prolifically by president w. bush but then obama as well these signing statements the founding fathers understood that part of the strength of congress viz a viz the executive was to log will put different provisions in

a single bill the president has to take the good with the bad or veto the whole thing if you don't permit the president to pick and choose he has a line item veto which the us supreme court said is unconstitutional so now we have the present because the president signs the bill and says that but these provisions i think encroach on mamma powers i'm not going and force them that's clearly of a flagrant violation of the requirement that a president sign or veto a bill in toto the then the have the the other provisions in the take care clause the president says he decides which clause heald he want to faithfully execute if he doesn't like them even when he signs the bill will say i'll just ignore them and bridgie and treat them as hortatory if you will. due process clause yeah here we have is a one of the most stunning things in my entire life here in washington chris is the ease with which we've accepted the idea that the president in this war against terrorism can play prosecutor judge jury and execution to kill anybody he wants

which obama's it is that obama did it imo he took it higher than bush he took it out of them and he can kill anybody wants based on secret evidence never confirmed doesn't have to be events anybody indicted and he doesn't have to share an explanation with anybody you just say i trust you to do it and that's what obama did when he killed the radical cleric anwar locky and his kid and his 16 year old son in yemen yes and it continues on and i believe chris that today that the. assassinations presidential assassination which by the way also violate an exact. the border which prohibits presidential exist as asked in agents 12 triple 3 they continue on a scale that we don't know about because the congressional oversight power has completely collapsed so these people just disappear and we never even know about them or we've tribute of somebody else the israelis did it aside let's assign that

to them because how many times you know people just disappear out of the in we no longer see them and we know that the executive branch is inclined any time you're in warfare all the history going back 100 years or more is the executive branch lies lies lies the u.s.s. me the mexican american war illicit the us is greer gulf of tonkin resolution every time so we know they're probably lying about this stuff. like sulaimani the appointments close yes under the constitution the president needs to said it has to confirm every principle officer of the united states president trump has gone way over any past practice he has half the cabinet or more they have never been confirmed by the senate whatsoever they're acting this acting that and moreover it's equally egregious and it's not unique to trump the national security advice or perhaps the 2nd most powerful man in the world has not 70 percent confirmation the senate lets him get it but chris you know that trustees of the kennedy center

require senate confirmation the general counsel the cia requires them to go the national security adviser does not this is utterly and completely ridiculous and i want to point out just one example of why it would make a difference michael flynn in my judgment if you want through confirmation he never would have passed muster we had known earlier on that he was engaged in lobbying for turkey illegally he was doing various and sundry things require him to register on the foreign agents registration act wasn't truthful he never would have been in and moreover john bolton never would have been confirmed you remember he couldn't even get confirmed as an appointment to the u.n. ambassador under under w. all they had. i'm kind of thing it was it was into a vehicle and react. so the this confirmation power is very very important soliciting a foreign contribution for the 2020 presidential campaign and bribery this was truly a stunning omission because nancy pelosi at one time during the investigation of

the impeachment said we have bribery here and senator richard blumenthal of connecticut just laid out the case quite clearly but the law is not ambiguous here if you are a candidate for federal office and you solicit anything of value from a foreign government to help your campaign that's a crime open and shut and we have something obviously mr trump solicited something of value from the president of ukraine namely an investigation against perhaps his rival and his opponent in 2020 in exchange for what in exchange for releasing the $400000000.00 in official act violating citizen privacy at this hour is both parties in both parties it would privacy is out the window chris without any warrants at all we're spying and collecting information relating to foreign intelligence whatever that means it we don't even know where the information is it is so stay green i talked to a close friend of mine you may know him bill been used to work at the n.s.a. they have so much collected data that they require 600 ports

a minute if you're trying to even look at what we have so not only does it invade privacy but it makes the difficulty of identifying anything useful even greater because you have a needle in a haystack you're looking for and the haystacks growing at logarithmic speed and suppression of free speech yet here we have the president openly in the tourist lee threatening that he will take action against media people and in one of the. post already yes for life for c.n.n. for alleged defamation and plus the fact is that he is uses the media if you will as a. as. a. vehicle a weapon to claim that they're unpatriotic and to exercise and perhaps this is the most dangerous instead of acknowledging that with all its flaws that organize scrutiny of government the 4th branch is indispensable to having checks and

balances it's even more important today than yesteryear because congress does no oversight anymore without the press out there it's a free pass for the executive branch and stead of encouraging that and again to go back to one point thomas jefferson if you had to choose between government newspapers as newspapers are without government either rather have newspapers the president has the everything he can to discredit and undermine the what i would call the checking these surveillance power over go over government of the media let's just talk locally what does this mean what does it mean for a constitutional democracy such as ours well i think our constitution has now been taken off of life support and what's truly i mean just another recent example is this the president goes after 2 supreme court justice ruth bader ginsburg. sotomayor saying you have to recuse yourself you know otherwise you need a price to pay in stupidly chuck schumer kind of aggravates the situation by suggesting on abortion decisions of the court doesn't have to pay a price of they don't vote the way these 2 would rather than acknowledging you know

through civilized argument this is what we believe is a sound decision making but the institutional integrity is very critical so that what does that mean going forward then with the constitution off of life support all we have is political checks on the press and those political checks are vanishing very rapidly in less we come to a congress and members recapturing the equilibrium that the framers understood was the cornerstone of liberty it's just a matter of time before we fall off the cliff where they're on the installment plan each president takes us further and further toward the cliff where we no longer will have liberty and the president will see. soon do nothing but rule by decree congress will become purely ornamental and we should have even fought the american revolution we'd be like collis under king george the 3rd maybe even worse. when you say off life support you're talking about the death of the constitutional state yes the death of constitutional state and notice this if you look at all of the debates

that the democratic candidates for the nomination of had the constitution is like not even there these critical issues that we've just broached here and you can make arguments they're not even in the playbook like where are you you have to take an oath as president to support and defend and uphold the constitution now why is that here the english when they overthrew james the 2nd and william and mary came in the parliament said we are not going to permit you to become crowned king and queen unless you take an oath to support the english bill of rights and that's why the oath is actually in the constitutional text itself is what the president has to do and not of them talk about the most important pledge that a president must make in order to enter office understand and force and protect the constitution of the united states and. that was bruce fein former senior official

of the arm of justice and constitutional scholar. why don't they need this is a no fly zone again so they don't let him out of the us i mean does. he love the missing mom of the sweet time of john the next

sharing. some emotion some are. very uncertain. telling some businesses are delusional. why groups last 12 days. welcomed the baby had a fever of 380.30 we're hoping that's. ok .

my hello there i'm in illinois and you're watching in question broadcasting live from the national headquarters of r.t. america here in washington d.c. we want to welcome our viewers from all around the world this evening so as coded 19 cases in america doubled over this past week the pan american health organization calls for the protection and p.p. supplies for health care workers at the front lines doctors say is the director of health emergencies department at the pan american health organization better known as possible he joined us a little bit earlier to discuss this i started out by asking him about coronavirus

testing.