Questions of Civic Proportions
What more can we see when look at the past and the present at the same time?
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Checks on Executive power are no straight forward proposition.
Throughout the reporting on the Mueller Report, Neal Katyal has shared his thinking when drafting the special counsel regulations in 1999. That team wanted to address what went wrong with the Starr Report during the Clinton administration. The Mueller Report is the first test of those revised regulations. Read Katyal’s initial response to this week’s events in the New Yorker’s “ Neal Katyal on Whether the Mueller Report Went Far Enough.”
Katyal on the question of why Mueller didn't push harder to interview President Trump:
Mueller had to know that, if he tried to subpoena the President, given what the President had been saying, there would have been a fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. I think Mueller would have won that fight, but it would have been years down the road, and, if your goal is to try and get the information to the American people and to Congress as quickly as you can, a lengthy court fight is going to put things back.
Our foreign policy doesn’t operate in a domain sepearate from domestic politics.
You may have read about President Jimmy Carter’s Palm Sunday remarks about President Trump and his concern that China is getting ahead of us. Carter pointed back to 1979, and the choices each of the two countries have made in the years that followed. The government and the people of the United States reveal their values when they make decisions about what gets money and what doesn’t.
A similar mathematical question raised over $1 million for three churches in Louisiana this week. Journalist Yashar Ali’s tweet went viral. He observed that the effort to rebuild Notre Dame would be well funded and asked his followers to match his donation to the three black churches burned down by a racist arsonist. President Trump’s pledge to send money to France prompted quick criticism about sending money abroad while Flint still needs clean drinking water and the people of Puerto Rico still need so much.
The mile-markers of the movement we celebrate today didn’t look like much at the time.
In Voices of the Movement, Jonathan Capeheart wants to elevate the words of people who experienced the Civil Rights Movement firsthand. With his podcast from the Washington Post, Capeheart asks what the lessons of the past can tell us about where to go from here. Three episodes into a nine-episode series, the conversation seems focused more on the history than the future. There might, however, be an important lesson for all of us in knowing that the guy who smuggled MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out of the Birmingham jail never looked at the notes he carried out.
Clarence Jones wanted to talk to Dr. King about fundraising and paying bail for the young people who had been arrested. Dr. King had something else on his mind, so Jones had to figure out the money by himself.
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