#emoluments clause

[liberalsarecool]

Hillary or Obama getting a $400,000,000 bribe from Qatar, the same country that gave Jared Kushner $1,500,000,000 for no reason, would be making much different headlines.

[hale-my-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Trump: Nepotism = Emoluments

[project2028]

BREAKING — ABC broke the story that Donald Trump is accepting a $400 million dollar Boeing 747 plane from Qatar as a gift. Trump intends to use this plane to replace the current Air Force One until the end of his term and then the plane will be transferred to his own personal Presidential Library.

The Trump Organization just last week announced that they were building a 5 billion dollar golf resort in Qatar and now they are gifting Trump a plane

This news story wasn’t actually confirmed until Trump later blasted Democrats for criticizing the transaction thus confirming the reports to be true.

The current Air Force One is owned by the United States Department of Defense and is strictly owned and maintained by the US government for security purposes.

This is blatant corruption to the core. Elected officials are not allowed to accept gifts over $20. In fact, Article 1 of the Constitution via the Emoluments Clause says that no elected official is allowed to accept any gifts from any King, Prince, or foreign State AT ALL.

Donald Trump’s own Attorney General Pam Bondi who approved the gift, was a paid Six figure lobbyist for Qatar.

Impeachable offense.

Trump says US government plans to accept luxury jet following reports of multimillion-dollar gift from Qatar | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump said Sunday night that the Defense Department plans to accept a Boeing 747-8 jet to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT,

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Trump family has raked in $3.4 billion over his two presidencies, new report says

President Donald Trump and his family made an estimated $2.37 billion from cryptocurrency alone, the report claims

[raygun631]

America in terms everyone can understand

[jonostroveart]

When Pigs Fly

[mommahoney]

The Emoluments Clause

It's PLAINLY stated in our Constitution.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Wait, That’s Unconstitutional

Making sense of Trump's all-out assault on the foundations of our system

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

There’s a common reaction to the headlines these days. Over the past 100 days, those of us who spent any time in law school (or paid attention in civics class) find ourselves recoiling, blinking, or shaking our heads in disbelief, thinking to ourselves, “He can’t do that.” “He” being Trump, and “that” being whatever latest affront to our Constitution and laws he has announced or his administration has done. Because these attacks are so rapid-fire in nature, it’s easy to get lost in the fog of his war on our founding principles. When this happens, it’s helpful to climb to a higher vantage point, reassert how things are supposed to be, and then understand more precisely how Trump has come for the constitutional, foundational values of our nation. These are not always so easy to parse or understand at first glance. Trump isn’t acting with pinpoint precision but rather with a heavy hammer. Moreover, he acts primarily in his own self-interest to accumulate power and money, while our Constitution suffers collateral damage. To complicate things further, some of his declarations and actions violate multiple parts of our Constitution, while others leverage one violation to create or amplify others. Today, I want to focus on five basic principles and rights contained within our founding documents, as envisioned by the founders:

The establishment of co-equal, separate branches of government

The prohibition on corruption within the Emoluments Clause

The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and a free press

The Fourth Amendment’s right to due process under law

The Fourteenth Amendment’s right to equal protection

For each of the above, I’ll lay out relevant language and principles before discussing a few key ways Trump has shredded them through his executive orders and actions. Note that this is not meant to be exhaustive; that would no doubt fill whole history books and legal treatises. Rather, through some better-known examples, I hope to provide a way to think rigorously and with discipline about how Trump threatens our constitutional foundations. Through a clearer understanding of the precise nature of his attacks and the core values he threatens, we can all feel less overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the flood while steeling and grounding ourselves more firmly in the defense of our constitutional Republic.

Stay in your lane, Donald: Disrespecting the separation of powers

Our Constitution begins with three distinct articles that establish a tripartite government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches. We understand these to be both independent and co-equal, and that they are intended to place checks upon the power of the others. But where does that notion of separate, co-equal branches that check each other come from? It derives partly from the fact that we have three separate branches in the first place, each charged with different roles. The legislature makes laws and controls the public purse. The executive faithfully executes those laws. And the judiciary, at least since Marbury v. Madison, acts as the arbiter and interpreter of our laws and the Constitution. We often take this set-up for granted, but at one point in our history, before we became a sovereign nation, all these powers lay in one party’s hands. It was a major reason we rebelled against the British crown. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47,

[...]

One of the first things his administration did was freeze billions in funds that Congress had already appropriated. This is called “impoundment” and the Supreme Court ruled 50 years ago, when Nixon tried it, that it’s unconstitutional because it usurps the power of Congress over public funds. If our democracy were functioning in a healthy way, Congress would have impeached Trump over this power grab the moment it happened. We face a crisis today precisely because our GOP-controlled Congress is unwilling to stand up to him and reclaim its authority. That means we must fight in the courts until we have a chance to change the balance of power in the 2026 midterm elections. Beyond seizing critical control of the flow of funds, Trump has also unilaterally imposed the most massive tax hike in generations. He’s done this by raising import taxes, also known as tariffs. It’s important to understand that the President doesn’t actually have the power to impose tariffs on his own. Trump is arguing that Congress gave him that power, however, by allowing him to declare “national emergencies” and impose tariffs in response. But these “emergencies” are pretextual and non-existent, and rule by emergency decree is how authoritarians seize power within a democracy, whether it’s Germany in the 1930s or the U.S. today. Once again, it’s largely up to Congress to stop him, but even just yesterday Republicans in the Senate narrowly voted down an effort to repeal Trump’s tariff authority. The most critical test of our system of governance is now well underway. The judiciary is empowered with interpreting our Constitution, and in a 9-0 opinion has ordered the government to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García, a migrant wrongfully sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador at the request of and with payment from the United States. To date, the White House has not done so, though there are reports that half-hearted efforts to request Abrego García’s return have finally begun. In an interview with ABC News, Trump startlingly admitted that he has the power to obey the Supreme Court but is declining to do so because “the lawyers” said the ruling said otherwise. (It did not.) If the White House can seize the power of the purse from Congress and can thumb its nose at judiciary orders, then it has seized for itself “all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands” as Madison warned. And that is in fact “the very definition of tyranny."

[...]

That pesky First Amendment: Trump tramples upon free speech and a free press

Of all of the amendments to our Constitution, we are likely most familiar with the First. On the subject of freedom of speech, it says this:

[Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble….]

Courts have interpreted this to include any state official action, including by the White House, that impinges on free speech. These protections importantly include not permitting government officials to favor one type of speech over another. Thus, content-based laws or restrictions are disfavored and presumptively unconstitutional, while content-neutral laws or regulations (which affect the time, place or manner of speech, without regard to content) can more readily pass muster. For example, in 1972 the Supreme Court held in Police Dept. of City of Chicago v. Mosley that the “government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial rules.” Further, it held in 1992 in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul that the “government may not regulate speech based on hostility—or favoritism—toward the underlying message expressed.” And in 1995, it held in Rosenberger v. University of Virginia that a public university couldn’t deny funding to a student publication because its statements were religiously themed, provided it was supplying funding to other groups. This was a form of “viewpoint” discrimination—a disallowed form of content-based regulation. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over the past 100 days, the Trump White House has regularly engaged in content-based bias and viewpoint discrimination, particularly against the press and other institutions such as big law firms and universities. Take its actions toward the Associated Press. When that organization refused to start calling the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s new name for it (the “Gulf of America”), Trump tried to ban it from the White House. A federal judge quickly ruled that this was improper viewpoint discrimination. “Under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” wrote federal district court Judge Trevor McFadden. “The Constitution requires no less.” Trump has also come after major law firms and elite universities for their liberal politics and advocacy for his opponents. One executive order targeted the firm of Perkins Coie, which had done legal work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as defended against election-related lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, by stripping its lawyers of security clearances necessary to do a great deal of high-level government work.

The first 100 days of the Trump Regime reveal that he has systematically trashed our Constitution.