6 quotes from today's oral argument in Trump v. United States.

I listened live and took some handwritten notes, so I could find various things in the transcript. Here are the 6 quotes that made the cut for me. All but one are from the Justices.

1. Trump's lawyer, D. John Sauer, encourages the Court to see far beyond Trump to the true horror of criminally prosecuting ex-Presidents:

The implications of the Court's decision here extend far beyond the facts of this case. Could President George W. Bush have been sent to prison for... allegedly lying to Congress to induce war in Iraq? Could President Obama be charged with murder for killing U.S. citizens abroad by drone strike? Could President Biden someday be charged with unlawfully inducing immigrants to enter the country illegally for his border policies?

2. In a similar vein, from Justice Alito:

So what about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese Americans during World War II? Couldn't that have been charged under 18 U.S.C. 241, conspiracy against civil rights?

3. Justice Gorsuch makes a brilliant suggestion. If Presidents didn't have immunity from prosecution, they could give themselves the equivalent by pardoning themselves on the way out. And note the reminder that Obama could be on the hook for those drone strike murders:

"I recognize that my dad’s communication style is not to everyone’s taste and I know that his tweets can feel a bit unfiltered..."

Said Ivanka Trump, in her convention speech last night. Clearly, she was there to reach out to people who might like some or a lot of what Trump is doing but think there's something brutal and rough about him and nice people don't associate with that.

My choice of the word "rough" makes me think of that famous line attributed to George Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." But that has nothing to do with how the President of the United States chooses to speak.

President Obama spoke in a beautifully polished style — most of the time — but he was ready to do violence on our behalf. I wrote "most of the time" because as soon I thought about Obama's readiness to do violence on our behalf, I remembered something he said: "Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."

Here's the larger context of that Ivanka quote:

"Some of the president’s critics will concede that Mr. Suleimani was an evil man, but many complain his killing was unlawful. Wrong...."

"He was a United States-designated terrorist commander. As I have been briefed, he was plotting further attacks against Americans at the time of his death. The authority granted to the president under Article II of the Constitution provides ample legal basis for this strike. Furthermore, those who accept the constitutionality of the War Powers Act should recall that Congress’s 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force very much remain in effect and clearly cover the Suleimani operation. This will be a relief to the Obama administration, which ordered hundreds of drone strikes using such a legal rationale. American forces are in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government, and they have every right and authority to defend themselves. This legal act of self-defense was not only proportionate — it was targeted and brilliantly executed, causing essentially no collateral damage."

Writes Senator Tom Cotton in "The Case for Killing Qassim Suleimani/The strike was justified and legally sound" (NYT).

That phrase "targeted and brilliantly executed, causing essentially no collateral damage" made me think of the Iranians hitting the passenger plane, which seems to have been the exact opposite — completely mistargeted, idiotically executed, and causing nothing but collateral damage, extreme collateral damage.

"We asked 2020 candidates how they would wield presidential power. Here is what they said."

A NYT extravaganza.

I tried to read some of that but it's a tough slog through the verbiage. The questions are long and carefully framed, but you're not adequately rewarded for understanding the questions because the answers are not written to make the distinctions clear.

My son John blogged this by choosing just one question and only 2 answers to it.

The one question John chose was:

1. Presidential War Powers

In recent years, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has claimed that the Constitution authorizes the president, as commander in chief, to order the military to attack other countries without congressional permission if the president determines that this would be anticipatory self-defense or otherwise serve the interests of the United States — at least where the nature, scope and duration of the anticipated hostilities are “limited,” like airstrikes against Libyan government forces in 2011 and Syrian government forces in 2017 and 2018.

Do you agree with the O.L.C.’s reasoning? Under what circumstances other than a literally imminent threat to the United States, if any, does the Constitution permit a president to order an attack on another country without prior Congressional authorization? What about bombing Iranian or North Korean nuclear facilities?

You have to work just to understand the question, and I admire the NYT for framing the questions with such precision. But the candidates can't give straight answers — especially the ones who are and will probably continue to be members of Congress. The 2 answers John picked out are from Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — neither of whom is currently a member of Congress. John seems to see a distinct difference between the 2 answers.

"The Islamic State’s so-called caliphate has been defeated, a U.S.-backed force said Saturday..."

WaPo reports in "The Islamic State’s caliphate has been defeated, U.S.-backed forces say."

I celebrate this victory, but please forgive me if I look immediately turn to WaPo's treatment of President Trump. The first mention of him is in paragraph 4, and it's negative:

The militants switched gears as territorial defeat loomed, seeding sleeper cells across former strongholds as they prepared a new phase of insurgency. U.S. military officials have also warned that President Trump’s planned troop withdrawal — the shape of which remains unclear — has the potential to create a security vacuum within which the Islamic State could regroup.

Next we see that the dramatic success of the "caliphate" occurred under Obama:

The U.S.-led military campaign began in September 2014 after the Islamist militants rampaged through Iraq, seizing a third of its territory in the space of a week. They described the land that they seized as an Islamic State, and it often bore the hallmarks of a real one. Bureaucrats dealt with household bills and garbage collection. The group even minted its own coins.

Notice that Obama is not mentioned. But the next sentence refers to the current president and just calls him "the president," which I found disorienting because I saw "2014" and thought about Obama:

For the president, victory against the Islamic State marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise and as the battle ground toward its conclusion, Trump had repeatedly declared the group defeated.

So the horrible events that happened under Obama's watch are never tied to his name, and then Trump is not named next to the word "victory" — "For the president, victory" — but he is named later in the sentence where it's more negative — Trump "repeatedly declared" something that sounds wrong, that the group was "defeated" when that didn't happen until just now.

"Omar says the 'hope and change' offered by Barack Obama was a mirage."

"Recalling the 'caging of kids' at the U.S.-Mexico border and the 'droning of countries around the world' on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor. 'We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,' Omar says. 'And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.'"

From "The Democrats’ Dilemma/What Ilhan Omar and Dean Phillips tell us about the future of the Democratic Party" (Politico).

"When I came into office, I met right there in the Oval Office with President Obama. And I sat in those beautiful chairs."

Said Trump — WaPo transcript — who seemed to be flying high at the end of his Q&A session after his speech today.

And we talked. It was supposed to be 15 minutes. As you know, it ended up being many times longer than that. And I said, "What's the biggest problem?" He said, "By far, North Korea." And I don't want to speak for him. But I believe he would have gone to war with North Korea. I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.

Now, where are we now? No missiles, no rockets, no nuclear testing. We've learned a lot. But much more importantly than all of it, much more important -- much, much more important than that -- is we have a great relationship. I have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un. And I've done a job.

In fact, I think I can say this: Prime Minister Abe of Japan gave me the most beautiful copy of a letter that he sent to the people who give out a thing called the Nobel Prize. He said, "I have nominated you, or, respectfully, on behalf of Japan, I am asking them to give you the Nobel Peace Prize." I said, "Thank you." Many other people feel that way, too. I'll probably never get it.

But that's OK. They gave it to Obama. He didn't even know what he got it for. He was there for about 15 seconds and he got the Nobel Prize. He said, "Oh, what did I get it for?" With me, I probably will never get it.

But if you look at Idlib Province in Syria, I stopped the slaughter of perhaps 3 million people. Nobody talks about that.... We do a lot of good work. This administration does a tremendous job and we don’t get credit for it.... So, Prime Minister Abe came here -- I mean, it was the most beautiful... five-page letter. Nobel Prize. He sent it to them. You know why? Because he had rocket ships and he had missiles flying over Japan. And they had alarms going off -- you know that. Now, all of a sudden, they feel good. They feel safe. I did that.

And it was a very tough dialogue at the beginning. Fire and fury. Total annihilation. “My button is bigger than yours” and “My button works.” Remember that? You don’t remember that. And people said, "Trump is crazy." And you know what it ended up being? A very good relationship. I like [Kim Jong-Un] a lot and he likes me a lot. Nobody else would have done that. The Obama administration couldn’t have done it. Number one, they probably wouldn’t have done it. And number two, they didn’t have the capability to do it.

At that point, he suddenly wrapped up — "So I just want to thank everybody. I want to wish our new attorney general great luck and speed and enjoy your life." Enjoy your life? I had the feeling that someone he trusted was flagging him down — Too high, you're flying too high, bring it in for a landing — and he did.

Trump said, "I don't want to speak for" Obama, then told us Obama told him he was "so close to starting a big war with North Korea." Obama was going to start a war? A nuclear war? And Trump doesn't think he should tell, but he immediately tells. Wild.

The man (Trump) is so high on himself. It seems that he was pumping himself higher and higher. He seems liberated by the belief that the Nobel people will never give him their prize, so he'll simply declaim his deservingness... and denounce Obama's.

"What do you say to Michelle Obama who says she will never forgive you for your birther comments in the past?"

A reporter asks Trump. Video at the link. Trump's answer:

Oh, Michelle Obama said that? I haven't seen it. I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book. And they always insist that you come up with controversial.

Well, I'll give you a little controversy back: I'll never forgive him for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly. It was depleted. Everything was old and tired. And I came in, and I had to fix it. And I'm in the process of spending tremendous amounts of money. So I'll never forgive him for what he did to our military. I'll never forgive him for what he did in many other ways, which I'll talk to you about in the future.

But what he did -- because she talked about safety -- what he did to our military made this country very unsafe for you and you and you.

The "safety" he's saying she talked about must refer to threats she says she received as a result of Trump's raising the question of whether Obama was born in the United States. From Michelle Obama's book (quoted at WaPo):

“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she writes. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”

By the way, why did Trump say "Oh, Michelle Obama said that? I haven't seen it" and then "because she talked about safety"? It seems to be one statement, she'll never forgive him for putting her family's safety at risk by raising the "birther" question. Did Trump see that statement or not?

"I lost my legs because my gov't was afraid to use the tools they had and saw me as expendable. I wish I'd had this admin."

"We begged to use bombs on the minefield ghost town I lost my legs clearing. But by all means-continue your rhetorically righteous tweeting...."

In an effort to understand the subliminality of war rhetoric, I erase some of the words in a paragraph of a Washington Post column.

Here's the first paragraph of "Obama’s Syria strike plan was much bigger than Trump’s" by Josh Rogin in The Washington Post:

Same screen shot, with erasures:

"I can imagine the smile on Trump administration officials’ faces when they figured out that they would both enforce a red line that Obama wouldn’t and rely on Obama administration legal thinking to provide cover for doing so."

Writes lawprof Jack Goldsmith in "The Constitutionality of the Syria Strike Through the Eyes of OLC (and the Obama Administration)."

President Obama’s aborted threat to intervene in Syria in 2013 has led many to forgot that the administration believed it had the domestic constitutional authority to intervene without congressional authorization. Even when President Obama announced that he would seek congressional authorization for the strike, he insisted that “I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization.”... As Charlie Savage reported [in the NYT in 2013]:

In recent weeks, administration lawyers decided that it was within Mr. Obama’s constitutional authority to carry out a strike on Syria as well, even without permission from Congress or the Security Council, because of the “important national interests” of limiting regional instability and of enforcing the norm against using chemical weapons, as [Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel,] said.

Obama had a "tendency... to micromanage issues better left to military commanders."

According to the NYT, which recognizes Trump's return to what is the better approach.

The change is at the heart of a re-engineering of the National Security Council’s role under its new leader, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, and reflects Mr. Trump’s belief that the N.S.C. should focus less on military operations and tactics and more on strategic issues. A guiding precept for the president and his team is that the balance of power in the world has shifted against American interests, and that General McMaster should focus on developing foreign and economic policy options in concert with the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies to respond to that challenge....

“In defense of the Obama administration, every single time we went to the president and asked for something more, we eventually got it, though we often had to jump through a lot of hoops,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who held a senior position at the Defense Department under Mr. Obama. “The episode that took the cake was toward the end of the administration, when we literally had cabinet secretaries debating the movement of three helicopters from Iraq to Syria.”

Obama frees Chelsea Manning!

The NYT reports:

President Obama on Tuesday largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration, and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous.

The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to commit suicide last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the male military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.

Manning gets out this May, instead of in 2045.

We were just talking yesterday about the NYT's sympathetic highlighting of Manning's plight. And we were just talking today — it's one post down — about the NYT editorial "Mr. Obama, Pick Up Your Pardon Pen."

ADDED: Obama has also pardoned James Cartwright:

Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleaded guilty in October to a single charge of making false statements to federal investigators in 2012 when he was questioned about leaking top secret information on US efforts to cripple Iran’s nuclear program to two journalists. 

Obama confronted with some terrible facts about female Marines in combat.

At last night's "Military and The Commander and Chief" town hall with President Obama, Captain Lauren Serrano asked a question about women in combat:

CAPTAIN LAUREN SERRANO: A study by the Marine Corps revealed that mixed gender combat units performed notably worse and that women suffered staggeringly higher rates of injury. Just one of those statistics showed that mixed gender units took up to 159 percent longer to evacuate a casualty than all-male units. As the wife of a Marine who deploys to combat often, that added time can mean the difference between my husband living or dying. Why were these tangible negative consequences disregarded and how does the integration of women positively enhance the infantry mission and make me and my husband safer?

Obama says:

I don't think any of - any studies are going to be disregarded. I think that what we have to do is to take a look at the particular deployments, the particular situations.... [I]f you can't do the job, if there is a problem with performance, then that has to be taken into account. But keep in mind that there are a lot of jobs that are considered combat that don't necessarily involve you being on the front lines going door-to-door in Fallujah.... [T]here may be situations in which [women] could do the best job. It may not involve physical strength or how many pull-ups you can do, it may involve the precision with which you can operate and you being able to keep your cool you being able to carry out a task with a low error rate. And it may be that in those situations, a woman can perform better than a man.

Did the Marine Corps study show that there were some things women did better? Or is the idea that individuals who can do these "precision" tasks best will be assigned to them, and some women will fit this group? And then there are physical-strength tasks that just aren't that dangerous, but are technically "combat," and that's also a place where female Marines can be assigned. There really aren't that many female Marines — only 6.8 % of Marines are female — so the point seems to be: Use them properly and the problem is taken care of without the blunt exclusion from combat.

The inclusion is not, Obama says, just "political correctness" or "some symbolic issue." The idea is to use everyone to the extent that they are useful. Except he doesn't say "use." He speaks in terms of giving "opportunities."

I don't want the presumption to be that a woman can't do the job, because I'm looking at you right now and I'm pretty sure that you're in better shape than I am and you can do a lot of stuff I couldn't do. And I don't want you not to have that opportunity.

I agree with you that we can't just out of some ideological notion make it more dangerous for your husband. But I don't want to - I don't want a military, an institution that starts with the premise that women can't do something. If it turns out they can't do something, then we'll deal with that specific situation. But I don't want to start off with that assumption.

For the annals of "Unexpectedly": "For Obama, an Unexpected Legacy of Two Full Terms at War."

Remember, as you listen, week after week, to predictions about what's going to happen next fall and in the coming 4 years: All the erstwhile seers are going to be calling everything "unexpected." I mean, if a Democrat wins, they'll be calling each bad thing unexpected, and if a Republican wins they call each good thing unexpected. That's me posing as a seer. If I'm wrong, it will be unexpectedly.

The headline quoted in the post title appears in — can you guess? — The New York Times. From the text:

[Obama] has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.

And — unless he shuts down all war by November or we amend the Constitution — no one can ever beat his record.

Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009....

They might want to avoid that advance Peace Prize move in the future... unless they want to promote war. (But, of course, Obama wasn't given the Peace Prize because they'd predicted he'd end Bush's wars. He was given the Peace Prize because he'd caused America to progress from what the Norwegians saw as our benighted racist ways and to elect a black President.)

The NYT portrays Obama's war legacy in a golden light:

His closest advisers say he has relied so heavily on limited covert operations and drone strikes because he is mindful of the dangers of escalation and has long been skeptical that American military interventions work.

He is mindful... A GOP President is lucky to get credit for thinking at all. Did the NYT ever call GWB "mindful"? Will it call President Trump "mindful"? Yes, I'm predicting that Trump will win. It's an "unexpectedly" kind of year.

I happened to glance at the comments at the NYT. The newest one at the moment says: "The opening sentence reveals the republican slant making the rest of the article invalid." Ah! Poor NYT! Here I am writing about its Democratic Party slant and some reader is bashing it from the other side. The NYT has reason to think we are getting this just right. 

I don't think the White House Correspondents Dinner people enjoyed Larry Wilmore very much.

Everyone looks so uncomfortable. Which is a good thing, right? Why should he make these people comfortable? Here's the transcript. I'll try to excerpt what I think this crowd may have disliked the most:

And I have to admit it’s not easy to follow the president, man. You got some jokes. Mr. President. The president’s funny. Stay in your lane, man. You don’t seem me going around president-ing all the time, right? I don’t go around passing health care, and signing executive orders, pardoning turkeys … not closing Guantanamo. Oh wait, maybe I did do that.

But I have to say, it’s great, it looks like you’re really enjoying your last year of the presidency. Saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors. That was cool. That was cool, yeah. You know it kinda makes sense, too, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from long distances, right? What? Am I wrong?

Speaking of drones, how is Wolf Blitzer still on television? Ask a follow-up question. Hey, Wolf, I’m ready to project tonight’s winner: Anyone that isn’t watching “The Situation Room.”...

But I have to say, about the first lady, it’s so nice to have dinner with you. She is the epitome of grace, class and poise, isn’t she? She really is. Not to be confused with future first gentleman Bill Clinton, whose three favorite strippers are named Grace, Class and Poise....

I’m impressed with the people in this room. There are so many rich, powerful people in this room. You know, it’s nice to finally match the names to the faces in the Panama Papers. It’s very nice....
MSNBC — MSNBC here tonight? No? Which actually now stands for “Missing a Significant Number of Black Correspondents.” Am I wrong? They like fired Melissa Harris-Perry, they canceled Joy Reid, they booted Touré. I heard they put Chris Hayes on probation because they thought he was related to Isaac Hayes.... MSNBC got rid of so many black people I thought Boko Haram was running that network. What was going on…?

You know, I should say some of America’s finest black journalists are here tonight. Don Lemon’s here, too. Hey, Don, how’s it going? Alleged journalist Don Lemon, everybody.

The camera shows Don Lemon giving him the finger.

I'll bet the audience was expecting more and harsher focus on Donald Trump. There was a reference to "his genitalia" — which took a shot at a Democrat (calling it "his President Johnson") —  to his "little baby hands" — the reason "everyone treats Donald Trump with kid gloves" — and an attack on "Morning Joe" for giving him so much favorable TV time — "Morning Joe: has their head so far up Trump’s ass they bumped into Chris Christie." But Wilmore delivered more pain to Democrats — politicians and the press.

There were also the transgressive racial words, from the beginning middle and end of the speech: 1. "negro" ("Well, welcome to 'Negro Night' here at the Washington Hilton, or as Fox News will report, 'Two thugs disrupt elegant dinner in D.C.'"), 2. "jigaboo" ("Ben Carson... praised Jackson... From the grave, Andrew Jackson replied, 'What did that jigaboo say?'"), and 3. "nigga" ("So, Mr. President, if I’m going to keep it 100: Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga. You did it.").

Obama did a great job of laughing and looking like he had a sense of humor about everything. Why shouldn't he? He had his speech too, and it was already done and — probably most people would say — funnier and better delivered. Check it out:

"Mr. Obama needs to be straightforward about deploying more troops. 'It has not been transparent for the public'..."

"...Representative Mac Thornberry, the Texas Republican who leads the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview, referring to the evolution of the military campaign. 'My view is that the president jumps through hoops because of his views of this politically.' Mr. Obama has not made a clear argument that giving the Pentagon freer rein can lead to greater success against ISIS. It seems inevitable that the next president will be dealing with this fight. Mr. Obama would do his successor a favor by being frank with the American people about the struggle and choices ahead."

The last 2 paragraphs of a NYT editorial titled "America Needs Frank Talk on ISIS."

The "linguistic contortions" the Obama adminstration uses to "mask" the "boots on the ground" that are the Special Operations forces.

Explained in the NYT:

“You know, when I said, ‘No boots on the ground,’ I think the American people understood generally that we’re not going to do an Iraq-style invasion of Iraq or Syria with battalions that are moving across the desert,” [President Obama has] said.

Defense Secretary Carter, in a discussion this month about a new deployment of as many as 200 troops, including scores of Special Operations forces, to Iraq to conduct raids and gather intelligence, spoke in Pentagon jargon. He called it a “specialized expeditionary targeting force.”

Senior American officials disagree on what exactly these troops will be doing, with top aides to Mr. Obama playing down any fighting role. “This is not a combat mission,” one senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal directives to the Pentagon. “This is to enable partners.”

But in a conference call with reporters on Dec. 2, Col. Steven H. Warren, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said, “I mean, a raid is a combat operation. There is no way around that. So, yeah, more Americans will be coming here to Iraq, and some of them will be conducting raids inside of both Iraq and Syria.”

"The United States will halt its military withdrawal from Afghanistan and instead keep thousands of troops in the country through the end of his term in 2017..."

"... President Obama announced on Thursday, prolonging the American role in a war that has now stretched on for 14 years."

“While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures,” said Mr. Obama, flanked by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his top military leaders. “I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.”

$500 million later, the Obama administration gives up on the effort to train and equip rebel forces in Syria...

... in what the NYT calls "an acknowledgment that the beleaguered program had failed to produce any kind of ground combat forces capable of taking on the Islamic State in Syria."

Some of the American-trained Syrian fighters gave at least a quarter of their United States-provided equipment to the Qaeda affiliate in Syria.... More broadly, the program has suffered from a shortage of recruits willing to fight the Islamic State instead of the army of President Bashar al-Assad....