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LONDON — As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work.So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.An examination by The New York Times and The Observer of London reveals how Cambridge Analytica’s drive to bring to market a potentially powerful new weapon put the firm — and wealthy conservative investors seeking to reshape politics — under scrutiny from investigators and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge and worked there until late 2014, said of its leaders: “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.”“They want to fight a culture war in America,” he added. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”Details of Cambridge’s acquisition and use of Facebook data have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm’s so-called psychographic modeling techniques.But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove.Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes.During a week of inquiries from The Times, Facebook downplayed the scope of the leak and questioned whether any of the data still remained out of its control. But on Friday, the company posted a statement expressing alarm and promising to take action.“This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties,” Mr. Grewal said.Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Mr. Kogan for violating Facebook’s rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago.In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators into allegations that it performed illegal work on the “Brexit” campaign. The country has strict privacy laws, and its information commissioner announced on Saturday that she was looking into whether the Facebook data was “illegally acquired and used.”In the United States, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.Congressional investigators have questioned Mr. Nix about the company’s role in the Trump campaign. And the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.While the substance of Mr. Mueller’s interest is a closely guarded secret, documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm’s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine. And the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, disclosed in October that Mr. Nix had reached out to him during the campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.” Only a tiny fraction of the users had agreed to release their information to a third party.“Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,” Mr. Grewal said. “No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”Still, he added, “it’s a serious abuse of our rules.”Reading Voters’ MindsThe Bordeaux flowed freely as Mr. Nix and several colleagues sat down for dinner at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan in late 2013, Mr. Wylie recalled in an interview. They had much to celebrate.Mr. Nix, a brash salesman, led the small elections division at SCL Group, a political and defense contractor. He had spent much of the year trying to break into the lucrative new world of political data, recruiting Mr. Wylie, then a 24-year-old political operative with ties to veterans of President Obama’s campaigns. Mr. Wylie was interested in using inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behavior and had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists, some of them affiliated with Cambridge University.The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.Then a chance meeting brought Mr. Nix into contact with Mr. Bannon, the Breitbart News firebrand who would later become a Trump campaign and White House adviser, and with Mr. Mercer, one of the richest men on earth.Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements. Mr. Bannon and the Mercers declined to comment.Mr. Mercer agreed to help finance a $1.5 million pilot project to poll voters and test psychographic messaging in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November 2013, where the Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, ran against Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic fund-raiser. Though Mr. Cuccinelli lost, Mr. Mercer committed to moving forward.The Mercers wanted results quickly, and more business beckoned. In early 2014, the investor Toby Neugebauer and other wealthy conservatives were preparing to put tens of millions of dollars behind a presidential campaign for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, work that Mr. Nix was eager to win.When Mr. Wylie’s colleagues failed to produce a memo explaining their work to Mr. Neugebauer, Mr. Nix castigated them over email.“ITS 2 PAGES!! 4 hours work max (or an hour each). What have you all been doing??” he wrote.Mr. Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages.Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew — a claim that has been disputed.When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000 — and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records.All he divulged to Facebook, and to users in fine print, was that he was collecting information for academic purposes, the social network said. It did not verify his claim. Dr. Kogan declined to provide details of what happened, citing nondisclosure agreements with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, though he maintained that his program was “a very standard vanilla Facebook app.”He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million — a number previously reported by The Intercept — contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested.
An email from Dr. Kogan to Mr. Wylie describing traits that could be predicted.
Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was “the saving grace” that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers.“We wanted as much as we could get,” he acknowledged. “Where it came from, who said we could have it — we weren’t really asking.”Mr. Nix tells a different story. Appearing before a parliamentary committee last month, he described Dr. Kogan’s contributions as “fruitless.”An International EffortJust as Dr. Kogan’s efforts were getting underway, Mr. Mercer agreed to invest $15 million in a joint venture with SCL’s elections division. The partners devised a convoluted corporate structure, forming a new American company, owned almost entirely by Mr. Mercer, with a license to the psychographics platform developed by Mr. Wylie’s team, according to company documents. Mr. Bannon, who became a board member and investor, chose the name: Cambridge Analytica.The firm was effectively a shell. According to the documents and former employees, any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.But in July 2014, an American election lawyer advising the company, Laurence Levy, warned that the arrangement could violate laws limiting the involvement of foreign nationals in American elections.In a memo to Mr. Bannon, Ms. Mercer and Mr. Nix, the lawyer, then at the firm Bracewell & Giuliani, warned that Mr. Nix would have to recuse himself “from substantive management” of any clients involved in United States elections. The data firm would also have to find American citizens or green card holders, Mr. Levy wrote, “to manage the work and decision making functions, relative to campaign messaging and expenditures.”In summer and fall 2014, Cambridge Analytica dived into the American midterm elections, mobilizing SCL contractors and employees around the country. Few Americans were involved in the work, which included polling, focus groups and message development for the John Bolton Super PAC, conservative groups in Colorado and the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican.Cambridge Analytica, in its statement to The Times, said that all “personnel in strategic roles were U.S. nationals or green card holders.” Mr. Nix “never had any strategic or operational role” in an American election campaign, the company said.Whether the company’s American ventures violated election laws would depend on foreign employees’ roles in each campaign, and on whether their work counted as strategic advice under Federal Election Commission rules.Cambridge Analytica appears to have exhibited a similar pattern in the 2016 election cycle, when the company worked for the campaigns of Mr. Cruz and then Mr. Trump. While Cambridge hired more Americans to work on the races that year, most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries, according to two former employees.Under the guidance of Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and now the campaign manager for his 2020 re-election effort, Cambridge performed a variety of services, former campaign officials said. That included designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.Cambridge executives have offered conflicting accounts about the use of psychographic data on the campaign. Mr. Nix has said that the firm’s profiles helped shape Mr. Trump’s strategy — statements disputed by other campaign officials — but also that Cambridge did not have enough time to comprehensively model Trump voters.In a BBC interview last December, Mr. Nix said that the Trump efforts drew on “legacy psychographics” built for the Cruz campaign.After the LeakBy early 2015, Mr. Wylie and more than half his original team of about a dozen people had left the company. Most were liberal-leaning, and had grown disenchanted with working on behalf of the hard-right candidates the Mercer family favored.Cambridge Analytica, in its statement, said that Mr. Wylie had left to start a rival firm, and that it later took legal action against him to enforce intellectual property claims. It characterized Mr. Wylie and other former “contractors” as engaging in “what is clearly a malicious attempt to hurt the company.”Near the end of that year, a report in The Guardian revealed that Cambridge Analytica was using private Facebook data on the Cruz campaign, sending Facebook scrambling. In a statement at the time, Facebook promised that it was “carefully investigating this situation” and would require any company misusing its data to destroy it.Facebook verified the leak and — without publicly acknowledging it — sought to secure the information, efforts that continued as recently as August 2016. That month, lawyers for the social network reached out to Cambridge Analytica contractors. “This data was obtained and used without permission,” said a letter that was obtained by the Times. “It cannot be used legitimately in the future and must be deleted immediately.”Mr. Grewal, the Facebook deputy general counsel, said in a statement that both Dr. Kogan and “SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”But copies of the data still remain beyond Facebook’s control. The Times viewed a set of raw data from the profiles Cambridge Analytica obtained.While Mr. Nix has told lawmakers that the company does not have Facebook data, a former employee said that he had recently seen hundreds of gigabytes on Cambridge servers, and that the files were not encrypted.Today, as Cambridge Analytica seeks to expand its business in the United States and overseas, Mr. Nix has mentioned some questionable practices. This January, in undercover footage filmed by Channel 4 News in Britain and viewed by The Times, he boasted of employing front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients around the world, and even suggested ways to entrap politicians in compromising situations.All the scrutiny appears to have damaged Cambridge Analytica’s political business. No American campaigns or “super PACs” have yet reported paying the company for work in the 2018 midterms, and it is unclear whether Cambridge will be asked to join Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.In the meantime, Mr. Nix is seeking to take psychographics to the commercial advertising market. He has repositioned himself as a guru for the digital ad age — a “Math Man,” he puts it. In the United States last year, a former employee said, Cambridge pitched Mercedes-Benz, MetLife and the brewer AB InBev, but has not signed them on.
Over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, President Donald Trump went on a tweetstorm criticizing the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Here’s a look at where Trump had a point and where his tweets were either misleading or wrong."As the House Intelligence Committee has concluded, there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. As many are now finding out, however, there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice & State. #DrainTheSwamp"Even the House Intelligence Committee — which released a report generally considered favorable to Trump — did not quite say that. On March 12, Republican committee members announced that they had found no evidence that Trump campaign associates colluded with Russian officials during the 2016 election. The findings are part of a forthcoming 150-page draft report, which contained no input from Democrats.Yet even the Republican who chaired the investigation, Texas Rep. Mike Conaway, didn’t go as far as Trump did. Conaway said on NBC’s Meet the Press that there was "no evidence of collusion." That phrasing is something short of a determination that there was definitely no collusion.Conaway also acknowledged that Democrats on the committee feel differently on that question. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on House Intelligence Committee, has said he believes there is "ample evidence" that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians.As for Trump’s reference to "leaking, lying and corruption" at the FBI and the Justice Department, Trump is likely referring to ousted former FBI director James Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe.Comey, who was fired by Trump on May 9, later testified that he made contemporaneous notes of conversations with the president that he strategically leaked to the media through a friend after his firing.McCabe was fired shortly before his retirement after the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility reportedly recommended his dismissal. The FBI’s internal watchdog concluded that McCabe had authorized FBI officials to discuss the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, then misled investigators when asked about it. Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz is expected to release a report on McCabe’s conduct.After his firing, McCabe said in a statement that he was being "singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey."It’s not entirely clear what Trump meant by his reference to the State Department."The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!"Trump appears to be reviving a familiar line of attack he’s made against McCabe, concerning the intersection of his wife’s political activities and his role in the investigation into Clinton’s handling of sensitive emails. As we’ve noted in previous fact-checks, Trump has repeatedly been wrong on the details.As a Virginia state candidate, Jill McCabe, a hospital physician, did receive donations linked to a longtime Clinton supporter, Terry McAuliffe, who was also the Democratic governor of Virginia.But if Trump is insinuating these donations influenced Andrew McCabe’s approach to the Clinton email investigation — which Trump has previously suggested — he’s ignoring key facts in the timeline that undercut this assertion.In October 2015, McAuliffe's PAC, Common Good VA, gave Dr. McCabe's campaign a total of $450,000. (An additional $17,500 had been given earlier.) The following month, McCabe lost her race. On Feb. 1, 2016 — three months after his wife's defeat — Andrew McCabe became the FBI's deputy director. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI said it was the first time McCabe had any oversight role over the Clinton case.Separately, Trump appears to be referring to reports that surfaced in May 2016 that the FBI was investigating McAuliffe’s campaign contributions, including $120,000 in donations from Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang through his U.S. companies."The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!"Trump is wrong to say the investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia started with a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Republican lawmakers have confirmed that George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser who was told during the election that high-ranking Russian government officials in Moscow possessed "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails," triggered the probe.While Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hasn’t fully laid out his rationale for why he appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller, some key facts leap out from the timeline leading up to his May 17, 2017, decision.On March 2, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from any "existing or future investigations" related to the 2016 presidential election, after he failed to disclose during his confirmation proceedings that he’d met with Russian officials during the campaign.On May 9, Trump fired Comey, and two days later said on national television that "this Russia thing" was part of his reasoning for sacking the FBI director.Rosenstein appointed Mueller less than a week later.To date, Mueller has filed charges against 19 people and three companies, and obtained guilty pleas from five people, including three who worked on Trump’s presidential campaign.Finally, Trump is wrong to say the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court was misused in order to spy on his campaign.Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page left the campaign in Sept. 2016. It was nearly a month later when FBI and Justice Department officials obtained a warrant on Oct. 21 to monitor Page after convincing the court there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of Russia. "Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source...or known someone else to be an anonymous source...?’ He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends."In this tweet, Trump is alleging that McCabe’s statement, issued after his firing, contradicts Comey’s sworn testimony during a May 3, 2017, hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In an exchange with Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, Comey stated that he never authorized anyone at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump or Clinton investigations.Here’s their full exchange:Grassley: "Director Comey, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?"Comey: "Never."Grassley: "Question two, relatively related, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation?"Comey: "No."After his March 16 firing, McCabe issued a statement defending himself against allegations that he improperly permitted law enforcement officials to discuss the Clinton investigation with reporters, which referenced the FBI director, the position Comey held at the time."I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As deputy director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter," McCabe’s statement reads.Here, McCabe states only that Comey was "aware of the interaction with the reporter" — not that Comey authorized it, which was what Grassley asked about."Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me. I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?"Just because McCabe may not have taken notes literally during a conversation with Trump doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be admissible in court. There is some flexibility in determining whether notes are "contemporaneous," and thus valid in court.The federal rules of evidence bar many types of "hearsay" evidence -- essentially, statements made out of court and not under oath -- from being used in court. But there are exceptions to this rule, and the very first type of admissible evidence on the list is "present sense impression." The rules of evidence describe this as "a statement describing or explaining an event or condition, made while or immediately after the declarant perceived it."The key phrase here is "immediately after." Additional commentary in the federal rules of evidence explains that "with respect to the time element, (the exception) recognizes that in many, if not most, instances precise contemporaneity is not possible, and hence a slight lapse is allowable."If this case ever went to court, it would be up to a judge to decide whether any delay by McCabe in writing his notes was too long to classify as "immediately after." It’s premature to litigate this question, so for now, Trump has no basis for suggesting that McCabe’s notes are "fake.""Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added...does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!"We have previously rated Mostly False a Trump assertion about Mueller’s team that "the people that have been hired are all Hillary Clinton supporters, some of them worked for Hillary Clinton."In addition, the Washington Post reported that 13 members of Mueller’s team are registered Democrats: Greg Andres, Rush Atkinson, Ryan Dickey, Michael Dreeben, Kyle Freeny, Andrew Goldstein, Adam Jed, Elizabeth Prelogar, James Quarles, Jeannie Rhee, Brandon Van Grack, Andrew Weissmann, and Aaron Zelinsky.Of these, eight have given donations exclusively to Democrats: Andres, Atkinson, Freeny, Goldstein, Prelogar, Rhee, Van Grack, and Weissmann. Six of them have donated to Clinton specifically, or to a Clinton-aligned fund. One other member of the team, Quarles, has given to both Democrats and Republicans.However, Trump left out that four other members of the Mueller team are not registered with any political party.In addition, federal regulations bar the Justice Department from considering political affiliation or political contributions as a factor in hiring career appointees, leaving Mueller no ability to factor that into his hiring decisions.
Unfortunately, the only way to deal with Trumpers is beat them over the head with the truth.#Resist
There is spin, and there lying. Trump does both, but when it comes to lying he takes it to a whole new level.
Quote from: Lois on March 21, 2018, 03:15:32 PMThere is spin, and there lying. Trump does both, but when it comes to lying he takes it to a whole new level.Naw........It's easy to see when Trump is lying........"his lips move". Love,Liz
“Mnuchin probably doesn’t know that there was a real-life experiment in the 1990s that answered this question,” said Robert Spitzer, an expert on presidential vetoes who has written about President Bill Clinton's failed effort to use a line-term veto. Spitzer said Clinton used the line-item veto on 10 bills and about 80 different provisions in 1997 before the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional in the 1998 case Clinton v. City of New York. Overturning that ruling would require two-thirds majorities of both chambers and ratification by 38 out of 50 states. In other words, Congress couldn't do that on its own.But is there any way Trump could get line-item veto authority without an amendment? Spitzer and others strained to imagine one.“It is theoretically possible that an imaginative lawyer might invent a mechanism that would pass constitutional muster, but I know of no such invention to date,” Spitzer said. “The other thing is that the court was pretty emphatic in its decision that any kind of item veto would have to be granted through constitutional amendment, so that by itself pretty much slams the door on Mnuchin’s speculation.”Added Roger Hartley, a constitutional amendment expert at Catholic University: “I could not imagine what ‘different ways’ he was thinking that are available to the Congress to enact constitutional line-item veto legislation absent a constitutional amendment.”Another amendment expert, John Vile at Middle Tennessee State University, said the only other way would be “for the Supreme Court to reverse the decision when confronted with a similar bill.” But the court's decision was 6-3, he added, and it has signaled no desire to revisit the issue. (Plus, only one of the three dissenters, Stephen G. Breyer, remains on the court.)
Trump has a secret plan to evade the Constitution and create a line-item veto, apparentlyQuote“Mnuchin probably doesn’t know that there was a real-life experiment in the 1990s that answered this question,” said Robert Spitzer, an expert on presidential vetoes who has written about President Bill Clinton's failed effort to use a line-term veto. Spitzer said Clinton used the line-item veto on 10 bills and about 80 different provisions in 1997 before the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional in the 1998 case Clinton v. City of New York. Overturning that ruling would require two-thirds majorities of both chambers and ratification by 38 out of 50 states. In other words, Congress couldn't do that on its own.But is there any way Trump could get line-item veto authority without an amendment? Spitzer and others strained to imagine one.“It is theoretically possible that an imaginative lawyer might invent a mechanism that would pass constitutional muster, but I know of no such invention to date,” Spitzer said. “The other thing is that the court was pretty emphatic in its decision that any kind of item veto would have to be granted through constitutional amendment, so that by itself pretty much slams the door on Mnuchin’s speculation.”Added Roger Hartley, a constitutional amendment expert at Catholic University: “I could not imagine what ‘different ways’ he was thinking that are available to the Congress to enact constitutional line-item veto legislation absent a constitutional amendment.”Another amendment expert, John Vile at Middle Tennessee State University, said the only other way would be “for the Supreme Court to reverse the decision when confronted with a similar bill.” But the court's decision was 6-3, he added, and it has signaled no desire to revisit the issue. (Plus, only one of the three dissenters, Stephen G. Breyer, remains on the court.)Why do we have nitwits running the country?#Resist
Actually, most voters did not bother to vote at all.