Democrats invoke rare Senate rule to force release of Epstein documents
The intrigue: The "Rule of Five" law allows any five members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to request federal agencies to provide information about "any matter within the jurisdiction of the committee."
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How can Republicans block this...?
By continuing to not follow the law or process as it benefits them like they have been. But good on Dems for the constant pressure. That's exactly what they need to do.
Right! It’s like when the Supreme Court told Andy Jackson that he couldn’t just forcibly deport Cherokee from their peaceful and prosperous farming communities. He just ignored the law, and brought generational shame to the US government. In a surprisingly close parallel it turns out that DJT can do the same thing, except this time even the Supreme Court doesn’t want him to follow the law. Strange times.
This is a commonly-told but not actually true version of events. Here's what really happened between Jackson and the Cherokee case.
The background of the case is that the State of Georgia had enacted a law forbidding the settling of Cherokee territories by whites without a licence. A man by the name of Samuel Worcester, a missionary who helped establish the first Cherokee-language newspaper (the Cherokee Phoenix or ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ), protested against this law, saying that Georgia had no power to legislate what goes on in Cherokee territory, because the Cherokee Nation was sovereign over their own territory and not subject to the law of the State. The governor of Georgia ordered the arrest of Worcester and some other dissidents who refused to apply for a licence. He was brought before a Georgia court and stood trial, was convicted, and sentenced to four years' hard labour. Some of his fellow defendants accepted pardons from the governor, but Worcester refused the pardon in order to preserve his right to appeal his conviction.
The case was brought before the US Supreme Court, which ruled in the case of Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation had sovereignty which the State of Georgia could not abridge, and that the law banning whites from settling Cherokee land was void. President Jackson expressed disdain over this ruling, and contemporary news thought he was unlikely to help the Supreme Court if it asked him to enforce its ruling. However, the Court never asked Jackson to send federal marshals to enforce the decision, so there was nothing for him to "violate".
Georgia state officials chose to ignore the ruling and refused to release Worcester from prison. His lawyers petitioned the new governor of Georgia to offer Worcester an unconditional pardon, but the governor refused, saying that the Supreme Court had overstepped its authority. Georgia officials decided to agitate for the federal government to impose a removal treaty against the Cherokees. Then, in an unrelated incident, South Carolina started a spat with the federal government by attempting to nullify a federal law that they didn't like, which caused the Jackson administration to change its tune towards Worcester's situation. His government dropped hints to the governor of Georgia that if Worcester (and another person similarly situated) were released, that the Jackson administration would arrange for a removal treaty to be imposed on the Cherokees. Worcester intended to continue pursuing his case before the federal courts but feared that doing so might provoke the government of Georgia to do something like attempt to secede or otherwise bring harm to the Cherokees. The governor and Worcester's legal representatives haggled over the wording of Worcester's petition for a pardon, and in the end, they were released the year after the Supreme Court's decision. Worcester gave up his case before the federal courts.
At the same time as this was happening, gold was discovered on Cherokee lands and the State of Georgia infringed on the Cherokees' sovereignty in other ways, including attempting to abolish the tribal government, trying to legislate away all of the Cherokees' land rights, and raffling off plots of Cherokee territory to white settlers.
In 1835 (three years after this ruling), a group of Cherokees not authorised by the Cherokee National Council or by their Principal Chief negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, agreeing on behalf the entire tribe to vacate their traditional homelands in exchange for five and a half million dollars and a reservation in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Despite the vast majority of Cherokee people opposing this treaty, its signatories having lacked the authority from the Cherokee council to negotiate it, and against the wishes of the Cherokee Principal Chief, the US Senate gave force to the treaty and President van Buren ordered the US Army to remove all Cherokees to Indian Territory in 1838.
I really do appreciate your excellent summary of events, and it is interesting to frame it as Georgia ignoring the Supreme Courts ruling rather than Jackson, but I wonder to what extent Georgia ignored the Supreme Court ruling with Jackson’s blessing. You could argue that it is really Pam Bondi ignoring court orders, and not Trump, but, of course, Trump could tell Pam Bondi (or whoever) to stop ignoring court orders. In theory the executive branch’s role is to enforce the orders of the court, and, by making it clear to Georgia that he had no intention of enforcing court orders, this could have enabled the state government to continue on in illegal activities that, if the rule of law were followed, should not have happened.
You clearly know more about this than me, so I’m not trying to argue, but the failure of the rule of law is obviously always a collective failure, and many many people enable it, and it still seems fair to me to pin some of the blame on AJ, though obviously not as much as I was implying.
The 19th century was a time of letter-writing, not Signal group chats. For that reason, I think that if the governor of Georgia had explicitly asked Jackson for permission to defy the Supreme Court, we would probably have a copy of that letter or at least a mention of its existence in the correspondence or journals of these men or of their secretaries. I also don't think Jackson was so brazen as to give a go-ahead to defy the Supreme Court. Such an action would have undoubted started a major incident if the press found out about it, and may have even caused the unravelling of the federal system, and Jackson was certainly no idiot and knew this.
With respect to the current situation, I think the current president and attorney-general are more or less just as willing to disobey the courts. Georgia officials in the Cherokee incident(s) only did so because they were politically accountable only to the white, landowning, citizens of Georgia, who were behind them every step of the way. In a similar vein, the voters seem to have delivered a message to Trump in 2024 that there is no political cost to authoritarianism and disrespect for the rule of law. Or, at least, that's the message Trump thinks the voters sent him. In reality, such a cost does exist, and it's why Trump lost in 2020. Though Allan Lichtman's prediction of the 2024 presidential election outcome was definitely wrong, I still think that his overall message, that voters care more about whether the incumbent president is good or bad than whether their opponent is good or bad, makes a lot of sense to me. But I'm no expert in that.
I mean, you do realize people don’t have to write a letter that says “let’s break the law together.” People in the 19th century were capable of waltzing over to the hermitage, chatting in a backroom, and leaving with an “understanding”.
The Georgia officials took their actions with the accurate perception that the federal government would choose not to enforce federal law. And they were right, and AJ was the person who happened to not be enforcing the law. He doesn’t have to write down on a piece of paper that he didn’t enforce the law, we see that he didn’t.
No wonder Jackson is his favorite president. It all makes sense.
They don't have to block shit. They can just ignore it.
Fall back on the sovcit playbook: claim that it's outside their jurisdiction and stall for time until they come up with another excuse to protect toddler-tupper Trump.
This is literally what I expect them to do. They'll claim governmental affairs nor homeland security have any reason to be involved in this case.
They'll have their stooges argue this on Fox news as well and twist the knife saying "Democrats are wasting your money on a witch hunt instead of working to improve your lives!"
I mean, if it's not blocked, who's going to force them to release?
By doing whatever the fuck they want.
...and how much MAGAite shit will they have to swallow for trying?