Israel Bans Omar/Tlaib

[Dill]

(08-16-2019, 08:23 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: As a US citizen on US soil Trump has the human right to have an opinion and express it.  Is he not, by virtue of the first amendment, entitled to make the statement he made?  Why are you so against Trump exercising his rights?  Also, your tyrannical point aside, you have no proof it was Trump's tweet that made this decision for Netenyahu.  While one could certainly come to this conclusion you cannot state so definitively, as you just did.  Also, you are wrong, the executive branch has the lion's share of control over foreign policy.

I made no quantitative distribution of the foreign policy powers of the Legislative and Executive branches, such that one branch had more. It is not a question of who has "the lion's share" (though control of the purse strings settles that question quickly if we are talking about magnitude of power).   Rather, I referred to the SEPARATION of their foreign policy powers. I am not wrong that Congress is responsible for funding and oversight. That means the president does not get to block or go around those funding/oversight powers. And he certainly could not defend a violation of the separation of powers on grounds of his right to free speech any more than he could so defend obstruction of the Russia investigation. 

I am not against Trump "exercising his rights" (though, to borrow your phrase, he appears to take an "a la carte" approach to the 1st Amendment, and would deny other Americans free speech on US soil, from Kapernick to network news broadcasters to whole cable channels).   But you should know by now that he is president of the US. He thus speaks for and as the US government, whether he understands this responsibility or not.  So no, an appeal to First Amendment Rights does not entitle Trump to use speech to set in motion a violation of the separation of powers, or even the appearance thereof. All government officials speaking publicly have office-appropriate limitations on their speech. A judge cannot tweet that some accused person headed for trial in his courtroom was clearly guilty, and then defend himself against removal by appeal to the 1st Amendment. Nor could an Army general who asserted in a public speech that the US Army was a Christian Army. Worse if it appears government officials are using government speech to pursue personal vendettas.

Finally, I don't have to state "definitively" that Trump made a decision for Netanyahu in order to raise the issue of separation of powers. We only need "coulda woulda" for that.  Government speech has to avoid appearance of suppression of rights. And presidential speech has to avoid the appearance of violating the separation doctrine by engineering a desired outcome in a foreign country which would interfere with a Congressperson's oversight responsibilities.