Fri, 04/09/2021
LAWRENCE The 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial gathered a historic collection of luminaries, including President Warren G. Harding, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, Chief Justice William Howard Taft and even Abraham Lincoln’s surviving son Robert Todd Lincoln.
But as Harding was delivering his remarks, an intruder approached. Local pilot Herbert Fahy ignored official requests to keep airspace above the event clear, instead circling over the crowd in his Curtiss JN-4 biplane, drowning out the commander in chief and causing a nervous panic in the spectators below.
“What I love about that scene is how powerless the president and federal government were to do anything,” said Sean Seyer, assistant professor of humanities at the University of Kansas.
The inauguration of a new U.S. President is a day of pomp and ceremony, of solemn oaths and dignified celebrations. But things don’t always go as planned. From drunken speeches to frozen canaries and rampaging roosters at inaugural balls, the day has a fine history of mishaps, mayhem, and mangled oaths.
1. At Andrew Jackson’s inauguration, the celebratory crowd got a bit too rowdy.
In 1829, around 10,000 people came to Washington, D.C., to celebrate the first inauguration of Andrew Jackson. The atmosphere was electric, but things got out of hand when the crowd headed to the White House for the post-inaugural reception. Much to the horror of the finely dressed ladies and gentlemen of the Washington elite, the common folk clambered into the White House, many of them through the windows. They upturned furniture, broke the china, and spilled or consumed the spiked punch. Jackson’s political rivals may well have exaggerated the extent of the destruction, but the White House was ov
Trump s pardons are worth a second impeachment inquiry
An immediate second impeachment may be our only hope to avoid a Trump 2024 bid for office.
Impeachment might still be the best option to avoid another Trump presidency.Anjali Nair / AFP via Getty Images
Dec. 29, 2020, 10:32 AM UTC
President Donald Trump is leaving the White House in January, and he seems determined to exploit and abuse every power of the presidency he can on his way out.
The clemency he offered up recently for convicted war criminals, corrupt former members of Congress and members of his extended family were bad enough. But most disturbing were his pardons of his political allies Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, both of whom were convicted as a result of Robert Mueller s Russia investigation.
by Binoy Kampmark / December 23rd, 2020
A flurry of them has been expected, and just prior to Christmas, US President Donald Trump waved his wand of pardon with vigour. On December 22, the president issued fifteen pardons and five commutations. The choices so far have been, to put it mildly, problematic.
The power to pardon can be found in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the US Constitution, a provision which states, in part, that the President “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That most eminent of judicial heads Chief Justice Marshall described a pardon as “an act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of the laws, which exempts the individual, on whom it is bestowed, from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed.”