Republicans' fantasy Constitution: Trump and the "phony emoluments clause"

These are tough times for independent journalism. In fact, Field sounded just like one of them, as Winkler describes: Taxing the property of railroads differently, he said, was like allowing deductions for property “owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or young men.” In short, this was a collective fraud perpetrated by a whole collective of scoundrels, creating a fantasy version of the 14th Amendment that’s become deeply and profoundly embedded in American law. “It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” The phrase “badge of servitude” comes directly from the 13th Amendment, underscoring the broader context that gave meaning to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Collectively, they’d cast exactly two votes finding Equal Protection Clause violations in those cases — one less vote in an entire decade than they cast in the Bush v. Gore decision. But it’s not the only one, as shown by the Court’s Heller decision, the first ever recognize an individual right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment — a position that former Chief Justice Warren Burger once called “a fraud on the American public.” The decision by Antonin Scalia was so roundly criticized that Scalia co-authored a book in its defense, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” which was ripped to shreds by then-appeals court judge Richard Posner, in a devastating review titled “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.” To be clear, both Burger and Posner were highly respected conservative jurists.