So, here we have two quotes from the president. They are both short and succinct and as uncomplicated as statements can be:
“I know Matt Whitaker.” –October 10, 2018
“I don’t know Matt Whitaker.” –November 9, 2018
Those two statements would not necessarily contradict each other if they came in reverse chronological order. After all, when you spend some time with someone you had not previously met, then it’s no longer true that you do not know them, but it remains true that you didn’t know them at an earlier period of time. But you can’t know someone in October and no longer know them in November.
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There are a lot of people discussing the constitutionality of putting Whitaker in charge of the Department of Justice and speculating about why it was done and what it might mean. Those are all interesting angles on this story which should be discussed. But I just want to pause for one second to point at those two conflicting statements from the president of the United States.
“I know Matt Whitaker.”
“I don’t know Matt Whitaker.”
He has absolutely no conscience or shame, no pangs of guilt or any possibility of feeling remorse when he contradicts himself like this. Say what you want, but this isn’t normal.
It is far too easy to become inured. Bad things happen if we do.
If Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III write an op-ed together, you have to figure it’s going to be good. And oh boy, is it good.
The two dissect the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States. And they stomp all over it.
Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.
If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.
Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.
What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.
Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys.
We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody.
Neal Katyal was an acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama and is a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in Washington. George T. Conway III is a litigator at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. Conway is also a famous spouse and, incidentally, a Yale Law School classmate of mine.
While outcomes were good very locally–Donna Shalala is going to Congress, Javier Enrique Fernandez beat Javier Enriquez for the state House, state outcomes were bad, but with redeeming features.
Gillum lost a squeaker. Nelson is a hair behind — 21,899 votes or .26 percent of 8.2 million ballots cast — with recount in the offing. Lots of provisional ballots to be counted, could maybe make the difference. All the downballot state Dems lost except maybe the Agriculture Commissioner, where the margin is tiny.
Looks like another roller coaster post-election period for Florida.
The worst news is that Amendment 5 passed, requiring a supermajority to raise taxes and to close loopholes. This may make Florida ungovernable, worse even then the fiscal straitjacket that hamstrung California after Proposition 13 and other anti-tax measures.
Equally bad is that DeSantis’s first act will be to name three Justices to the state Supreme Court, doubtlessly cementing a conservative-to-reactionary majority for a generation.
Florida really is a sanity-stressing jurisdiction sometimes.
So, trepidatiously, I went off to vote. I imagined officious claims that I was trying to vote twice, ending in a provisional ballot. In the event, however, it was all a a happy anti-climax. The official called over someone to explain what to do, which involved punching some buttons, and voilà! I am issued a nice new giant ballot.
Apparently even if they had my by-mail ballot, they would allow me to vote in person as the system is programmed to erase the earlier ballot in that case. Which sort of makes me wonder how that works. As I understand it, the state releases the early vote totals pretty quickly after polls close. That leaves just two possibilities: either (1) they have my name attached to my ballot up until the polls close, and can pull it before they count it; or (2) they have my name attached to my vote even after an initial count, and can deduct my vote from the total before releasing it. Neither possibility suggests that ballot anonymity is preserved very well, does it? Although in case (1) I guess it could be anonymous once it’s counted.
Fusion Power is Only 15 Years Away, we’re told. I guess that’s progress since in just the last few years people have said its Always 50 Years Away, or maybe Always 30 Years Away, or maybe formely 30 years away, now its more like 50 years away, or maybe just forever 20 years away, or 13 Years Away.
As of this morning, 
