Trump on July 23:
Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President. But I don’t even talk about that because they did a report and there was no obstruction. After looking at it, our great Attorney General read it. He’s a total professional. He said, “There’s nothing here. There’s no obstruction.” So they referenced, “No obstruction.” So you have no collusion, no obstruction, and yet it goes on.
Trump on July 12:
Also, take a look at one other thing. It’s a thing called Article II. Nobody ever mentions Article II. It gives me all of these rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II
“Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason. He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government.” @foxandfriends A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone! The Trump Administration will take a look!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2019
Jason Zengerle at NYT:
After the C.B.P. press event, Nielsen, sporting aviator sunglasses and a navy blue quilted vest, escorted Trump across a dusty field to inspect a new section of border wall. Briefly pulling him aside from the Kevlar-clad C.B.P. officers and gun-toting local law-enforcement officials who were accompanying them, Nielsen, according to two people familiar with the conversation, reviewed with the president the options available to him short of refusing to let people in. Trump wasn’t pleased. Kevin McAleenan, then the commissioner of C.B.P., one of the agencies under the D.H.S. umbrella, was also on the wall-inspecting trip. According to two people familiar with the encounter, Trump urged him to block asylum seekers from entering the United States. If McAleenan went to prison for doing so, Trump said, he would pardon him. (The White House has denied that Trump said this.)In 2016, Kevin McCarthy wrote:
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution reads very clearly: The president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The take-care clause is a bulwark against tyranny. It supports the separation of powers stipulated in the Constitution: The legislative branch makes law and the executive branch administers it.
...
Unfortunately, we live in a dangerous time, and many of our nation’s elected representatives accepted the president’s argument, implicitly consenting to his subversion of congressional authority by refusing to block the president’s actions. It seems they are happy to hand Congress’s constitutional powers to the president as long as the policy that gets enacted suits them.
