Congressional and Executive Authority Over Foreign Trade Agreements
www.congress.gov

... Summary

This report examines the constitutional powers of Congress and the President to make foreign trade agreements, the respective roles the legislative and executive branches have played in recent trade agreements, and legal debates concerning the extent to which the executive branch may enter into trade agreements without congressional approval.

The Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate foreign commerce, impose tariffs, and collect revenue, while the President holds constitutional authority to negotiate with foreign governments. Courts have only infrequently opined on the ways in which the United States may enter into foreign trade agreements based on this separation of powers.

Nevertheless, it is broadly accepted that the United States may enter into trade agreements with other countries via "congressional-executive agreements," which are negotiated by the President and approved"either in advance or afterward"by Congress.

By contrast, many have questioned whether the President may enter into trade agreements with other countries via "sole executive agreements," which are not approved by Congress and rest on the President's independent constitutional powers.

Presidents have, however, made various nonbinding trade commitments to other countries without congressional authorization based on their asserted authority to conduct foreign policy. ...

Federal Judiciary Act (1789)
www.archives.gov

... One of the first acts of the new Congress was to establish a Federal court system through the Judiciary Act signed by President Washington on September 24, 1789. ...

The generality of Article III of the Constitution raised questions that Congress had to address in the Judiciary Act of 1789. These questions had no easy answers, and the solutions to them were achieved politically. The First Congress decided that it could regulate the jurisdiction of all Federal courts, and in the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress established with great particularity a limited jurisdiction for the district and circuit courts, gave the Supreme Court the original jurisdiction provided for in the Constitution, and granted the Court appellate jurisdiction in cases from the Federal circuit courts and from the state courts where those courts rulings had rejected Federal claims. The decision to grant Federal courts a jurisdiction more restrictive than that allowed by the Constitution represented a recognition by the Congress that the people of the United States would not find a full-blown Federal court system palatable at that time.

For nearly all of the next century the judicial system remained essentially as established by the Judiciary Act of 1789. Only after the country had expanded across a continent and had been torn apart by civil war were major changes made. A separate tier of appellate circuit courts created in 1891 removed the burden of circuit riding from the shoulders of the Supreme Court justices, but otherwise left intact the judicial structure.

With minor adjustments, it is the same system we have today. Congress has continued to build on the interpretation of the drafters of the first judiciary act in exercising a discretionary power to expand or restrict Federal court jurisdiction. While opinions as to what constitutes the proper balance of Federal and state concerns vary no less today than they did two centuries ago, the fact that today's Federal court system closely resembles the one created in 1789 suggests that the First Congress performed its job admirably. ...

Ween - Don't [Deficate] Where You Eat (1994)
www.youtube.com

Lyrics excerpt ...

genius.com

...
[Verse 1]
Don't you ever think of me
When you're outside strolling
Don't you ever wave the flag
When we're rockin' and rollin'

[Refrain]
Don't ---- where you eat, my friend

[Verse 2]
Who said it was hard to climb
A peak that you can't see
I tell you it's an easy thing
When it's you and me

[Refrain]
But don't ---- where you eat, my friend

[Verse 3]
A little food and a little drink, uh-huh
Nothin' too fancy
Lamb, veal, and some good old wine
This is the life for me
...

(I'll leave the site censor hamster to adjust the comment to please the advertisers...)

September 26, 2016 - Issue: Vol. 162, No. 145 -- Daily Edition (2016)
www.congress.gov

... Mr. REID. Madam President, virtually every time Donald Trump says or does something discriminatory -- and that is often -- the media relies upon a catalog of buzzwords to describe his actions. The press uses words like hateful, intolerant, bigot, extremist, prejudice, to name but a few. Yet there is always one word that many of the press conspicuously avoid: Racist. They never label Trump as a racist, but he is a racist.

Donald Trump is a racist.

``Racist'' is a term I don't really like.

We have all, with rare exception -- I don't know who it would be -- said things that are not politically correct, but I don't know of anyone, when that happens, who doesn't acknowledge it and, if necessary, apologizes quickly, but Donald Trump doesn't believe the racist things he does and says are wrong. He says them with the full intent to demean and to denigrate.

That is who he is.

Each time Trump is given a chance to apologize and make amends, he refuses, and then he doubles down on what he said before.

The media is not holding Donald Trump accountable at all. He is not being held accountable. ...

Trump has even had a secret system for discriminatory practices. As the Washington Post reported:

Trump employees have secretly marked the applications of minorities with codes, such as `No. 9' and `C' for colored. .

. . The employees allegedly directed blacks and Puerto Ricans away from buildings with mostly white tenants and steered them toward properties that had many minorities.

In the 1980s, Trump took his racism to Atlantic City. This is Donald Trump at his best. He cheated, coerced, filed bankruptcy, did anything he could to cheat people out of money.

In the process, his racism came to the forefront in Atlantic City. Trump was accused of making his African-American employees move off the casino floor when he didn't want to see them, which was any time he came to the casino. One employee, Kip Brown, said:

When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor. It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.

Trump was later fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission for that act of disgusting racism. ...

Article by Vladimir Putin "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" (2021)
web.archive.org

... During the recent Direct Line, when I was asked about Russian-Ukrainian relations, I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people -- a single whole. ...

"There is no Ukraine": Fact-Checking the Kremlin's Version of Ukrainian History (2020)
blogs.lse.ac.uk

... The notion that Ukraine is not a country, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of Russian leadership. ...

Using a GRAT for tax-efficient wealth transfer
www.fidelity.com

...
Key takeaways

- - - For families or individuals who own assets that they expect to appreciate significantly in value, a grantor retained annuity trust (GRAT) might be an appropriate option to consider as part of a comprehensive estate plan.

- - - With a GRAT, the grantor gives up control of the assets for the term of the trust while receiving a regular annuity payment, and the appreciation on the trust assets may pass to heirs free of gift or estate taxes.

- - - The trust can be structured so that the grantor does not use any of their lifetime gift and estate-tax exclusion....