In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
By 4-1 vote in May 2021, our prodigal St. Johns County Board of Commissioners pledged nearly $17 million to the PGA TOUR, INC., an unprecedented 25-year "incentive," a taxpayer subsidy, latest of several for PGA TOUR. In 2017, it approved another $2.8 million in "incentives"
On that occasion, and on others whenever fraud, waste, abuse, misfeasance and nonfeasance occurred in St. Johns County, I walked to the podium, exposed and opposed their flummery, dupery and nincompoopery. Watch the video.
Naturally, under the malignant, narcotic maladministration of County Administrator HUNTER SINCLAIR CONRAD, our Dull Republican County Commissioners rubber-stamped the deal, 4-1.
Sick twists.
Now, with the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund's acquisition of PGA, TOUR, INC., it's time to question the bone saw murderers and their investment in PGA TOUR, INC., backed with an extravagant 25-year term (Commissioner Jeb Smith dissenting).
Editorial from The Washington Post:
OpinionThe Senate has some good questions — and few answers — about Saudi-owned golf
Former president Donald Trump talks with Yasir Al-Rumayyan at Trump National Golf Club on May 26 in Sterling, Va. (Alex Brandon/AP)
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Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, cited “scheduling conflicts” in declining to appear this month at a Senate hearing. His lawyers indicated he would cooperate in other ways — but he has not, despite repeated information requests. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, on Thursday publicly invited Mr. Al-Rumayyan to pick any day in September to testify. Mr. Blumenthal is not holding his breath.
The subject Mr. Al-Rumayyan seems to be avoiding is the fund’s bid to control professional golf, via a partnership between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf organization. The pact raises questions not only about “sportswashing” to distract from state human rights atrocities, but also about the degree to which the Saudis are using their oil profits from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to control more elements of American culture. Mr. Blumenthal and his colleagues should persist in posing these questions.
The senator wants to hear directly from Mr. Al-Rumayyan about what role he intends to play in American golf and how that dovetails with the fund’s larger investment goals in the United States. Mr. Blumenthal is also asking for a list of all U.S. assets currently held by the Saudi fund; all U.S.-based contractors, consultants, public relations firms, strategic consultants, crisis consultants, lobbyists and law firms that have done work for the fund; and any records relating to Project Wedge, the code name for what became LIV Golf.
That project was as political as it was economic, growing out of an effort to improve Saudi Arabia’s reputation following the 2018 state-sponsored assassination of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a squad of agents who flew to Istanbul, where Khashoggi was located, with a bone saw aboard two private jets owned by Mr. Al-Rumayyan’s fund.
Saudi Arabia has spent at least $6.3 billion on sports deals since 2021, according to the Guardian, more than the gross domestic product of Barbados or Montenegro. The fund bought the Newcastle United soccer team for $391 million, and a Saudi soccer team signed Cristiano Ronaldo for $200 million a year. This doesn’t include Aramco’s Formula One sponsorships or significant Saudi investments in video game makers, including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, or Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster.
LIV Golf has showered largesse on U.S. politicians willing to associate themselves with the organization. It will hold its final event of this season in October, offering a $50 million purse, at former president Donald Trump’s Doral course in Florida. The Greenbrier resort owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R), a U.S. Senate candidate, will host a LIV Golf tournament in August.
of the code used by chambers of commerce. Major League Baseball gave up this designation in 2007, and the National Football League gave it up in 2015. Mr. Wyden’s bill would exclude sports organizations from claiming the nonprofit status if the value of their assets exceeds $500 million.
Current law also exempts sovereign wealth funds from a 30 percent withholding tax on payments such as dividends and interest. The Saudis can use this to maximize tax-free profits from the PGA Tour deal. Mr. Wyden’s legislation would deny the withholding benefit to countries with more than $100 billion invested globally, unless they have a free-trade agreement or a tax treaty with the United States and aren’t deemed countries of concern by the State Department. The measure is written in a way to target Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as Russia and China.
In other words, there is ample reason for Congress to consider the policy implications of Saudi Arabia’s dealings, as well as the moral ones, and for Senate investigators to continue pursuing the apparently permanently indisposed Mr. Al-Rumayyan.
Meanwhile, in the latest reminder of President Biden’s failure to keep his campaign promise to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan visited the country on Thursday to meet with the crown prince. Fortunately, members of Congress are pushing back harder against Saudi influence.
The Post’s View | About the Editorial Board
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board and areas of focus: Opinion Editor David Shipley;Deputy Opinion Editor Karen Tumulty; Associate Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg(national politics and policy); Lee Hockstader (European affairs, based in Paris); David E. Hoffman (global public health); James Hohmann (domestic policy and electoral politics, including the White House, Congress and governors); Charles Lane (foreign affairs, national security, international economics); Heather Long (economics); Associate Editor Ruth Marcus; Mili Mitra (public policy solutions and audience development); Keith B. Richburg (foreign affairs); and Molly Roberts (technology and society).
Article I section 8 and Article III, section 3 of our United States Constitution provide the answers to this sixth-rate Supreme Court Justice, this juvenile jerk, Justice SAMUEL ANTHONY ALITO, JR.,whose dubious defense of the indefensible -- taking money and other things of value from corporations and their hick hack defense lawyers,
In theory, there is no branch in the American constitutional system that exists above or beyond the reach of the others.
“The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others,” James Madison observed in Federalist No. 51.
Last week, Justice Samuel Alito gave a slightly different account of the relationship between the “departments” of government, at least as it relates to the relative power of the Supreme Court.
“Congress did not create the Supreme Court,” Alito said in an interview with writers from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito continued. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
Alito was responding to a question about the prospect of ethics rules for the court. And he’s probably right that Congress has no authority to micromanage the conduct of individual justices. The legislature can’t force the justices to use one interpretive method over another or promulgate rules on how they reason through particular cases and decide them.
But Alito’s claim is much bigger than a narrow point about the overall independence of the court; it is a categorical statement of judicial supremacy that also stands as a glimpse into the arrogance of one justice on a court that falsely sees itself as the only and final authority on what the Constitution means.
It makes sense that Alito, who has used his platform to attack critics, journalists and anyone else who thinks the court has obligations to people outside the conservative legal movement, would see the court as standing outside the power of Congress to shape and check the federal government. But he’s wrong.
Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution gives Congress the power “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
The “necessary and proper” clause gives Congress broad authority to decide on what it needs to carry out its enumerated powers. “Congress has duties to perform and powers to execute,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in his opinion for the court in McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819. “It has a right to the means by which these duties can be properly and most usefully performed, and these powers executed.” By that standard alone, Congress almost certainly has the authority to regulate the court by way of its power to structure the federal judiciary.
If that isn’t enough, there is also Article III, Section 2, which outlines the jurisdiction of the court and gives Congress a direct and explicit role in shaping its procedures and conduct: “In all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the Supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
It might be tempting to read this as a limited grant of power except for the fact that a vast majority of the Supreme Court’s work is in its appellate jurisdiction. As far as the Constitution is concerned, Congress cannot only shape that jurisdiction (“with such Exceptions”) but also set the terms by which the court exercises its appellate authority (“under such Regulations”). Congress could, to use one example, require justices to recuse themselves in any appellate proceeding in which they have a conflict of interest.
In addition to what is specified by the Constitution — Congress cannot restrict the “original jurisdiction” of the Supreme Court and it cannot diminish the salaries of the justices while they still hold office — there are obviously things the legislature cannot do to the court. No power, after all, is truly unlimited.
As it stands, however, the kinds of ethics rules that are on the table — or should be — fall squarely within congressional authority to shape, regulate and even discipline the Supreme Court. The ethics bill sponsored by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island would impose new rules for financial disclosures and require justices to adopt a binding ethics code. And while there is the real issue of how to enforce an ethics code short of impeachment, which is essentially a dead letter as it relates to members of the Supreme Court, there’s no question that Congress has the power to pass a law of this kind.
Which brings us back to Justice Alito. Yes, the Supreme Court is a creature of the Constitution, not Congress. But the same Constitution that creates the court also gives the legislature the power to check its influence and balance its power.
And if you are, like Samuel Alito, one of the most right-wing members of a right-wing court that is using its power to extend its influence over the political system — if you have been a pivotal figure in the effort to constitutionalize the views of your reactionary backers and allies — then you might be quite interested in trying to sell the idea that the Constitution doesn’t actually say what it was plainly written to say.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
