People Are Starting To Catch On To The "100% Renewable Energy" Scam

Have you heard of a guy named Mark Jacobson?  He's the trendy Stanford professor who has written a couple of big pieces claiming that having the United States get 100% of its energy from nothing but wind, water and solar power by 2050 is no problem at all.  In fact (according to Jacobson) it's "low cost."  For example, here's a link to one of his big pieces, a 2015 opus titled "Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes."   This was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Hey, there's some serious "peer review" going on there!  

Jacobson is also the "brains" behind an enviro organization pushing 100% renewable energy called the "Solutions Project."  (Slogan: "Together, we can make renewable energy a reality for everyone – 100% for 100%.")  Celebrities with their names and pictures on the organization's website include Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo.  California Governor Jerry Brown is full in for Jacobson's program.  This is big time stuff.

Actually, you need to have only the tiniest hint of bullshit radar to know that this guy is full of it.  It takes about ten minutes with one of Jacobson's papers to realize that his pronouncements are pure fantasy, made without any serious consideration of the engineering problems of making electricity work 24/7/365 with almost entirely intermittent sources, let alone any serious consideration of the cost of what he is proposing.

Yet for the first several years after Jacobson started publishing his nonsense, it seemed like the whole world was giving him a pass.  I guess that so many people just want to believe so badly that all critical thinking gets suspended.  The first hint I saw of a crack in the dam came back in March, when a publication called Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews published a piece by B.P. Heard, et al., called "Burden of Proof:  A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems."  I covered that piece in a post in April titled "Finally, Some Critical Thinking On The Subject Of The Feasibility Of Renewables."   The underlying article was not focused solely on Jacobson, but reviewed some 24 studies that had claimed, to one degree or another, to demonstrate the feasibility of 100% renewable electricity systems.  But the review was particularly critical of Jacobson, finding that his pieces "did not apply simulation processes to their own, different proposed systems, nor did they address the uncertainties, challenges and limitations articulated in their supporting references or related critiques. . . ."   

Well, now it seems like this particular dam may have just burst.  Steven Hayward at Powerline reports on a new article out in none other than PNAS specifically focusing on Jacobson's work and finding it, let us say, deficient.  (Or, to quote Hayward's pithy summary of the new piece, "Jacobson is full of crap.")  The title of the new PNAS piece is "Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar," and the authors are Christopher T.M. Clack with a long list of co-authors.

You can get a clue as to where Clack, et al., are going by reading their abstract.  Excerpt:

[W]e point out that this work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions. Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. 

Ouch!  But actually, those are the polite words in the piece.  For example, what are some of those "inadequately supported assumptions" to be found in Jacobson?  Here's one that I particularly enjoy:

The system in [Jacobson's piece linked above] assumes the availability of multiweek energy storage systems that are not yet proven at scale and deploys them at a capacity twice that of the entire United States’ generating and storage capacity today.

Multi week energy storage for the entire United States?  How much would that cost, pray tell?  Needless to say, Jacobson does not attempt such a calculation, nor does the Clack, et al., critique.  But the intrepid Manhattan Contrarian did take a look in this October 2016 post at an energy storage system for New York City that our genius Mayor Bill de Blasio is buying to provide a big 30 seconds of backup power for the City.  The cost is $14.4 million.  Multiplying by 120 (to get an hour) and then by 24 (to get a day), I calculated the cost of energy storage for one day's electricity for New York City to be around $41.5 billion.  So how about multi week?  Two weeks' worth would be 14 times the $41.5 billion, or $581 billion.  Since New York City is around 2.5% of the population of the U.S., you can multiply by around 40 to get the full cost for multi week storage for the country.  That would be around $23 trillion -- far more than a full year's GDP for the whole country.  But don't worry -- Jacobson has a new system ("underground thermal energy storage") that hasn't been invented yet, let alone tried at scale, that he thinks can do the job for less.  No problem!

And how about one more random assumption from Jacobson:

The [Jacobson] study . . . also makes unsupported assumptions about widespread adoption of hydrogen as an energy carrier, including the conversion of the aviation and steel industries to hydrogen and the ability to store in hydrogen an amount of energy equivalent to more than 1 month of current US electricity consumption.       

All airplanes to run on hydrogen?  Millions of tons of enormously volatile and explosive hydrogen (i.e., the HIndenberg) stored all over the place?  No problem there either!

As Hayward notes in conclusion, "Jacobson is regarded as a joke by most of his Stanford colleagues."  Likely true.  It's about time a few of them spoke up.  But now, is there any hope of making any progress with California's politicians and celebrities?

The Important Work Of International Agencies: Keeping The Poor Poor

With so much craziness going on around Washington, the Manhattan Contrarian has had barely any time lately to keep up with the efforts of the international and UN bureaucracies in their never-ending fight to keep the poor poor.  In the case of the IMF, there hasn't been a good Manhattan Contrarian take-down since an April 2013 post titled "The Dopes At The IMF Continue Their Advocacy For Bigger Government."  

But Dan Mitchell at his International Liberty blog helpfully reminds in a post last week ("More Economic Malpractice From The IMF") that the incompetent bureaucrats at the IMF are very much still at it.  It seems that IMF head Christine Lagarde gave a big speech in Brussels about a week ago, misleadingly titled "Building a Virtuous Cycle."  The theme of the speech was that what the poor countries of the world need to do is increase tax rates and tax collections so as to bring more resources in their countries under the control of the government.  Why?  Because government will use the resources so much more effectively than the private sector ever could.  I'm not making this up.

Of course, when Lagarde said these things she spoke in IMF-bureaucrat-speak, a strange language bearing only passing resemblance to English, and actually much closer to the Newspeak of Orwell's 1984.  Excerpt:

[W]e are here to discuss an equally powerful tool for global growth — domestic resource mobilization. . . .  [T]axes, and the improvement of tax systems, can boost development in incredible ways. . . .  So today, allow me first to explain the IMF’s commitment to capacity development and second, to outline strategies governments can use to generate stable sources of revenue…the IMF has a third important developmentmission — capacity development. . . .  [T]he focus of our event today — enabling countries to raise public tax revenues efficiently.

Get into that new IMF vocabulary!  "Domestic resource mobilization"!  "Capacity development"!  "Strategies to generate stable sources of revenue"!  All of these, needless to say, are just alternative ways of stating the Holy Grail of the IMF, which is more taxes extracted from the citizenry and handed over to the bureaucrats.

And the proof that more taxes and bigger government will lead to better "resource mobilization" and improved economic performance?  Mitchell calls it the "triumph of anti-empiricism."  All actual evidence is to the contrary.  

However, don't forget that the famous economist Paul Samuelson, in a 1943 book chapter titled "Full Employment After the War," claimed to have discovered a mathematical proof of something called the "full employment multiplier," a system by which a government could expand its country's economy by increasing both taxes and spending in equal amounts.  Of course, that is the same book chapter in which Samuelson made the single most disastrously wrong economic prediction of all time, namely the prediction that, if the government cut spending commensurate with the huge military demobilization coming after World War II, "then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced."  As we all know, they did cut the spending, and what happened was the greatest economic boom in the history of the world.

Seventy-four years later, Lagarde continues to advocate for increased taxation and government spending as the route to economic salvation.  How is this even possible?

Can The President Be Criminally Prosecuted For Exercising His Constitutional Duties? Further Thoughts

The "attack leak of the day" is the lead story in today's Washington Post: "Special counsel starts investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, officials say."    This time we have no fewer than five anonymous sources ("Five people . . . speaking on the condition of anonymity. . . .").  Really, is there any Democratic Party member or holdover employee in the government at this point who is not engaged in attack leaking against the President?  Of course, attack leaks are just as likely to be complete baloney as to have any truth in them -- as obvious examples, the dozens of attack leaks insinuating that the FBI and national security services were investigating "collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia have all proven to be completely false, after dominating MSM front pages for months.   

So what is the possible "obstruction of justice" here?  That Trump asked Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn?  Let's take the worst possible case: suppose that Trump directly ordered Comey as follows:  "I order you to drop the investigation of Flynn right now and to transfer everyone working on it to other tasks."  Can that possibly be an obstruction of justice, given that the prosecutorial discretion function of the government belongs to the President?  

Those arguing that direct exercise by the President of the executive's prosecutorial discretion function can theoretically constitute "obstruction of justice" uniformly cite supposed "rules" or "protocols" of the Justice Department that set up a kind of a wall to insulate the prosecutorial function from political influence.  There's certainly nothing in the Constitution about this, nor in the laws that I can find, nor even in regulations adopted via the Administrative Procedure Act.  Looking around to try to find the basis for this extra-constitutional principle, I find this February 17 article by Jane Chong at Lawfare.  Chong traces the current protocol for Justice Department independence from presidential interference to a 2009 memo written by then AG Eric Holder.  Hey, current AG Sessions hasn't officially revoked the memo yet!  And so now a memo of the prior AG is to be the basis for a criminal investigation of the President of the United States? 

So, if exercising the prosecutorial discretion function to fail to prosecute an obvious crime for blatantly political purposes can be "obstruction of justice," can there be any more clear-cut example of same than Eric Holder's dropping of the prosecution of New Black Panther Party members for their voter intimidation scheme in 2008 in Philadelphia?  From Fox News, June 30, 2010:

J. Christian Adams, now an attorney in Virginia and a conservative blogger for Pajamas Media, says he and the other Justice Department lawyers working on the case were ordered to dismiss it.  "I mean we were told, 'Drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party.'"

Did Holder take orders from President Obama in deciding to drop that prosecution?  The Justice Department stonewalled production of emails between Justice and "high-level Obama political appointees" in the White House.  So we will never know the answer to the question.  But in any event, the matter was treated as a political issue -- and appropriately so.  I never saw anyone suggest that Holder -- let alone Obama -- could be prosecuted for "obstruction of justice" for declining to charge, no matter how blatant the crime and no matter how political and self-serving and baseless the decision not to charge.

But I digress.  There actually are some good reasons to maintain a level of separation between the political forces of the White House and the prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department. Not the least of those reasons is to encourage a degree of confidence on the part of the public that the criminal processes are being used fairly and not for political vendettas.  Maintaining the separation is also thought to be generally good for a president politically, because the voters could hold the President accountable for misusing the prosecutorial function against political enemies.  But notice that those considerations apply minimally, if at all, to a decision not to prosecute somebody.  And in any event, it is purely the President's decision whether he wants to maintain the separation, or alternatively breach it and suffer the political consequences.

For those interested generally in the law of whether it can be a crime when a governmental executive exercises his constitutional powers in a way the other side doesn't like, there is a recent case where these issues were considered extensively.  The case arose in the state of Texas, and involved the prosecution of then-governor Rick Perry (now he is the Secretary of Energy) over alleged crimes that arose when Perry exercised his power under the Texas constitution to veto an appropriation of money by the legislature to the office of an official with whom he had clashed.  In 2014, the Travis County, Texas (that's the county where Austin is located) prosecutor charged Perry with the crime of "misuse of government funds" for committing this act.  I covered the subject in a post titled "The Perry Prosecution And Giving Prosecutors The Benefit Of The Doubt."   

In my post I called the Perry prosecution "blatantly outrageous overreaching."  But Perry continued under the cloud of the prosecution until his case reached the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 2016.  (This is Texas's highest court for criminal matters.  In effect they have two Supreme Courts.)  That court threw out the prosecution.  Although I did not do a follow up post on the Perry case when it was thrown out, Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy did.  Eugene also submitted an amicus brief in the case in support of Perry -- a brief joined by a who's who of law professors.  You will not be surprised that Alan Dershowitz was one of them.  From Volokh's summary of the Texas court opinion (mostly a quote of the opinion itself):

“The [Texas] Constitution does not purport to impose any restriction on the [governor’s] veto power based on the reason for the veto, and it does not purport to allow any other substantive limitations to be placed on the use of a veto.” Therefore, “The Legislature cannot directly or indirectly limit the governor’s veto power. No law passed by the Legislature can constitutionally make the mere act of vetoing legislation a crime.” And other state courts were right to say that “courts may not examine the motives behind a veto or second-guess the validity of a veto.”  

Hard to see how that same logic does not apply to a prospective prosecution of Trump for exercising the prosecutorial discretion function to decline to prosecute, or the general executive function of firing people.

Meanwhile the madness continues.  Am I the only one in the country who thinks that the President is entitled to have a Justice Department and an FBI who work for him and are not engaged in a constant guerrilla war to undermine the duly elected executive and his administration?

The Deep Constitutional Thought Of Preet Bharara

Back in March, when President Trump finally fired Preet Bharara from the job of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, I took the occasion to write a post titled "Good Riddance To Preet Bharara."  The post outlined some of Bharara's worst abuses as U.S. Attorney -- from the non-insider insider trading jihad (ultimately ended when the Second Circuit ruled that much of the underlying conduct was not a crime), to the shakedown of J.P. Morgan for $2 billion for failing to uncover the fraud of Bernie Madoff, to the politicized prosecution of Dean Skelos, to the blatantly illegal gag order in the Reason Magazine subpoena.  

You would think this guy would just go away quietly.  But on Sunday he re-emerged on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous.  This time he was spouting his theories about how our federal government should work under the Constitution.  Here is the transcript.  There are also articles reporting on the event in the New York Times here, and the New York Post here.   

First, I'll give you the gist of Mr. Bharara's Deep Constitutional Thoughts:  The U.S. Attorneys and the FBI get to decide who is going to be prosecuted and for what, and the President damned well better not meddle in something that is none of his business.  And if the President does have the temerity to try to meddle, even a little, the U.S. Attorneys and FBI can and should turn on him and investigate him and prosecute him for obstruction of justice.

The New York Times puts it this way:  

Mr. Bharara said the contacts with Mr. Trump made him increasingly uncomfortable because they broke with longstanding Justice Department rules on communicating with the White House.

Got that?  The Justice Department and prosecutors, on their own authority and without the consent of the President, can make "rules" that say, in effect, we don't report to the President and we don't take orders from the President, and we'll prosecute whomever we damn well please, and we don't even have to talk to the President if we don't feel like it.  We, the hoity toity unelected bureaucrats, are entitled to tell the duly elected President -- holder of all of the executive power of the U.S. government under a crystal-clear provision of the Constitution -- to get lost.  Oh, and then to prosecute him for attempting to exercise his constitutional function.  Indeed, that's just how Mr. Bharara thought he was entitled to behave:

The final contact occurred March 9, a day before Mr. Bharara was among 46  asked to resign.  Mr. Trump was then president, so Mr. Bharara said he declined to return the call and reported it to the chief of staff of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. 

Here is a somewhat longer quote of Mr. Bharara's own words:

[Y]ou have uncontroverted from someone who was under oath that on at least one occasion, the president of the United States cleared a room of his vice president and his attorney general, and told his director of the FBI that he should essentially drop a case against his former national security adviser.

And whether or not that is impeachable or that's indictable, that's a very serious thing. . . . And there's a lot to be frightened about and a lot to be outraged about if you have a president who, A, may have done it, although I know he denies it, but he hasn't done it under oath yet. And, B, he seems to suggest that even if he had done it or said words to that effect, there's nothing wrong with that. . . .  

That's an incredibly serious thing if people think that the president of the United States can tell heads of law enforcement agencies, based on his own whim or his own personal preferences or friendships, that they should or should not pursue particular criminal cases against individuals.

That's not how America works.

Actually, it is how America works.  Has this guy even heard of the Constitution?  Does he know that the President is the sole constitutional executive officer of the United States and that all of the subordinate executive branch personnel -- including the Attorney General, all the prosecutors, the FBI, and the whole rest of the Justice Department -- work for the President?  Bharara was the most powerful of all U.S. Attorneys in the country for some seven and a half years, and claimed the authority under the Constitution to put hundreds of people in jail, and yet he seems to have absolutely no idea that the prosecutorial discretion function of the government belongs to the President and not to the director of the FBI or anybody else.  The combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.

I particularly like that business where Bharara is outraged at the President thinking he can tell the prosecutors what cases to pursue "based on his own whim or his own personal preferences or friendships."  And how exactly do you think U.S. Attorneys exercise the prosecutorial discretion function?  How did Preet Bharara do it?  Is he telling us that his "whim" or "personal preferences" or "friendships" had nothing to do with it?  Balderdash!  And why exactly does he think that his own "personal preferences" take precedence over those of the guy who was elected to the office of President?  Rank idiocy.

Here is my proposal for President Trump:  See if Alan Dershowitz is available to give a one hour long mandatory lecture on basic constitutional law to all lawyers in the Justice Department.  If Dershowitz is not available, I am, and I'd be happy to do it.  At the end of the lecture, give a short quiz to the participants.  The quiz could include a few simple questions like these:

• In which government official does the Constitution "vest" "the executive Power" of the United States?
• Does the President of the United States have the authority under the Constitution to exercise the prosecutorial function of the executive branch of the government?
• Do the Attorney General and the FBI Director work for the President?
• Can the President fire the Attorney General or the FBI Director at any time for any or no reason?
• Can the President, if he wants, personally exercise the prosecutorial discretion function of the U.S. government?

Anybody who gets any of these simple questions wrong promptly gets fired for cause due to basic incompetence.  That will be a good start on draining the swamp!

Peonies!

One of Mrs. Manhattan Contrarian's favorite things is her flower garden in the country.  The annual highlight is the peonies, which bloom for about two to three weeks in mid-June.  Here are two pictures of them from this morning:

If you look closely, you can see that many of them are still not fully opened.  They will be with us for close to two more weeks.  

Corruption In The Eye Of The Beholder

An awful lot of people you might have once thought were sane have worked themselves into a lather the last few days over the testimony of Jim Comey supposedly revealing "obstruction of justice" by President Trump.  Hey, that's a crime!  On to impeachment!

There are probably a hundred or more instances of this out there, but I'll focus on the Washington Post and New York Times, since they seem to be the authoritative origin of the official talking points for the progressive media and blogosphere.  In the Post it's "Comey lays out the case that Trump obstructed justice."  

A Senate committee on Thursday heard former FBI director James B. Comey essentially lay out an obstruction of justice case against President Trump as he highlighted critical encounters that will be part of any evaluation of whether Trump committed a crime.  There was evidence of possible intent: when the president cleared the room so he could ask Comey — without the attorney general or his son-in-law present — about the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials after the 2016 election.   There was the suggestion of quid pro quo: when Trump repeatedly raised the status of Comey’s job as he asked for loyalty.  And there was the consequence: when Comey, having not steered investigators away from Flynn, was fired by Trump in May, long before the end of his 10-year term.

Or consider, from the New York Times, "Trump, Comey, and Obstruction of Justice: A Primer."

The testimony by the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey that President Trump, before firing him last month, demanded loyalty, urged him to drop the investigation into his former national security adviser and pressed him to “lift the cloud” of the Russia inquiry is fueling accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Would you think that, before they would plaster this kind of thing all over their front pages and lead editorials, our seemingly authoritative media would have at least a teensy clue what they were talking about?  Don't bet on it.  The Post, Times, et al., seem to be completely unaware that under our Constitution (Article II, Section 1), the "executive Power" is "vested" in the "President of the United States of America" -- and in nobody else.  The "executive Power" includes the power to prosecute for all crimes, and also includes the function of prosecutorial discretion.  The Attorney General and FBI Director hold none of this power on their own, but only by delegation from the President.  The President has the absolute right and authority to direct them to use the prosecutorial powers as he sees fit.  He has the clear constitutional authority to direct that any prosecution be ended, or to pardon the target, or to fire any and all of the prosecutors.  So how could any of that possibly be "obstruction of justice"?  

There is literally only one person on the left side of the political divide -- law professor Alan Dershowitz -- who seems capable of uttering these simple truisms and of trying to keep his fellow travelers from making utter fools of themselves.  Dershowitz published an op ed in the Washington Examiner on Thursday stating some of the obvious:

The president can, as a matter of constitutional law, direct the attorney general, and his subordinate, the director of the FBI, tell them what to do, whom to prosecute and whom not to prosecute. Indeed, the president has the constitutional authority to stop the investigation of any person by simply pardoning that person. . . .  The Comey statement suggests that one reason Trump fired him was because of his refusal or failure to publicly announce that the FBI was not investigating Trump personally. Trump "repeatedly" told Comey to "get that fact out," and he did not.  If that is true, it is certainly not an obstruction of justice.

All I can say is, there sure seem to be an awful lot of people with a gigantic level of outrage over conduct that couldn't possibly more clearly legal and authorized and constitutional.  

And now, can we talk about some conduct of the government that is (or was) equally clearly illegal and unauthorized and unconstitutional?  I'm talking about the practice of the prior administration of shaking down banks and industrial companies for multi-billion dollar settlements and then passing out the loot to political friends and supporters of the administration, to be used for the political advantage of the Democratic Party and its allies, including voter registration and voter outreach efforts.  The Wall Street Journal had a good roundup of the bank side of the scam back in August 2016, headline "Look Who's Getting That Bank Settlement Cash."  

Imagine if the president of the United States forced America’s biggest banks to funnel hundreds of millions—and potentially billions—of dollars to the corporations and lobbyists who supported his agenda, all while calling it “Main Street Relief.” The public outcry would rightly be deafening. Yet the Obama administration has used a similar strategy to enrich its political allies, advance leftist pet projects, and protect its legacy—and hardly anyone has noticed.  The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. . . . 

Combined, the [settling] banks [including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America] must divert well over $11 billion into “consumer relief,” which is supposed to benefit homeowners harmed during the Great Recession. . . .   [A] substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list. Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but.  This is a handout to the administration’s allies. Many of these groups engage in voter registration, community organizing and lobbying on liberal policy priorities at every level of government.

None of the handouts to the prior administration's political supporters was made the subject of an appropriation by Congress.  They took the billions of dollars of settlement money, put it in a slush fund, and passed it out to their friends as they saw fit for political advantage.  Is it possible to imagine a clearer case of extreme corruption?

And does the Constitution have anything to say about this?  That would be Article I, Section 9:  "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law. . . ."  

Well, now new Attorney General Jeff Sessions is putting an end to this practice.  From the front page of today's New York Times, "Settlements for Company Sins Can No Longer Aid Other Projects, Sessions Says."    

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a memo issued this week, directed the Justice Department to no longer include funding for projects managed by outside groups in settlements with corporate wrongdoers. The settlement money will instead go exclusively to the federal Treasury or to victims of the company’s actions, Mr. Sessions said.

Do you expect there to be a little outrage here about money belonging to the taxpayers being passed out to left-wing interest groups for political purposes, in the face of a specific constitutional prohibition?  Hey, this is Pravda.  They go and seek out reactions from a few environmental lawyers:

“You’re killing something that’s worked really well — which is getting violators who’ve broken the law, in some cases in a criminal way, to agree to fund projects to make the air or water cleaner,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and the former director of civil enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency. “What’s wrong with that?” . . .  Frank Holleman, a senior lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said that if settlement money for environmental violations goes to the Treasury Department, it may be spent on something else, and prevent restoration of or protection of an affected community or ecosystem.

Don't try to look for any kind of unifying constitutional theory in the positions being taken here.  It's only about momentary advantage in the political fray.  We get the money!  You go to jail!  Constitution?  What's that?

UPDATE, June 11:  RealClearPolitics links this morning to a particularly unhinged example of a constitutional ignoramus, Fred Kaplan of Slate.  The article is headlined "What Trump Doesn’t Know Will Hurt Us: The GOP excuse about Trump’s ignorance will lead America to disaster."

House Speaker Paul Ryan tried to excuse the most incriminating portions of Comey’s statement—the highly detailed claims that Trump pressured him to swear loyalty, to drop the probe of Michael Flynn, and to tell the public that Trump himself was not under criminal investigation—by saying that the president is “just new to this.” In other words, Ryan was saying, Trump isn’t a crook; he’s just ignorant. . . .  So these are the GOP’s rationales for Trump’s behavior: He was only talking like a felon, he didn’t necessarily commit a crime; and if he did, it’s only because he didn’t know what he was doing.

Fred, I highly recommend that you not take your constitutional law from the political writers at the Washington Post and New York Times.  You might try reading the document itself, which is not long.  The relevant provision is only one sentence of 15 words.