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John Bolton on Government Reform
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Trump agrees that America has too many elections
In an essay adapted from his book, Bolton writes: 'One highlight came when [Chinese President Xi Jinping] said he wanted to work with Trump for 6 more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the 2-term constitutional limit on presidents
should be repealed for him. Xi said the US had too many elections, because he didn't want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.''At the opening of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to
Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang,' Bolton wrote. 'According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security
Council's top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.' [According to leaked Communist party documents, at least 1 million Uighur Muslims are detained in the camps.]
Source: Axios.com excerpts from "The Room Where It Happened"
, Jun 17, 2020
1976: Challenged post-Watergate campaign finance reform
I spent a large part of 1974-76 working on Buckly v. Valeo, challenging the constitutionality of every major provision of the post-Watergate campaign-finance "reform" legislation. Overreacting to Watergate, as in other laws such as the War Powers Act and
the Independent Counsel statute, Congress had set strict contribution and expenditure limits on federal campaigns; tried to limit drastically "independent expenditures" separate from campaigns; imposed sweeping reporting and disclosure requirements;
created a system of public financing for presidential elections; and established a new regulatory body, the Federal Election Commission, to oversee the law. This entire construct violated the First Amendment's
protection of freedom of speech, and we initially hoped President Ford would veto the legislation. Given the weakened state of the Ford presidency and the overwhelming pressure to "reform," that proved impossible.
Source: Surrender is Not an Option, by John Bolton, p. 14
, Nov 6, 2007
Page last updated: Oct 10, 2020