Attorney General William P. Barr has told people close to President Trump — both inside and outside the White House — that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department.

So far, Trump has defied Barr’s requests, both public and private, to keep quiet on matters of federal law enforcement. It was not immediately clear Tuesday if Barr had made his posture known directly to Trump. The administration officials said Barr seemed to be sharing his position with advisers in hopes the president would get the message that he should stop weighing in publicly on the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigations.

“He has his limits,” said one person familiar with Barr’s thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others, to discuss internal deliberations.

Individual members of Congress cannot sue President Trump to stop his private businesses from accepting payments from foreign governments, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled Friday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously dismissed a lawsuit filed by more than 200 Democrats in Congress seeking to enforce the Constitution’s anti-corruption emoluments provision.

“The Members can, and likely will, continue to use their weighty voices to make their case to the American people, their colleagues in the Congress and the President himself, all of whom are free to engage that argument as they see fit. But we will not—indeed we cannot—participate in this debate,” according to the unsigned order from Judges David S. Tatel, Thomas B. Griffith and Karen LeCraft Henderson.

The 12-page opinion points to past Supreme Court decisions, which the judges said do not permit individual lawmakers to bring lawsuits on behalf of the entire body in part because Congress acts through majority votes in the House and Senate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/individual-members-of-congress-barred-from-suing-president-trump-over-business-dealings/2020/02/07/b3d97b3c-3c7e-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html

Nathaniel R. Jones, Rights Lawyer and Federal Judge, Dies at 93

As a voice of the N.A.A.C.P., he challenged school segregation in the North and racial bias in the military. But, he cautioned, the struggle is not over.

Nathaniel R. Jones, a former chief legal spokesman for the civil rights movement and later a federal appeals court judge who devoted his long career to eradicating the legacy of slavery endured by his own family, died on Jan. 26 at his home in Cincinnati. He was 93.

As the general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1970s, Mr. Jones revealed unwelcome truths by challenging school segregation in the North and racial bias in the military justice system, in which, among other things, black defendants had complained of being unable to trust white lawyers. He was also a strong defender of affirmative action programs and other measures to address historic discrimination.

In 1976, Mr. Jones helped persuade Alabama officials, including Gov. George C. Wallace, to pardon Clarence Norris, the last surviving member of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Ala., in 1931.
...
In 1971, a federal judge found that Detroit’s schools had been deliberately segregated. But the United States Supreme Court later all but banned the busing of children between mostly black urban districts and mostly white suburban ones to achieve integration.

“The court has said to black people: ‘You have rights, but you don’t have a remedy,’” Mr. Jones said at the time.
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Mr. Jones held to a simple but powerful credo. As he told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2012, “The key to prevailing as a minority in a segregated, oppressive society is to not let the prevailing stereotypes define who you are.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/nathaniel-r-jones-dead.html