Presidential Chirping Omitted

There's nothing I could write here about the President that hasn't already been said.  So, I'll skip that.  If you need to hear it again, imagine about a 45 minute rant based on the liberal views of a U.S. Citizen who is a governmental employee with a spouse who also works for the government.  Make sure you add a healthy dose of 4-letter words.

That said, I'm a bit confused.  I recently read that Stephen King has been blocked by the President's twitter feed among other U.S. citizens.  Yes, that Stephen King.  The Shining.  The Mist.  Carrie.  Pet Cemetery.  It.  I follow Mr. King on Twitter, and he confirmed it.  My question is, is the President of the United States, a servant of the people in a public office, allowed to exclude U.S. Citizens from official statements made on social media platforms such as Twitter?

For the answer, let's go to the National Constitutional Center.  In their own words, "The National Constitution Center is the first and only institution in America established by Congress to 'disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a non-partisan basis in order to increase the awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.'" 

Their analysis is unclear.  It seems that several organizations and representatives of U.S. Citizens have complained about being blocked by @realDonaldTrump, which is, arguably, the personal Twitter account of the man elected to office.  However, statements by Spicey-bear indicate that all Tweets from that account should be considered "Official White House statements."  If that strict definition holds, it stands to reason that by blocking citizens from receiving official public statements is, in fact, unconstitutional.  

But, not all constitutional scholars agree.  Eugene Volokh professor at the UCLA School of Law says it's not that simple: "...when the president is giving a public speech, he is understood at least in part as expressing his own views. Indeed, that is why even Supreme Court justices who believe that the government may not endorse religion think that it’s fine for government officials to express religious views in their speeches — here, for instance, is the view of Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Van Orden v. Perry:

Our leaders, when delivering public addresses, often express their blessings simultaneously in the service of God and their constituents. Thus, when public officials deliver public speeches, we recognize that their words are not exclusively a transmission from the government because those oratories have embedded within them the inherently personal views of the speaker as an individual member of the polity."

 Also, Mr. Volokh demonstrates that, while blocked users can't follow the President on that account, you can skip logging in, and search for @realDonaldTrump which will show you all relevant tweets, regardless of your account's relationship with the President's.

More serious than being "blocked" is the matter of the President deleting tweets.  If you use the rationale above, where a President is acting as a man and not attempting to use the twitter account as an official statement device of the office of the Presidency, a deletion is nothing.  As the President of the U.S., well that's far more serious.  Forbes has the story here from Carter Moore, Former Congressional Aide and Federal Employee, on Quora: "[on the question of legality for deletions] Very unlikely [to be legal].  But while I hate to be too lawyerly about it, it depends on the nature of the tweet and on how thoroughly he deletes it.  The only 'out' that the President would have in deleting a tweet would be if the tweet could be argued to be a record of 'purely private or nonpublic character which do[es] not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.'  Of course, a tweet being public immediately rules it out as being private or nonpublic in character, so that’s an unlikely defense."

A holdover from Obama is the policy that all official tweets be recorded and archived in perpetuity by the U.S. Archivist Office.  And we know that deleting something from the Internet doesn't necessarily mean it's gone.  

Where everyone agrees is that all shall be revealed when the lawsuits come.  My opinion?  I believe that the subject matter coming from the President's personal account is, generally, politically based.  And, that his seemingly "personal" flare-ups on Twitter are, in part, caused by his recent elevation to the office.  I doubt very much that the shenanigans between Morning Joe and the President would have happened if he wasn't so sensitive about his claim of #fakenews by liberal media outlets.  I believe that his name-calling is a direct result of the portrayal of his incompetence and impotence by the Left, and therefore, every idiotic word out of his mouth should be recorded and recognized for generations to come to study: this is how NOT to be President.

That said, let's see some lawsuits already, and enough about bleeding eyes, let's get back to blocking unethical healthcare bills and Russia, no?