WAS THAT REALLY NECESSARY? EXCELLENCY ALI

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Was that really necessary? Excellency Ali?

Pres Ali is a disappointment. A bigger and bigger one, sadly. No learning from slippages. Barging ahead, unthinkingly. Blame rests on his advisers, handlers. Their duty is to protect the president. From himself. It was the Fourth. Not an ordinary one. But the soaring, sprawling celebration of 250 years of cherished American liberty. U.S. Ambassador, Excellency Nicole D. Theriot had her say, said it well. On taking the podium, Guyana’s Pres Ali started out on the right foot, then his compass gyrated. A stumbling came. Rather ghastly, I think. Sullying an extraordinary moment. Imperiling to the ambience of more delicate sensibilities. Foreign ones mostly; local ones faded way back.

“In Guyana today, we are accustomed to seeing people walk on examples and still criticize.” Seriously, Excellency? Was that really necessary, Mr. President? Throwing a tantrum, stamping feet, before assembled guests of the ambassador (and Guyana, also). Unseeming, ungracious, and uncouth. Disturbingly so. I try with my president. Efforts to set him on the right path are usually brushed off, mocked. It’s why the people who come from what Guyanese call the ‘outside’ look down their noses on the natives.

Pres Ali may lull himself into thinking that he is excluded from such a put-down. He would be shocked. Foreigners humor him because of Guyana’s oil kingdom. He is a keyholder.

  Aw shucks man it was the 250 th celebration of an honored presence. Therefore, wrong time and wrong place to curse critics. Wrong occasion to banish Guyanese parasites to some specially constructed PPP Govt gulag. What kind of a man, one who should be an example for society, goes into a glittering gathering and growls? Does a man enter a birthday bash, bumps everybody out of the way, and blasts away? To display the bile and acids (maybe stored toxins, I muse) that fester inside of him. It’s a democracy, Brother Ali. Ideals include freedom to think and freedom to speak. Remember, skipper?

The very celebration that the president graced (used guardedly) with his ennobling and enrobed presence stands as a singular testimony. To bold men and women who treasured freedom from the suffocation of a Crown, and did something about it. The King of England could have claimed to be a recipient of the divine right of kings. To rule and to tax. Revolutionary Americans didn’t give a damn about any such self-assigned sacredness (sanctity), refused to prostrate themselves, grovel. Real men, real leaders, rise and roar their resistance in such times.                                          I would appreciate if someone in the government would connect the dots, if wise enough; then, present to Excellency Ali, with my compliments.

Guyana is now an oil power. A country among countries. Though many of its citizens are starving, which the president rejects, Guyana is now the going place. Foreigners are galloping to get here before others. To grab their share of Guyana’s riches. Thus, would be immensely beneficial to this country’s standing, if its head-of-state comports himself like a, well, genuine head-of-state. One overflowing with confidence, and with just the right dash of the debonair. That is, in the stateliest of fashions at all times.

Having delivered his verbal volley, maturity and the decorum of true statesmanship required Pres Ali to call it quits, and immerse himself in the ambassador’s hospitality. Instead, Guyana’s headman chose to deposit another verbal sledge, when he praised the ambassador for working “relentlessly behind cameras, behind the noise, quietly.” Noise, chief! Clearly, the president can’t help himself. His spitefulness (“noise”) must be vented. What point is proved, Dr. President? American ambassadors don’t need applause from Guyanese presidents. They do just what Her Excellency is doing. Carry America’s flag. Sell America’s brand.

I humbly recommend that Pres Ali use that example and order some of his own ambassadors to stop making utter fools of themselves and do some real work. For the record: happy Fourth to Excellency Theriot and the team.

The Arithmetic of Exclusion

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦OBJECTIVITY♦JULY 2026                                         

The Arithmetic of Exclusion: Why WIN’s Absence From the CRC Is a WARNING,Not  an Oversight   

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that hides behind procedure. Ganesh Mahipaul’s defense of WIN’s exclusion from the Constitutional Reform Commission is a textbook case: technically accurate, substantively evasive, and revealing precisely because of what it doesn’t say.

Mahipaul’s argument is that WIN has “meaningful oversight” through the Parliamentary Standing Committee, where proportional representation gives the PPP/C five seats and WIN and APNU two each. This is true. It is also beside the point. The Standing Committee reviews what the Commission produces. It does not shape what gets consulted on or which reforms get framed as viable before the bill ever reaches Parliament. 

By the time WIN’s voice enters the process under Mahipaul’s model, the architecture of reform has already been built without them.

David Patterson’s rebuttal cuts to the arithmetic that actually matters: any constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. A commission that excludes the party whose votes are mathematically necessary to pass anything is not pursuing reform. It is pursuing the appearance of reform, with the real negotiation deferred to a later stage where consensus will have to be manufactured under time pressure rather than built through consultation.

But there is a harder problem here than optics, and it has gone largely unremarked. The Constitution Reform Commission Act itself — the 2022 law establishing the current CRC — allocated its 20 seats by naming specific parties: five for the PPP/C, four for what was then the APNU+AFC coalition, and one each to a list of civil society sectors. The seats reserved for the parliamentary opposition were written into statute as belonging to the PNC-led coalition, because at the time of drafting, the PNC-led coalition was the opposition. 

It no longer is. WIN is. This is not a matter of fairness or good faith gone missing — it is a matter of a law whose own operative terms no longer match political reality.

 When the Guyana Human Rights Association raised this in September, the observation was precise: the statute’s language has been overtaken by an election result, and the Commission’s composition has not been adjusted to match it. That is not a commission choosing to be generous or ungenerous toward a newer party. That is a commission arguably operating on a legal fiction.

History offers two instructive, and very different, precedents for how Guyana has handled moments like this.

The 1999–2001 reform process — the one that produced the current Standing Committee mechanism WIN is now told should be sufficient — was itself born out of the 1997 Herdmanston Accord, a CARICOM-brokered settlement following contested elections that explicitly required broad-based commission representation as the price of political legitimacy. The resulting Commission, and the constitutional amendments it produced in 2000–2001, were widely accepted precisely because the major electoral contenders of that moment were seated at the table from the start, not consulted after the fact. 

Guyana’s political class did not resolve the disputes of that era by asking the newly empowered actors to wait for a downstream committee. It resolved them by rebuilding the table.

The 1980 Constitution is the precedent that should concern everyone invoking “process” today, because it shows what constitutional change looks like when it is engineered without the participation of whoever holds inconvenient political weight. 

Burnham’s Constituent Assembly was built on a 1978 referendum that abolished the need for referendums to alter entrenched constitutional provisions in favor of a two-thirds parliamentary vote, and postponed scheduled elections so the sitting Parliament could reconstitute itself as the body empowered to write the new constitution. It did not lack a process. It had an elaborate one. What it lacked was the participation of anyone capable of contesting the outcome. 

Guyanese across the political spectrum still treat that document, and the manner of its making, as the cautionary tale by which all subsequent reform is measured. It is not a comparison to invoke lightly, and this Commission is obviously not that. But the underlying principle — that the legitimacy of a constitutional process is measured by who was in the room when the terms were set, not by how many public hearings followed afterward — is exactly the principle Patterson is arguing, and exactly the one Mahipaul’s defense sidesteps.

Patterson’s disclosure that Nigel Hughes resigned his Commission seat specifically to let the new Leader of the Opposition nominate a replacement removes any claim that this is logistically complicated. The seat is legally vacant. The mechanism to fill it already exists. And when even a former PPP MP tells Kaieteur News that the government “would do well” to include WIN, and that doing so “would not require much,” the silence from those with the actual authority to act stops looking like caution and starts looking like calculation.

None of this resolves every legitimate question about the Commission’s composition — that’s a separate conversation. But the test for whether a reform process is genuine has never been whether it eventually produces a document. It’s whether the people who must vote it into law were in the room when its terms were written. On the government’s own account, and arguably on the plain text of the Commission’s founding statute, they were not.

The seat is empty. The law creating it may no longer even describe the Parliament that exists.

The only question left is why nobody with the power to fix that has moved to.

THE OFFICE AND THE MAN

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 THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM 

The Office and the Man       

Ambassador Theriot’s Sub Judice Problem-The 592Guardian.

When United States Ambassador Nicole Theriot told reporters this week that it would have been “inappropriate” to invite Azruddin Mohamed to the U.S. Embassy’s 250th Independence Day reception;

she was not simply commenting on a businessman she considers unwelcome. She was making a determination — publicly, and not for the first time — about a man whose guilt has not been established by any court, and in doing so, excluding from a diplomatic function the constitutional office he currently holds: Leader of the Opposition of Guyana.

These are two different acts, and the conflation between them is doing a great deal of quiet work.
The individual is not the office
Mohamed the individual is indicted in the Southern District of Florida on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud, connected to an alleged multi-year scheme to defraud the Guyanese state of gold export taxes and royalties. He is also under U.S. Treasury sanctions dating to June 2024. None of this is in serious dispute, and none of it is this media’s concern to relitigate here.

What is this media’s concern is that the Leader of the Opposition — a position created and protected by Guyana’s Constitution, carrying formal consultative functions including under Article 161(3)(b) on the appointment of GECOM commissioners — was not invited to a function marking the bilateral relationship between Guyana and the United States.

“An embassy is entitled to decline social engagement with an individual it has sanctioned. It is a considerably larger act to decline to acknowledge, at a diplomatic function celebrating partnership between two sovereign states, the constitutional office that individual currently and lawfully occupies. The first is a personnel decision. The second is a statement about whose institutions Washington considers legitimate.”

Ambassador Theriot’s own language elides the distinction. She did not say it would have been inappropriate to invite the Leader of the Opposition, currently Mr. Mohamed. She said it would have been inappropriate to invite him. The office disappears into the man — which is precisely the confusion that lets an ambassador’s personal judgment about an individual’s culpability stand in for a foreign government’s institutional recognition of a constitutional post.
This is not the first time
This would be a narrower complaint if it were an isolated lapse in phrasing. It is not.

In April, Ambassador Theriot told a national television audience: “We firmly believe that they’re guilty of the crimes that they’re being indicted for.

The remark drew a formal written warning from Florida-based attorney Peter A. Quinter, representing the Mohameds, cautioning that such comments were inappropriate given that the matter remained sub judice in Guyana — an argument grounded in the diplomat’s obligation under international convention to avoid prejudicial commentary on a host country’s live judicial proceedings. That extradition matter, at time of writing, remains before the Caribbean Court of Justice, which granted a stay and has scheduled further hearings on the applicants’ special leave application.

Three months after being formally cautioned for prejudging Mohamed’s guilt on air, the Ambassador made a second discretionary judgment against him — this time not verbal but structural, translating her stated belief in his guilt directly into an act of institutional exclusion .

That is not conflation happening by accident. That is a pattern: a foreign diplomat treating an unresolved extradition matter as settled, and now allowing that settled-in-her-mind verdict to determine which of Guyana’s constitutional officers gets a seat at the table.

The precedent, not the person
Set aside, for a moment, whatever view any reader holds of Mohamed’s conduct as a businessman. The question this editorial is asking is not whether he is guilty — that is for the CCJ and, if extradition proceeds, an American jury to determine.

‘The question is whether a foreign embassy should be in the business of deciding, unilaterally and prior to any judicial resolution, which of a host country’s constitutionally-elected office holders merit diplomatic recognition

If the answer is yes, Georgetown should understand clearly what has been established: that the standing of Guyana’s Leader of the Opposition —

an office that exists independent of, and as a check upon, whichever party holds executive power — is now contingent on the approval of the United States Embassy.That is not a small precedent for a small state to absorb without comment, regardless of who currently holds the office, and regardless of how this or any future extradition proceeding resolves.

It is worth noting, too, what standard is not being applied consistently. The sitting President of the United States was convicted — not indicted, convicted, by a New York jury on 34 felony counts — and continued to preside over the very independence being celebrated at Ambassador Theriot’s own reception.

Indictment abroad disqualifies a Guyanese constitutional officer from an invitation list; conviction at home did not disqualify an American president from his own inauguration

 If the operative principle were genuinely about legal jeopardy, it would need to explain that asymmetry. It cannot, because the operative principle is not legal jeopardy. It is discretion — American discretion, applied to a Guyanese institution, with no obligation to be consistent because there is no mechanism by which Guyana can hold Washington to account for it.

President Ali described the U.S.-Guyana relationship this week as being at its strongest point in the two countries’ history, founded on “mutual respect.”

Mutual respect between sovereign states is not merely a matter of warships and communications upgrades. It includes respecting the constitutional architecture of the smaller partner — including, and especially, the parts of that architecture a foreign government finds inconvenient.

An ambassador who cannot keep the man and the office separate has not yet demonstrated that respect. Whether Guyana’s government is prepared to say so is a separate question — and, this news-outlet would argue, an urgent one.

THE BOOK OF JUDGES : REVEALING, RIVETING

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THE 592 Guardian.♦Accountability♦Objectivity ♦Truth                   

The Book of Judges –Revealing, Riveting-July 2026

The Bible is out.  It’s Guyana’s Book of Judges.  What a book, it is.  Like the Bible not referred to, there are good judges and a heap of bad judges.  Life.  Get used to it.  Most of all, there’s a place called Guyana.  Ever heard of it?  Better that didn’t happen.  Spare the senses, help the faculties endure much longer.

I don’t know where Guyanese get their ideas.  The politics got them bad, pushed them overboard

Try these.  First example, whoever said a judge has to be faultless, meaning, infallible, needs an immediate head x-ray.  Even Roman Catholic popes are not infallible.  Notwithstanding old pronouncements to the contrary over a century and a half ago.  If not Vicars of Christ, then it’s clear that expectations are too high for Guyanese judges.  What Guyanese may have in mind for local judges fits the mold of England’s Lord Mansfield and Lord Wilberforce.  Or America’s Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evan Hughes.  They don’t make like them anymore.  Like JOF Haynes and Akbar Khan from right here.  Hence, I recommend that my fellow Guyanese come back down to earth.  Settle for Justice Clarence Thomas.  See how quickly this country is returned to the days of slavery (if it already isn’t).  Think a luminous jurist with the prowess of Justice Clarence Thomas would ever rule against American gladiators and New York Stock Exchange darlings, such as Exxon and Chevron.  Think again.

There’s America.  There’s England.  There is Guyana.  Things are a little peculiar here.  This is PPP Guyana.  The lid just collapsed on everything.  Perverse and profane are the fittest, most proper words.  Who cares about charges?  Since when did that matter to the PPP brain trust?  By the way, it’s a one-brain brain trust?  I am open to challenge, any enlightenment.  On both counts.  In a society where favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism are all at rampant levels, it is fascinating that so many Guyanese are still stuck at who’s related to whom.  Or was.  Take it for granted.  Move on.  The PPP has continuously proved that it’s a legacy entity.  Money passed on.  Assets handed down.  From father to son, mother to daughter, those have all been prominent parts of an enduring kith and kin culture.  Count on critical support from me.  It’s what my position on the appointment of judges with conspicuous political lineage.  None can say they don’t know where I stand.

Convictions, relations, connections, all are part of the same closed and intricate PPP spider’s web.  Outsiders are out.  Logically, where else can they be, since out is out?  I am bewildered.  Not blue; at least, not yet.  Guyanese just must manage themselves in a more responsible manner.  Old judges, recent judges, new judges, and temporary judges, what do citizens expect when they study these people?  I hope it’s not the voice of god from heaven gushing from them, man or woman. 

Where he or she is pronouncing about the last days and Judgement Day.  Or, taking a step lower, as fountains of wisdom, graced by traces of celestial intellect. In other words, the presence of those who brook neither interference nor resistance.  No questioning, objecting, differing.  Thus, I have spoken.  Thus, it shall be.  Adjudicated.  Over.

Sorry to deflate anyone’s balloon, help them return from space.  Judges are regular human beings.  A few are brighter and hardworking.  Quite a few are dumber than barbells and lazy as hell.  Judges partake of the fare of the dining room.  They visit the bathroom and read newspapers.  What they do with the latter when in the former, that’s not my business.  I must say, though, that the PPP has the business of the judiciary where it wants it.  From Judicial Service Commission to judicial service selections, everything is under control.  My hang-ups are straightforward.  If this is the grass, then what does that say about the weeds.  Those aspiring judges that didn’t make the cut. If these are Guyana’s best then this country had better start praying. 

My conviction.  My conclusion.

2026 MID-YEAR REPORT

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2026 Midyear Report –Pt II

A new year. The beginning of a second consecutive term. It was hailed as the dawning of a new era. Supposedly, that third rail in politics that electrifies towards glorious leadership and governance deeds. In surveying the landscape, there are indications of what will be going forward.

A big, boisterous national budget. One bawdier than past blasts. Just bursting with dollars: $1.5 trillion plus. A million in today’s PPP

Guyana is now ‘keep-the-change’ money. Perhaps, one tennis roll that doesn’t have to be taken on ‘trust’. Credit

 At the rate that these national budgets are spiraling, with a trillion comfortably scaled, a billion could soon go the way of a million. That is, small change and fine bangamary money.
Is Guyana heading the way of World War I Germany? Despite all the government’s comforting talk of inflation under control? Guyanese poor don’t know about inflation. They know starvation. Another big budget lauded. But there’s that dark side of Oil Guyana that the oil-enriched PPP Govt shuns talking about. Amidst ballooning daily oil production, there’s the darkness of deep, widespread destitution.

The government and its paid cheerleaders (private sector compensated differently) were ecstatic with the record-breaking budget in February. Four months later, it was time to ask for what poor workers call a ‘raise’, some overtime help, that li’l extra. Officially, Guyanese savor impressive, innocent sounding names: Financial Paper and Supplementary Budget. An anemic needs a supplement, that boost to shake off the lethargy to get him going. However tentatively.
Four months after the big party held a bigger party over Guyana’s biggest budget (yet), it was in need of the energy from a $55 billion supplement. A real supplement, or a PPP Govt on destructive steroids? Whatever it was or is, the supplements (budgets) will have to keep coming.

In the first half of 2026, the PPP Govt boasted about Guyana’s towering, inspiring democracy. The Americans, British, Canadians, and Europeans had to huff and puff to get parliament reconvened. Speaker Manzoor Nadir couldn’t find the keys, or his nerves. Minister Gail Texeira couldn’t find her voice or feet; couldn’t find in time the right lines in her script.

The PPP’s Dr. Cheddi Jagan had developed a cottage industry around walking out of parliament. Today’s Jagan’s PPP descendants have created an industry of stopping Guyanese elected from walking into parliament

From Down with America! it is Thank God for America. And BC& E, of course. The claim is that Guyana’s self-sufficient. Oil. The reality is that Guyana under the yoke of the PPP is self-destructive.

Some youngster, reportedly closely linked to PPP royalty, allegedly damaged property belonging to Guyanese. The palace turned off the lights, went quiet. The police followed suit. Into this vacuum, stepped Pres Ali, after donning his now well-worn Minister of Defense robes to deliver the protective: why the noise? There’s no issue.                                                          Responsible people, mature parenting, and sober judgment are at work. Pres Ali is better off being a pope. One who could see the devil, then forget and forgive the details.
If this is rule of law and respect for law and order, I’m better off with the subcontinent’s Modi or North Korea’s Kim. Guyanese would be, too. Anil Nandlall should share insights on this chapter of rule of law, and his president’s practice of it, in his next Facebook trash talking session.

Right next door, Venezuelans closed out the first half of 2026 in tragic, wrenching despair, when a series of devastating earthquakes struck. Guyanese rightly extended words of harmony and humanity.
I do the same for my fellow Guyanese living right here. They live with daily political and environmental earthquakes that rock them, then ravage them. A piteous presidency. A putrid set of political hustlers and scavengers.
After each local earthquake, the PPP sniffs around to see what more it can grab for itself. The good news is that the first half is over; the past is past. The bad news is that there are six months left. Therein lie opportunities for many more tragedies and exploitations of regular Guyanese.

One last thing: to my fellow American and their fellow travelers: a joyous Fourth.

THE OFFICE ,NOT THE MAN

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRUTH♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦OBJECTIVITY

The Office, Not the Man: Ali’s “Continuity” Fiction and the Article 127 Breach

There is a particular species of executive overreach that does not announce itself with a raised fist. It arrives instead in a lawyer’s phrase, offered almost as an aside, and it is more dangerous for the modesty of its delivery. This week it arrived as “a grey area that we have to navigate carefully.”

That is how President Irfaan Ali characterised the question of whether he is constitutionally obliged to consult Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed on the substantive appointments of the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice. There is no grey area. Article 127(1) of the Constitution is not ambiguous, and it does not run to the President’s convenience. It states, without qualification:

The Chancellor and the Chief Justice shall each be appointed by the President, acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.” Not notice. Not courtesy. Agreement — from the Leader of the Opposition, a constitutional office presently held by Mr Mohamed, not by a letter Dr Ali wrote to his predecessor

The theory, in the President’s own words

Pressed on why he had not engaged Mr Mohamed directly, Dr Ali offered a “continuity of government” theory: that because his administration continued after the September 1 elections, the recommendation he had put to then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton in October 2025 “remains the position of the government” and requires no fresh engagement with the man who has held the office since January 26. Asked again, directly, whether that position had been communicated to Mr Mohamed, the President repeated only that the recommendation “has not changed” — an answer to a question that was not asked, and a studied evasion of the one that was.

This is worth sitting with, because it is not a slip. It is a legal theory, articulated by a head of state, in defence of a decision not to perform a constitutional duty.

Reduced to its essence, the theory holds that “consultation” under Article 127 is satisfied once, in perpetuity, regardless of who subsequently occupies the office of Leader of the Opposition — that the President’s obligation attaches not to the constitutional office and the person Guyanese voters and parliamentarians have placed in it, but to whichever individual happened to be convenient to consult at the moment the President first formed a view.

Mr Mohamed’s rebuttal was plain and correct: “Mr Norton is not the Opposition Leader. He needs to write me or call me and mention that he wants to meet on whatever issue. We can’t go with that letter.” Put another way — the Office survives the transition of the person occupying it, and so does the President’s duty to it. That is not a novel constitutional proposition. It is the ordinary operation of Westminster-derived office.

The courts have already answered this question

The President is not improvising in a vacuum. Guyana’s High Court has already ruled — directly and specifically — on the character of the Article 127 obligation, in litigation arising from Dr Ali’s own decade-long refusal to make these very appointments. In April 2023, Justice Damone Younge held that “for as long as there are no substantive appointments to the offices of Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127(1) of the Constitution, the President and the Leader of the Opposition are under the continuous mandatory constitutional duty and obligation to engage in a process which results in compliance with Article 127(1) of the Constitution.”

Continuous. Mandatory.                Those are the court’s words, not the Opposition’s rhetoric. A continuous duty cannot, by definition, be discharged by a single static communication frozen at a moment in time and preserved thereafter as if the office to which it was addressed had not changed hands. If the duty is continuous, it necessarily runs to whoever currently holds the office being consulted — otherwise the word “continuous” means nothing at all. Dr Ali’s own government has never challenged this characterisation of the duty; it has only ever argued about timing, never about to whom the duty is owed.

Indeed, it is the government’s own former courtroom position that now undercuts the President’s “continuity” theory. In the same 2023 proceedings, Attorney General Anil Nandlall argued on the State’s behalf that the President retained discretion over when to initiate the Article 127 process — “as soon as is reasonably practicable” — while never once disputing that the party owed consultation was the sitting Leader of the Opposition. The government’s litigated position, then, conceded implicitly what Dr Ali now wishes to avoid conceding explicitly: that the obligation tracks the office as currently occupied. He cannot rely on a letter to Mr Norton to satisfy a duty his own Attorney General has already told a judge is continuous and mandatory.

Anticipating the deflection

There is a precedent the government may reach for, and it should be dealt with before it is deployed. Mr Nandlall has separately noted, in relation to the appointment of the Commissioner of Police, that the constitutional consultation requirement did not apply at a moment when there was, in fact, no Opposition Leader in office to consult — a genuine vacancy, not a change of occupant. That is not the present case. Mr Mohamed is the duly elected Leader of the Opposition.                                                 

There is no vacancy for Dr Ali to invoke, no absence of an interlocutor, only his own reluctance to pick up the telephone.

Any attempt to graft the Police Commissioner precedent onto this dispute should be recognised for what it would be: a false equivalence between an empty office and an occupied one the President would simply prefer not to deal with.

A demand grounded in the Office, not the man

Some will note, correctly, that Mr Mohamed and his father are presently the subject of United States sanctions and an extradition fight tied to allegations of gold export tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering. That is a serious matter, and it is entirely beside the point. The Constitution does not condition the President’s Article 127 duty on the Opposition Leader’s personal legal standing, his popularity, his business history, or Dr Ali’s evident discomfort with him. It conditions the duty on the office. This publication has never hesitated to hold power to account regardless of who wields it or who opposes it, and we extend the same standard here: the demand that Dr Ali consult with Mr Mohamed is a demand that he respect the Office of Opposition Leader, exactly as we would make of any president confronting any opposition leader, popular or reviled. To excuse the President from a constitutional duty because the current occupant of a co-equal office is personally unpalatable to him is to hand him a permanent veto over which opposition leaders he must respect the Constitution for — a veto no president should have and none was given.

The pattern this fits

This is not an isolated lapse. It is the latest instance of a governing style this publication has documented repeatedly: a President who treats the constitutional bodies and processes designed to check him as optional formalities to be honoured only when convenient, and who prefers his own unilateral pronouncement to the deliberative process the Constitution actually requires.

We have seen it in his preemption of the Integrity Commission’s findings before the Commission itself could act. We have seen it in the GECOM commissioner impasse, where the Leader of the Opposition’s Article 161(3)(b) nomination rights have met similar resistance.

 We now see it in the judiciary’s top two offices — offices that have sat without substantive appointments for more than two decades, a fact the Caribbean Court of Justice’s own President, Adrian Saunders, has publicly and pointedly lamented.

Seventeen years without a substantive Chancellor. Seventeen years without a substantive Chief Justice. A High Court ruling, sought by his own government’s political opponents, that already tells him the duty is continuous and mandatory. And still, in July 2026, the President’s answer is a “grey area” and a letter written to a man no longer in office.

A 36-seat mandate is a mandate to govern. It is not a dispensation from the Constitution’s plain text, and it is not, whatever the President may have convinced himself of, a title deed to a kingdom.

  . Mr Mohamed says he is prepared to test court, as the opposition did successfully in 2023. He should. The Constitution, and the ruling already on the books, are on his side.

THE EITI BOARD SPEAKS FOR CIVIL SOCIETY

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

The Board Speaks of Civic Space. Guyana Shows What Closing It Looks Like. –The 592 Guardian — Editorial.July 2026

When the EITI Board issued its statement reaffirming that “meaningful, representative and independent civil society participation is essential to the credibility and effectiveness” of extractive-sector transparency, it was speaking in the register international bodies reserve for principles nobody in the room will admit to violating. Helen Clark, the Board Chair, framed it as a defence against a global trend — civic space closing across 122 countries, 43 of them EITI implementers. Guyana did not need to wait for the global statistics.

It has spent the past year demonstrating, in real time, exactly what “closed, repressed or obstructed” looks like when practiced through procedure rather than force.

 The Board’s validation team was on the ground in Guyana from June 8–12. What they found, or were permitted to find, sits at the center of a story this paper has been tracking since the reconstitution of the Guyana EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group began unraveling in 2025 — a story that is, at its core, about who gets to sit at the table and who decides who sits at the table.

A Convenor With a Concession

Start with the appointment that should have disqualified itself.

In appointing Dr. Ivor English as Convenor of the Civic component of the MSG, Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat handed the gatekeeping role for civil society’s own selection process to a man who, by Policy Forum Guyana’s account, had been granted gold-mining concessions totaling nearly 20,000 acres — concessions later subdivided into over a dozen medium-scale permits, a structuring pattern civil society groups say is commonly used to dodge the fee thresholds that apply to large-scale operations. PFG’s statement went further, noting that the permits were contiguous and paid on the same day, which it said raised questions about coordination in how they were structured.

The Ministry’s defence was that English had since divested and posed no conflict. English himself told a local outlet he might return to mining “in a big way” in the future. That is not the language of a man with no stake in the sector he was appointed to help oversee on civil society’s behalf.

A civic convenors entire function under the EITI Standard is to guide an independent, representative caucusing process — to be, in effect, the referee civil society trusts to keep the selection clean. Guyana handed that whistle to a player.

This was not the Ministry’s first attempt to install a favorable convenor. Its earlier bid to hand the role to the then-Chairman of the Private Sector Commission was reversed only after the EITI’s Oslo Secretariat intervened. The English appointment was, by the accounting of Policy Forum Guyana and the Transparency Institute Guyana Inc. — this paper’s own investigative partner — the second attempt within the same cycle to shape civil society’s representation from the government side of the table.

Notices That Never Arrive

The pattern repeats at the level of pure logistics, which is where obstruction hides best because it never has to admit to being obstruction. When the civic caucusing meeting was finally convened in November 2025 to select MSG representatives, established organisations — the Guyana Human Rights Association, Red Thread, the Breadfruit Collective, the Amerindian Peoples Association, and TIGI among them — say they never received the invitation carrying the agenda and preparatory documents needed to participate meaningfully.

The Ministry’s rebuttal was that it had placed an advertisement in the newspaper. Civil society’s answer, correctly, was that a newspaper notice is not an invitation to a meeting requiring documents nobody had seen.

That same choreography resurfaced during the Validation Team’s June visit. An official letter dated June 5 inviting Members of Parliament to engage with the visiting EITI evaluators was, according to the Clerk of the National Assembly’s own account, signed for and received at the Parliament Office nearly a week before Opposition MPs say they were notified — reportedly only hours before their scheduled slot. The Chief Whip’s charge was direct: that government was limiting who got to speak to the international body sent to assess the state of Guyana’s transparency and accountability. Whether or not that characterization is accepted in full, the sequence of dates is not in serious dispute, and it fits a now-familiar shape — technical compliance with the letter of a notice requirement, paired with practical exclusion of the people the requirement exists to protect.

What the Board’s Language Actually Demands

The EITI Standard’s civil society protocol is not decorative language. It exists precisely to prevent governments from performing openness while managing outcomes — to ensure, as the Board’s statement puts it, that civil society can participate “freely, independently and safely.” Guyana’s MSG saga over the past year has tested every clause of that sentence. Freely — when convenors are drawn from the extractive sector itself. Independently — when the referee for civic selection is appointed by the same Ministry whose licensing decisions civil society exists to scrutinize. Safely — when mining-sector stakeholders across the Guiana Shield already cite “security concerns” as their standing excuse for withholding basic reporting data, a reluctance the GYEITI Secretariat itself flagged in its own 2025 Annual Progress Review.

The Board’s statement was general by design, calibrated to a global membership, careful not to name a single implementing country. It did not have to. Guyana wrote its own footnote in real time — the concession-holding convenor, the caucusing meeting held without proper notice to the very groups the process was meant to enfranchise, and now an opposition delegation informed of its audience with international evaluators only after the paper trail shows it should have known a week earlier.

 Awaiting the Verdict

Guyana’s second EITI Validation, which commenced formally on May 15 and brought the assessment team to Georgetown in June, is now the mechanism that will either ratify this pattern as acceptable or name it for what it is. The Validation Standard examines three things: outcomes and impact, stakeholder engagement, and transparency.

Guyana’s own record over the last twelve months has supplied the evaluators with a stakeholder-engagement case study that writes itself — assuming the team was allowed to hear the parts of it that mattered.

The 592 Guardian will be watching for that report closely, and we will hold it against the paper trail we have already built rather than against the government’s press releases about “open and transparent” processes. A country that has to keep re-litigating who counts as civil society, six years into its EITI membership, is not managing implementation friction. It is managing dissent. The Board has now said, in its own words, that this distinction matters. Guyana’s Validation report will tell us whether the Board is prepared to say so about Guyana by name.

 The 592 Guardian will publish further analysis when Guyana’s 2026 Validation report is released.

A BRIDGE TOO CONVENIENT

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUTABILITY JOURNALISM.JULY 2026

A Bridge Too Convenient: What Suriname’s Unilateral Turn Says About Who Was Never Really in the Room

The 592 Guardian — Editorial.

On Monday night, in a Paramaribo budget debate most Guyanese never heard about until it was already history, Suriname’s Public Works Minister Stephen Tsang told his National Assembly that his government would finance the Corentyne River Bridge “100 per cent” on its own, that tolls were on the table, and that a new tender was “likely.”            On Tuesday, President Irfaan Ali told this reporter’s counterparts at Demerara Waves that he did not know who Tsang was, and that President Jennifer Geerlings-Simons had personally assured him — as recently as their last exchange — that Suriname was still “finalising their end of the arrangement.” Guyana, he insisted, was ready with its commitment. There was, he said, “only one thing we’re interested in and that is the joint development of the bridge.”

Two governments. One project. Two entirely different stories, told forty-eight hours apart, with a head of state professing ignorance of the named minister to a Guyanese newsroom rather than to his own Assembly.

 That gap deserves scrutiny on its own terms, before any theory of motive gets attached to it. Whatever Suriname’s calculus turns out to be, the sequence of events itself — nearly four years of joint procurement machinery, a named preferred contractor, repeated joint statements as recently as September 2025, and now a unilateral reversal aired first to Surinamese legislators — is the story. Everything that follows is an assessment of plausible scenarios, not a verdict.

What Is Actually Established

Strip away the diplomatic language and the record is precise. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board opened bids in August 2023 from five pre-qualified contractors or joint ventures, all but one Chinese state-owned or state-linked. China Road & Bridge Corporation bid US$236,173,962, against Ballast Nedam Infra Suriname’s US$325.4 million.

By December 2024, Minister Juan Edghill was confirming CRBC as the jointly evaluated preferred contractor — selected by both the Guyanese and Surinamese evaluation teams, though without a signed construction contract, pending resolution of financing.

The financing question was never resolved because it could not be. Suriname’s IMF structural adjustment programme constrained its borrowing capacity, and by January 2024 both qualifying bidders had indicated they could not meet the pre-financing terms under the original Public-Private Partnership model, forcing both governments to pursue direct financing instead — including a joint approach to Beijing. That approach appears to have stalled indefinitely: Suriname had separately restructured $476 million in debt with China’s Exim Bank in November 2024, with $140 million already in arrears, a detail that should have been sitting on every desk in Georgetown as a warning sign about Suriname’s actual appetite for taking on new Chinese-linked debt for a “joint” bridge.

Through 2025, the diplomatic choreography continued undisturbed. Presidents Ali and Geerlings-Simons met in Nieuw Nickerie in September 2025 and reaffirmed their commitment to “continue close coordination to address outstanding legal, technical and financial matters,” with the bridge framed as integral to Amazonian regional interconnectivity. As recently as October 2025, Vice President Jagdeo was telling reporters the project would move at the pace at which we can reach an agreement on funding,”explicitly distinguishing it from unilateral Guyanese projects like the Berbice Bridge precisely because it was a shared undertaking requiring Suriname to raise its share.”

Then, in April 2026 — three months before Tsang’s announcement — the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry called on Government to halt discussions on the bridge altogether, citing Suriname’s “unilateral imposition of exorbitant fees for the use of shared waterways and accusing Paramaribo of enforcing measures that undermine Berbice’s development even as Guyana continued negotiating in good faith”. That is a material fact this editorial board has not seen adequately connected to Tuesday’s announcement in any Guyanese coverage so far: the private sector was already flagging bad faith on Suriname’s side months before Tsang stood up in the National Assembly.

Guyanese private sector bodies are warning that repeated controversy over Guyana’s border with Suriname is beginning to erode confidence in cross-border energy cooperation, after a map shown at the Suriname Energy, Oil and Gas Summit (SEOGS) 2026 depicted the New River Triangle as Surinamese territory.

 Scenario One: Fiscal Pragmatism, Badly Communicated

The least sinister reading is also the most mundane, and it should not be dismissed simply because it is boring. Suriname is servicing IMF-conditioned debt. A jointly financed, jointly tolled bridge under a DBFOM structure with a Chinese state contractor carries exactly the debt-trap profile that regional analysts have already flagged — the Hambantota Port precedent is not an abstraction to anyone advising Paramaribo on this financing structure If Surinamese technocrats concluded that a wholly Surinamese-financed, tolled asset is more bankable and less politically exposed than a bilateral arrangement requiring Guyanese sign-off on every design and tariff decision, that is a coherent, defensible policy shift. Under this reading, Tsang’s error was not the decision — it was springing it on Guyana’s president via a parliamentary answer rather than through the joint commission structure both sides had spent a year rebuilding.

This scenario does not require corruption. It requires only that Guyana’s government failed to notice, or failed to prepare for, a financing reality that the GCCI was publicly warning about in April.

Scenario Two: A Contractor Pipeline Already Compromised

This is the scenario the 592 Guardian’s initial read raises, and it merits being stated precisely rather than insinuated. If Suriname builds the bridge unilaterally and re-tenders, the previously “jointly evaluated” preferred contractor — CRBC — loses its automatic claim to the project. A new, Suriname-only tender means new evaluation criteria, a new procurement authority of record, and no obligation to honour a bilateral evaluation process Georgetown can no longer supervise or audit.

What would need to be true for this to be more than a hypothesis: evidence that specific Guyanese or
Surinamese officials had already extracted, been promised, or negotiated undisclosed benefits contingent on CRBC’s selection under the joint framework — and that a re-tender threatens to expose or unwind those arrangements.

 This publication has not seen such evidence, and none has been published by any outlet covering this story as of writing. The Diálogo Américas analysis on CRBC’s track record documented irregularities including labor rights violations and shoddy work across other jurisdictions where the company has operated — establishes that CRBC carries a global pattern warranting scrutiny. It does not establish anything about the Guyana-Suriname procurement specifically. Readers should hold this distinction firmly: a contractor’s bad track record elsewhere is grounds for demanding transparency here, not grounds for assuming skullduggery has already occurred.

If this writer’s instinct is right, the tell will not be in Tsang’s announcement — it will be in whichever entity Suriname’s new tendering procedure ultimately selects, and how quickly. A re-tender that lands, within months, on a contractor with any traceable relationship to the original bid pool, evaluation personnel, or financing intermediaries would be the concrete fact pattern worth an investigative follow-up. Absent that, this remains a scenario, not a finding.

Scenario Three: Suriname Monetizes What Guyana Was Prepared to Subsidize

The toll question is the detail that should worry Georgetown most regardless of which other scenario is true. A wholly Suriname-financed, Suriname-owned, Suriname-tolled bridge converts an asset both governments spent four years describing as mutual infrastructure into a Surinamese revenue instrument that Guyanese commercial traffic, fishermen, and cross-border trade will simply have to pay to use. Guyana’s 2025 budget had already earmarked GY$5 billion (US$23.9 million) toward its 50% share under the joint model. If that joint model is now dead, the operative question is not just who builds the bridge — it is whether Georgetown negotiated, or even attempted to negotiate, toll-rate protections, dispute mechanisms, or usage guarantees for Guyanese users before Suriname’s unilateral turn hardened into policy. Nothing in the public record indicates Guyana raised this possibility as a contingency at any point over the past four years. That is itself an accountability gap, independent of Suriname’s motives.

The Question This Editorial Board Is Actually Asking

Not “why did Suriname do this” — Paramaribo owes its own public an answer to that, and Minister Tsang has at least attempted to give one, however undiplomatically delivered. The question for Guyanese readers is narrower and squarely within this publication’s remit: why was President Ali “unaware”?

Four years of joint procurement architecture, a jointly named preferred contractor, and a September 2025 joint statement reaffirming “close coordination” do not evaporate without warning unless one side stopped communicating substantively months before the public announcement — which the GCCI’s April intervention suggests was already visible to Guyana’s private sector. Either Guyana’s diplomatic and technical teams were not picking up on deteriorating signals that industry stakeholders were seeing in real time, or they were picking them up and the public — including this newsroom — was not told. Both possibilities are failures of stewardship over a US$236 million binational asset and Guyana’s committed GY$5 billion stake in it. Neither requires Suriname to have acted in bad faith for Guyana’s own accountability question to stand.

President Ali’s posture — professing ignorance to a private newsroom rather than convening a public accounting of what Georgetown knew and when — is itself the story this editorial board will continue to pursue.         

If favoured contractors, financing intermediaries, or officials on either side of the Corentyne stood to gain from the joint framework’s collapse into a unilateral Surinamese tender, that will only surface through what happens next: who bids, who wins, and how fast. This publication will be watching the next tender notice as closely as we watched the last one.

The 592 Guardian’s editorial board applies its standing methodology to this matter: aspirations and announcements are treated as unverified until independently confirmed; verified findings are distinguished explicitly from unproven allegations; and institutional actors are named directly. Readers with knowledge of the original NPTAB evaluation process, financing negotiations, or any aspect of Suriname’s anticipated re-tender are invited to contact the editorial desk.

2026 1st HALF, LEADERSHIP. GOVERNANCE

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 THE 592 GUARDIAN. GOVERNANCE♦ACCOUNTABILITY

2026 1st Half: Leadership, Governance

The first half of 2026 is over.  It’s really 10 months, a few days shorted.  I’m counting that Guyana’s New Era began with Pres Ali’s second inaugural.  Did he do better?  Did governance in Guyana climb out of its hole?  If so, was there a first step forward or many backwards?  

Or, given governance and leadership characters, did Guyanese get the wayward?  The sideways culture now normalized?

 Prime Minister Mark Anthony Phillips once a soldier, is now a political guerilla fighter.  More for party, less about country.  With that handle, Mark Anthony, he could be a Roman orator or a Puerto Rican singer.  Not he.  Let it be: a proud, honorable Guyanese.  Salutations, Marshall.  Not fire, think field.  PM Mark Anthony stood in Guyana’s equivalent of the Roman Forum, and perorated.  Stabroek News will be taken care of soon.  A man truer to his word there never was.  Stabroek News was taken care of, the PPP and Mark Phillips way: it died and was buried.  No resurrection.  

There’s regard for men of honor.  Leadership and governance, Guyana style, the PPP wiles.  I like.

 Another leader, one given to the garrulous and grandiose, is Guyana’s Master Governor.  Whoever never heard of Excellency Ali is a failed AI experiment.  In 2020, six years ago, not six months (or ten), Master Governor Ali swore to transparency and accountability.  For Guyanese to get access to information, they have to get valid passport, FBI clearance, U.S. visa, and a red shirt.  Naysayers, critics, and parasites are excluded.  No matter what they have.  Or what the law says.  Pres Ali in fits of the fanciful said that’s not his cup of tea.  British teaching.  Like Pontius Pilate, Irfaan Ali washed his hands clean of the vulgar access to info affair.  It’s Guyana’s Profumo Affair.  It’s Leadership 601.  Taught in the schools of Mao Zedong, Indira Gandhi, Narendra Modi, DJ Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu.  Guyana’s Ali learned well.

Incidentally, he swore to unity in 2020.  One Guyana still birthed.  IDPADA-G almost died.  The people at Mocha got sanitized.  Some losing folks get a basketball.  Others got shot.  Seems a funny kind of unity, to me.

In September 2025 (Inaugural Palaver II), he promised an anti-corruption czar.  The people at Office of the President, Freedom House, and major procurement outfits had serious cases of diarrhea.  Their world almost ended.  Wiser heads prevailed.                                                                Chatter about anticorruption czar disappeared.  And, it’s only midyear.  See, why like PM Mark Anthony, there’s such regard for HE Ali!  PM Mark Anthony and Office of the Prime Minister are still in this gospel.  They also had a fit when Excellency Ali swore to go after peddlers of misinformation and disinformation.  Somebody gave him Confucius’ masterpiece: the hardest, the longest, journey begins with the first step.  Dr. Ali has been treating himself for cramps, since September 2025. 

Misinformation and disinformation, he discovered belatedly (or cleverly) is a PPP Govt monopolized, subsidized, and oversized business. 

 Bigger than Exxon.  Have concerns about Silica City?  Roll them, then smoke them.  Need to know how all the oil money was spent?  AK Singh has a machinegun called “national development priorities.”  A load of buckshot mixed with bull-s*** sprayed on Guyanese.  Who to watch more: Venezuelans with AK-47s or AK Singh with his scholarly arsenals?  This is leadership.  This is governance.

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo took a sabbatical post September 2025.  It was his own 9/11 great escape.  Reimages himself as Steve McQueen.  Who to put for 2030?  Policymaker or kingmaker?  Queenmaker isn’t a stretch.  Spoke of resuming his press conferences.  His handlers whispered: not the greatest idea.  PPP dirty laundry all hung out to dry.  Don’t make self a spectacle to deliver cheap shots.  The White people are appalled, shrink in disbelief (disgust also).  They have weight.  They count.  Cease and desist with all the carrying on and disgracing party, Cheddi, and the Yanquis.  Decency reigned; 2030 strategy priority took over.  Anil Nandlall couldn’t feature.  Not after the CCJ extradition embarrassment.  Though partially redeeming himself at the ICJ.  

Fellow Guyanese -the book on 2026, its midpoint.  Great news!  The second half looks identical.

THE MANDATE IS NOT DISCRETIONARY

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THE
ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM • GOVERNANCE • ELECTORAL INTEGRITY.                                                                                                   

Editorial — Electoral Governance
The Mandate Is Not Discretionary: President Ali Must Act on Article 161

This is not a vacuum in the law. It is a vacuum manufactured by an Executive that prefers paralysis to a Leader of the Opposition it does not like.
The 592 Guardian | July 2026
Kaieteur News’s Peeping Tom column this week calls for the courts to “settle” the question of GECOM commissioner tenure, framing the dispute as an unresolved ambiguity that only judicial intervention can cure. It is a comfortable position for everyone content to wait. It is also wrong, and it lets the one actor with a present constitutional duty — the President of Guyana — off the hook entirely.
There is no ambiguity here. There is a refusal.

Two Provisions, Not One
Article 225, imported into the Elections Commission framework through Article 161(6), governs removal for cause: infirmity, misconduct, the disciplinary track that shields a sitting commissioner from being purged mid-term for political convenience.                                                                                    Nobody is invoking that provision against the opposition-nominated commissioners. Nobody has alleged misconduct. That is precisely why the “security of tenure” defence being raised on their behalf is a category error — it answers a question nobody asked.
The actual provision in play is Article 161(3)(b): three members appointed by the President acting on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition, tendered after meaningful consultation with the non-governmental parties in the National Assembly. The text names an office, not an individual. It has always named the office. That is why the same phrase recurs, unaltered in meaning, in the appointment of the Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127, the Judicial and Public Service Commissions under Articles 198 and 200, and the GECOM Chairperson under Article 161(2) itself.
Follow the logic of “permanent commissioner” theory to its end and it collapses on contact with its own premise: had the 2025 elections returned a different government, would anyone seriously argue the opposition-nominated commissioners should answer to advice tendered by a Leader of the Opposition who no longer exists in that configuration? The theory only survives because it currently protects the people asserting it.

Where the Obligation Actually Sits
GECOM’s own Chairperson has already said, on the record, that she has no power to remove or reconstitute the Commission herself — that the Constitution assigns appointment and removal elsewhere, and that the path runs through the President once the Leader of the Opposition tenders his nominees. That is not an unsettled question. That is the President being told, by his own Commission’s Chairperson, where his desk is.
Azruddin Mohamed, as the sitting Leader of the Opposition following meaningful consultation, holds the sole constitutional standing to tender that advice under Article 161(3)(b). Not the immediate past Leader of the Opposition. Not the Forward Guyana Movement, however useful a third seat might be to a compromise communique The office, as currently occupied, and no other.

The President’s instruments of appointment are not a courtesy he extends when convenient. They are a duty triggered by the tendering of valid advice.

Whether the appointing power is exercised promptly or withheld indefinitely is therefore not a gap in the Constitution — it is a choice made daily inside the Office of the President. A choice, this publication notes, made considerably easier by the fact that the current Leader of the Opposition is no friend of this government.

What the Courts Cannot Fix
Peeping Tom is right that political compromise cannot override constitutional text. He is wrong about what the text requires the courts to resolve. A judicial reference would take months, invite appeal, and hand every interested party an incentive to relitigate a question the Constitution already answers in plain language. What it would not do is compel a President who is already declining to act under clear advice to suddenly act under a court order he can also slow-walk.

Guyana does not have a drafting problem at Article 161. It has an enforcement problem at the Office of the President.

The remedy is not five more months of uncertainty manufactured for the comfort of incumbents on both sides of the seat — it is the President discharging the duty the Constitution already places on him.

THE GUARDIAN’S DEMAND
President Irfaan Ali must formally receive the Leader of the Opposition’s Article 161(3)(b) nominees and issue the instruments of appointment within thirty days of their tender, consistent with the duty the Constitution already imposes on his office. Anything short of that is not constitutional caution. It is obstruction with a legal-sounding excuse.
— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board