ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Ok, I think you're actually out on a limb on this one. Suppose a person is literally just selling goods. In exchange for money, they give up their legal right to that good. This is a quid pro quo, but not one that is of any real concern. Neither the quid nor the quo is "in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties". So, where does something like that come in to play? Is it in the actual thing that Trump did? Or is it somehow justifying a vague and possibly overbroad definition of "campaign contribution"? If the latter, what, exactly, does that justification look like?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Sure, so that kicks the question to, "What counts as a campaign contribution?"
Remember back a whole five years? We seriously had to discuss whether talking to a foreigner was a campaign contribution. At least this time, money exchanged hands. Why does it count as "a campaign contribution"? Whelp, mostly because there is sufficient vagueness, and when it comes to Trump, any vague stick will do. Maybe... someone gave money to the Trump campaign? That's what a "campaign contribution" is, right? ...no, that's not what happened. Someone exchanged money in a way that helped the Trump campaign? Sure, that happens all the time; no crime. Well, maybe that helping of the Trump campaign provided the people involved some influence or access! Wait no, we just saw the Supreme Court call bullshit on that one.
So, how, exactly, does this count as a "campaign contribution", and how can that be disassociated from there being some appearance of quid pro quo? If we're going to start roping in all sorts of stuff like just talking to foreigners, we're talking about things that look very different than the traditional "campaign contributions", you know, the "giving money to a campaign" that the Supreme Court okay'd on the grounds that Congress [was] target[ing] only a specific type of corruption—"quid pro quo" corruption. Like, real talk, if people brought a case that getting opposition research by talking to a foreigner was a campaign contribution (and managed to win in the lower courts), do you think the Court would have accepted that rationale and said that it merely follows directly from the parts of CU we've been quoting?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I agree that there needs to be a standard and that said standard needs a credible mechanism to ensure that it is followed. The question for these topics always is, "What standard will you commit to holding your politicians to as well, and how credible is the mechanism that is going to ensure that you hold to your commitment?" Because we lived through the Lock Her Up era, where the only possible reason to bring a prosecution against a political opponent was because you lived in a tin pot little dictatorship. Where were the people who are now saying the very reasonable, "A true jury of his peers should be able to cut through any fabricated charges," at that time, and were they saying, "A true jury of her peers should be able to cut through any fabricated charges"?
I think this is why people could reasonably think that the standard shouldn't necessarily follow along the lines of "sufficient badness". Instead, I could reasonably see a standard of "sufficiently long history of consensus toward said badness". This is what I think has really rubbed the Right wrong in the past seven years. With Hilary, the common talking point was, "Everyone knows (and therefore, everyone agrees that the long-standing consensus is) that any of us would 100% be prosecuted for doing that." (Hell, at the very least, the IG's report says that one of the officers involved basically couldn't understand why Paul Combatta wasn't charged with 1001, because what he did would normally catch a charge >95% of the time.) Whereas every single time with Trump, it's been like, "Weeeeeeeeeelllllllllll, if we squint our eyes and contort our reading only a liiiiiiiiiiiittle bit, there isn't absolute precedent in the courts that what he did is not illegal!"
There is a lot to prosecutorial discretion. They do legitimately have to make calls when there is uncertainty about the law. I actually personally said that, looking the Hillary case, it seemed more like a 50/50 than an 80/20 (in either direction) for whether they could actually obtain a jury conviction for Hillary, herself. I said that I was fine with the refs swallowing the whistle on a 50/50 call with two minutes to go in the third period. Should she have had to have a jury of her peers cut through any fabricated charges after having lost the election? Maybe. I don't know. It would have held the standard that you might want. But I kinda lean toward thinking that if there is much of a belief that the person is going to stay active in politics, we should be mostly bringing cases where there is long, well-trodden legal history, less "novel theories".
The biggest downside I see to this is that politicians could then come up with "novel badness", and I think that's maybe just a price we have to pay. Impeachment is of course a political option to stop any ongoing badness, and the legislature can immediately thereafter pass a law clarifying whether such novelty really should be considered to fit within the scope of the law if such novel badness is sufficiently bad to warrant further measures. Which sort of brings me back to the Edwards case. Who out there was clamoring for, "Hey Congress! What John Edwards did was really really bad, and it cuts to the core of free and fair elections! It's only because you wrote a shitty law that he got off! You really need to pass a new law clarifying that such behavior is in fact really really bad!" Basically nobody. Nobody really cared to set the standard there.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
So, what is the appearance of quid pro quo involved when Donald Trump pays his porn star? Your blockquote says:
Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties, does not give rise to such quid pro quo corruption.
When Donald Trump spends large sums of money in connection with an election, in what way is it an effort on the part of Donald Trump to control the exercise of an officeholder's (presumably, Donald Trump's) official duties?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Five paragraphs later:
When Buckley identified a sufficiently important governmental interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption, that interest was limited to quid pro quo corruption. See McConnell, supra, at 296–298 (opinion of Kennedy, J.) (citing Buckley, supra, at 26–28, 30, 46–48); NCPAC, 470 U. S., at 497 (“The hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors”); id., at 498. The fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Note Stevens' dissent, which is claiming that the majority construed the rationale for campaign finance laws too narrowly:
Congress may “legitimately conclude that the avoidance of the appearance of improper influence is also critical . . . if confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a disastrous extent.” A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold
and
Proving that a specific vote was exchanged for a specific expenditure has always been next to impossible: Elected officials have diverse motivations, and no one will acknowledge that he sold a vote. Yet, even if “[i]ngratiation and access . . . are not corruption” themselves, they are necessary prerequisites to it; they can create both the opportunity for, and the appearance of, quid pro quo arrangements.
Stevens tried to push the "appearance of" line, like you have. He tried tying it to "ingratiation and access". Stevens lost. Furthermore, while John Edwards took a million dollars from two specific other people in order to pay off his mistress, what "ingratiation and access" was acquired by Trump paying off Trump's mistress?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
A Modest Kickstarter Proposal
In multiple domains, there is a reasonably strong consensus within the zeitgeist that negative mood affiliated media does not correlate to negative behavior. In fact, the opposite is often claimed, that proliferation of such media provides a substitute for the negative behavior, actually reducing it. Casual Ducking pulls up hundreds of articles, many in academic works, arguing that pornography (even aggressive/violent pornography) substitutes for real-world sexual assault, that generally violent video games substitute for real-world violent behavior, that fake child porn (or just sufficiently cheap, legal, and easy to access child porn) substitutes for real-world sexual abuse of children. Many people make these arguments and attach their real names and institutional affiliations to them.
On the other hand, casual Ducking for games where one is a school shooter doesn't elicit any similar list of names/affiliations calling for such a substitute. Instead, it appears to have been kinda-sorta tried and mostly just shut down. What accounts for the difference? Is there a theoretical argument for why it should have a different effect? Is there some sort of data which could be marshaled against the thesis? I don't have solid numbers for the actual cost of school shootings, but I have to imagine that if someone could set up a kickstarter (or whatever platform you'd need to use to not have the effort immediately banned by the platform) to create a school shooter video game, and if said game could provide even a weak substitute, it would be an incredibly efficient use of EA contributions.
This thought arose from watching the bodycam video of the heroic police officers that was posted below. It reminded me of actual first person shooters that I played back when I was young. In addition, the discussion of whether the shooter had a poor strategy for a loadout was interesting. Some blamed (or, um, I guess praised) FPSs for having a typical mechanic where you can carry multiple weapons essentially "for free". Would it make a difference if the video game was tailored to give players the wrong idea about what would be effective in such a situation? Or should it (and FPSs in general) move to being a more realistic simulation?
Finally, what was actually my first thought on the matter was a response to people praising the officers (especially in comparison to Uvalde). Pointing out that their behavior is something that society has strong and important reasons to encourage. I actually thought first, "What if you made a game that let you take on that persona, rushing into danger to save children at great risk to yourself?" But then, I ran into a conundrum. Would this version of the game actually encourage such behavior? Or would it substitute away from such behavior? "Yeah, I get the rush of going headlong into danger to save innocents plenty at home; no need to actually go out and do that in the real world"?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
There could be lots of related charges such as tax fraud, witness tampering, etc that would be much stronger
Those would be some potentially significant shifts. I don't think I've seen any reporting or even wild speculation from the usual commentariat that has even hypothesized particular facts that could be used to support such a thing. Have you seen anything at all?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Back in the old place, in the old times (last summer, lol), we were talking about the raid of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. I sketched a timeline:
The most important thing is the timing of the charges and potential conviction. You probably want to prevent Trump from becoming the official nominee. If he's already the official nominee, it's going to be a harder political sell to strip one of the major parties of their candidate at the last minute. Think back to Comey and the investigation into Clinton emails. On June 6, 2016, the AP and NBC declared that Clinton had won enough delegates/superdelegates to ensure the nomination. On July 5, Comey publicly addressed the investigation, attempting to declare it closed. At the time, I wrote that it seemed more like a 50/50 that they could get a conviction than an 80/20 either way, and that it seemed completely reasonable for the refs to swallow the whistle on a 50/50 call in the third period of a playoff game. Enough had been settled that it would be incredibly destructive to the political process if they brought charges at that point; either the case would be hanging over the whole process, just waiting to get adjudicated until after the election... or they'd have to rush through a trial, and the resulting clusterf would be immense.
The first primaries are January 2024. You need enough time for blue states to go through an expedited process that evaluates the conviction and declares that their understanding is that it prevents Trump from being on their primary ballots... as well as enough time to physically print/distribute the new ballots and such. So, the ideal time for a conviction is maybe late fall, early winter 2023.
Now, the Trump campaign would have to go to the district courts in all these states in an attempt to get it changed back. The states will vehemently reject any ruling from a district in another state (or a circuit they are not part of), and they will lean on how some provision in their state law is different than that of the other state, so they are not a suitable target of an injunction, even if a district judge tries to implement a nationwide one. Blue districts/circuits will slow-play the cases as much as possible, so the Trump campaign will have to target the reddest district/circuit in a blue state that is brave enough to try to strip him off the ballot. Game theoretically, if every blue state in sufficiently red circuits refrain from stripping him off the ballot, that probably won't tip the primary in his direction, but it prevents a case from getting pushed through quickly. All they need to do is gum up the works for long enough that some number of primaries happen before SCOTUS steps in. And SCOTUS could be put in a terrible spot - maybe only days/weeks out from some primaries, are they really going to tell states, "You have to change all your ballot material again to put this guy back on"?
If a few states go through without Trump on the ballot, you have the best shot at establishment Republicans rallying around an alternate candidate, everyone declaring post-hoc, "Candidate X was obviously going to win anyway; Trump is a loser; none of that stuff really mattered," and trying to ignore it all as hard as possible. While Trump's base will continue to be up in arms, they would really lack any power to do anything about it.
So, what implications does this have for the timing of everything else that leads up to this? Well, ballpark a typical case that goes to trial as taking a year. If you bring charges only six months out, Trump can probably delay things long enough that a conviction happens too late to make changes to the primary; if you bring charges a year and a half out, Trump will 100% demand the speediest trial that ever did happen. Obviously, you can't predict the future perfectly, but shooting for a year out is probably the best EV move (would love to hear some actual lawyers' takes on this). That means you want to file charges in late fall, early winter 2022.
...in turn, that means that if you're taking a shot on what may or may not be a fishing expedition, hoping that you can bring charges at the optimal chance to keep Trump off of the ballot, you'd want that shot to be... summer 2022. You have a few months to thoroughly analyze everything you were able to acquire and game things out in more detail, with much more information.
In hindsight, I feel like I wanted to lean on the lower side of 6mo-1yr rather than just 1yr, but that may just be wishful thinking. I'm pretty confident that I thought 1.5yr was definitely too long. Whelp, since those charges seem to have evaporated (with the revelations of classified materials at many other politician's private locations and all), this must be the next best shot. Nevermind that SDNY probably had all of the relevant information on the matter ever since Cohen's guilty plea, here we are, 6mo-1yr out.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Only courts, not prosecutors, can definitively say whether something constitutes a crime. It is a separation of powers issue.
Citizens United was pretty clear that the purpose of contribution limits is to prevent quid pro quo. Does that count as a court saying something meaningful about what constitutes a crime here?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Article on John Edwards at the time and indictment.
John Edwards' case was a vastly better case for the purpose of campaign finance law. He took someone else's money and gave it to his mistress. The indictment describes the purpose as:
In order to restrict the influence that any one person could have on the outcome of the 2008 primary election for President of the United States, the Election Act established that the most an individual could contribute to any candidate for that primary election was $2,300.
Citizens United limited the purpose of these laws to quid pro quo. Consider Steven's dissent in Citizens United, trying to set a wider outer bound of what type of corruption these campaign finance laws can get at (beyond quid pro quo), saying things like:
Congress may “legitimately conclude that the avoidance of the appearance of improper influence is also critical . . . if confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a disastrous extent.” A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold
and
Proving that a specific vote was exchanged for a specific expenditure has always been next to impossible: Elected officials have diverse motivations, and no one will acknowledge that he sold a vote. Yet, even if “[i]ngratiation and access . . . are not corruption” themselves, they are necessary prerequisites to it; they can create both the opportunity for, and the appearance of, quid pro quo arrangements. [Emphasis added]
For Edwards, this could make sense. He took a million dollars from two specific blokes and gave it to his mistress. Those two specific blokes very likely had "ingratiation" and "access" on account of that money. I could at least see someone making a reasonable argument that they think such an arrangement means that laws were being bought and sold. They didn't prove quid pro quo, but it at least could point in that direction.
In this case, Trump it makes no sense to claim that Donald Trump was trying to enter a quid pro quo with Donald Trump; it makes no sense to claim that Donald Trump was trying to gain ingratiation, access, or undue influence over Donald Trump. At best, one could try to claim that the Enquirer was trying to gain something in return (like influence) even though money never actually changed hands between them, but Trump could say the same thing that he would say to everyone else who he has bought or attempted to buy something from: “That’s what the money (I offered you) is for.".
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I am on board with some caution, because we haven't seen the literal document yet. There are a lot of possibilities. That said, there has been a lot of news reporting, and SDNY has been plenty talkative privately with left-leaning journalistic outlets over the last several years. We just had reporting about how there was a "mutiny" in the office over whether or not to finally bring the charges.
So, on the amount of caution, I would contrast with the caution I was suggesting back in the pre-Mueller days about the Trump-Russia thing. On that issue, it was highly likely that if there was any there there, it was done pretty secretly. It was highly likely that if a case was going to be made, it was going to be made using the much more secretive counterintelligence resources of the federal government. And Mueller wasn't going to be giving private exposes to journalists; he was going to just let his documents do the talking.
Those factors are different here. Every journalist that is likely mainlined in to SDNY is telling the same basic story with the same basic parameters that we've known for years. We've known the basic contours, because they pushed super hard in the Cohen indictment to cram it in there! You can easily believe that every ounce of effort was put forth to make sure that he pled guilty to the campaign finance charge so that they could blast "unindicted co-conspirator" on every mass media outlet they controlled.
So, while it may be the case that some additional facts have been discovered, we probably actually have a really good guess as to the main thrust of the case, because we've probably known the main thrust of the case for the past few years. It's been turned over and over by plenty of legal experts, most of whom came down on the side of, "This is a pretty out there, novel interpretation of campaign finance law, struggling with the John Edwards history as well as the Supreme Court's embrace of quid pro quo being the purpose of such laws in Citizens' United." We know who paid who, from whose account, and how it was labeled.
I still totally agree that we should have caution in making actually conclusive statements about the contents of this particular indictment, but if you paid close attention to this issue the first time around, I feel like there's a pretty low (<10%) chance of there being anything genuinely new/surprising besides perhaps a few minor facts/twists.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Listen man, see Entelecheia's comment. Then go back to rippin' your bong all you want.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Do you have something actual to say? This is just sneering. There's literally nothing here.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Many mothers who aren't particularly nice people end up greatly disliking their children when they turn out to be, surprise, not very nice people either. They just realize something about the fruit of their labor after the deed has already been done.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Yeah, I still can't find anything of any value in this comment. The first paragraph is nearly unintelligible. The second paragraph, well, would you like me to hold your hand on the way to the various comments where I did explain what Girard meant? I will admit, I was unprepared for quite so many people seeming to honestly have no idea at all about the entire enterprises of science and metaphysics.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
we have managed to have plenty of intelligent discussions prior to your arrival
I've been around these parts since the old old old old old place. You remember those days?
You never explain yourself, even when you claim to it's just "go read Foucault"
Aaand, you've shown that you haven't read my comments. I said that this was the response I got from the academic wokies.
"this forum needs more Girard."
This was just a general observation. My actual response to the particular concern was to point to other comments that I had made explicitly explaining myself. Which of course you didn't read.
Prior to our last exchange
Oh my, I'm super excited to back through the comment history and see what other comments of mine you didn't bother to read.
either you can maintain your ego on a forum full of strangers, or you can set it aside to learn and have interesting discussions. It's one or the other. Step one is reading the things that other people write.
EDIT: Oh, I see it now. You linked to it, too. ROFL. Apparently, you didn't read my reply there. You just swooped in to say literally nothing at all. At the very least, you didn't respond to me again explaining the very basics. Because of course you didn't. You just wanted to act like you didn't understand. ROFL.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
You're engaging at the object level and you should be at the meta level.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
My metaphysical theory is that it is unproductive to subscribe to (any other, esp. adversarially wrought) metaphysical theories that are untestable given my methodological constraints.
How did you test that metaphysical theory?
Is this some in-joke I am not privy to?
Ohhh, shoes were all the rage. You do better than to fall into that hole, but it's mostly a funny dig.
that does not have any bearing on the correctness of atheism
I didn't say that it does. It's just a bonus that atheism likely enabled the very thing that OP was decrying.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
They are. They can be argued for. Not all that conclusively, though. Similarly, people can argue for various Christian positions, and I imagine you would say that such arguments are similarly not conclusive. Yet one of these things is to be ridiculed. Which one?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The central claim of atheism is that the Christians (or other theists) are wrong
I mean, this is a part of it. They generally have significantly more at the core. It takes about two questions of asking "why is that" to get to it. (Hint, they're usually appealing to methodological constraints, which they're sneakily confusing for a metaphysical theory.)
Goodguy asked why the Motte doesn't pounce on this whenever someone makes decisions based on those teachings.
Actually, he didn't. Not a word about making decisions. Just about Christians being Christians in general.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Nope, not an argument about the object level. About the meta level.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I mean, people still do that, tho. They just don't have to say it anymore. Do we use kid gloves on Christians because Christians aren't often in the forums saying that they believe in the resurrection? I mean, it's been at least as long since I've actually seen that.
Ok, so Trump pays money for X. X could be a waiver of a right to sue for breach of contract; could be bumper stickers; could be diet coke. This is a "campaign contribution", because diet coke is a "thing of value" provided to the campaign (in exchange for money)? And perhaps, that diet coke vendor is charging just a bit too low.
Do you think that Trump buying diet coke counts as a "campaign contribution"? Do you think it should? Do you think that if he buys a diet coke, he should be required to report it? ....do you think it should be a felony if he doesn't? Do you think we've mayyyyyyybe stretched federal election law a biiiit too much, and a biiiit outside the lane of what the Supreme Court said was a legitimate interest?
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