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Notes -
I would like to not scream bloody murder.
Ten months ago, a prediction was made here:
Whelp, here we are. Frankly, I still don't care a whit about his crowds chanting stuff. I do, indeed, care about the actual authorities bringing actual shoestring cases based on sketchy interpretations of laws (where the FEC has disagreed with said sketchy interpretation, but we don't have a circuit court ruling saying that they're wrong, and where there's an extremely strong First Amendment defense1).
Similarly, I might observe that the "good conscience" clause talk reminds me of the "regularly given" clause talk, where in the latter case it remained talk and the former case is yet to be seen... but I certainly wouldn't scream bloody murder. I'd say that it's probably a somewhat sketch interpretation of the rules in both cases, probably not great, but it's at least sort of in line with the general types of somewhat ridiculous procedural rules lawyering I expect from modern political parties.
Would anyone else like to scream bloody murder?
1 - I also just recently listened to a Short Circuit Podcast where they talked about a completely different campaign finance case. The legal expert on the topic very directly and blithely mentioned that SCOTUS has only allowed these laws to be justified by quid pro quo concerns (exchanging money for official acts), exactly as I have been saying in the Trump case, where it makes no sense to think that Trump entered into a quid pro quo with Trump to exchange Trump's money to Trump for Trump's official acts, just because he used an intermediary to make the payment. He didn't mention the application to Trump's case, but it's yet another example of just how common and boring it is to know this for subject matter experts, how completely true and uncontroversial it is in general, and how the only thing you need to do is an extremely simple application of this boring principle to Trump's case.
Sure. I do think it's an outrage and it's much more outrageous to egg that on when you're the sitting President and your DoJ is currently in the process of trying to lock him up. I thought Candidate Trump doing it was unseemly, but I also thought it was mostly a joke, that many people (including myself) do kind of think that Hillary Clinton is criminally sketchy but assumed that no one would ever actually go after her. That proved to be correct, so no harm, no foul. For whatever reason, the response to Trump overstepping norms has been to just completely blow through them and annihilate any pretense that the DoJ is something other than regime apparatchiks targeting enemies.
The same "it's different when people without actual power do it, and they are just joking/venting anyway" argument is commonly fielded in defense of variants of "kill all (white) men".
Well yes there is a difference. Some random person screaming “kill all white men” and an army of armed militants who have spent the last 3 years going door to door executing white men screaming “kill all white men” while they do it are very different things.
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