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Does Trump sue just to fundraise?
Throughout the early history of the American legal system, if you wanted to sue anyone in court you had to follow this arcane and inconsistent labyrinth of common law pleading rules. What we today generically call "lawsuits" were pointlessly split up into "actions at law" or "bills in equity" or whatever, all of which had different pedantic rules depending on the jurisdiction you're in (for a long time, federal courts dealing with state law had to apply procedural rules that were in effect at the time the state joined the Union). When the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were first created in 1938, the intent was to get rid of the stodgy traditional requirements in favor of something comparatively more informal. As reflected in Rule 8, all you really need to file a lawsuit is a "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief" in your complaint.
This "permissive" paradigm was put to the test in front of the same guy who was responsible for writing those new rules, Judge Charles E. Clark. The 1944 case Dioguardi v. Durning is a fun read, and involves a handwritten lawsuit filed by a guy with a very questionable grasp on the English language complaining about a customs official seizing "tonic" bottles "of great value" imported from Italy. Clark ruled that "however inartistically they may be stated" the guy was clear enough to meet the new pleading standards. For a more modern example from a much more complicated case, see the complaint that was filed in the Tesla Securities lawsuit (I know nothing about this case, just picked it at random for an example). Despite the complex subject matter and the number of people involved, the complaint is only 58 pages and is structured logically enough to make it relatively easy to follow. It establishes why the court should hear the case, some background facts, and then articulates in clear detail who harmed who and why the court should do something about it.
In contrast, compare the lawsuit that Lance Armstrong filed against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in 2012. The Judge took one look at the PDF, saw that it was 80 pages long, and promptly dismissed it with a "I ain't reading all that" ruling:
Since lawsuits are already a vehicle to air grievances, it's understandable when clients/lawyers try to sneak in as many parting shots as possible. Lawsuits are endowed with an aura of gravity and seriousness that a bare press release or op-ed outlining the same grievances would lack. Unless things get *too *egregious, there's not a whole lot a judges can do to stop the practice of trying to disguise a press release under a legitimate lawsuit costume.
Back in March of last year, Trump filed a wide-ranging 108-page lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and several dozen other defendants. You can read the entire lawsuit yourself here but the basic allegation is defamation over claims/insinuations that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. The complaint was later "amended" in June to include yet more defendants, and ballooned to 193 pages in the process.
The Trump v. Clinton et al lawsuit eventually got dismissed last September. For a full accounting as to why you can read the 65-page opinion but the short summary is the lawsuit was a confusing constellation of disconnected political grievances Trump had smooshed together into a laundry list of allegations that could not conceivably be supported by any existing law. For example, Trump's lawyer Alina Habba alleged malicious prosecution without a prosecution, alleged RICO violations without predicate offenses, alleged obstruction of justice without a judicial proceeding, cited directly to reports that contradicted their claims, and on and on. None of these problems are supposed to be common knowledge, but it is *very *basic stuff any lawyer filing a federal lawsuit should either know or research before they step foot on a rake. But when the defendants in this case pointed out the problems, Habba's response was to just double down instead of correct them. My favorite tidbit was when they justified why one of the 30+ defendants, a New York resident, was being sued in a Florida court (even federal courts need personal jurisdiction established) by claiming that defendant should've known that the false information they were spreading would end up in Florida, and also that they "knew that Florida is a state in the United States which was an important one."
When someone is served with any lawsuit, they have an obligation to respond or risk losing the entire case by default. In very rare circumstances (namely with handwritten complaints from prisoners with nothing better to do), a lawsuit is so patently bogus that a defendant can sit on their laurels doing nothing, confident it will get dismissed without them having to lift a finger. Before Trump's lawsuit was dismissed, a veritable legal machinery from the 30+ individuals/corporations sued whirred into action, ginning up an eye-watering amount of billable hours in the process to investigate and respond to the allegations. The judge in this case was seriously annoyed by all this and on Thursday she imposed sanctions by ordering Habba and Trump to pay everyone's legal bills, totalling almost $938,000. You can read the 46-page opinion here.
I've written before about pretextual excuses, such as when NYC *claimed *their employee vaccine mandate was for public health reasons, but then implemented exceptions that were inconsistent with their lofty claim. I argued it's reasonable to conclude NYC was lying. Similarly, Habba may claim as a lawyer that her lawsuit was to pursue valid legal remedies on behalf of her client, but when her efforts are completely inconsistent with that goal, it's perfectly reasonable to conclude she's lying. If valid legal remedies was the real goal of the suit, even someone like me --- with no experience civil litigation --- can contemplate trivial changes which would have significantly improved its success (most obviously don't wait past the statute of limitations, don't try to sue 31 different entities all at once, don't try to sue in a court that lacks jurisdiction, don't try to sue fictitious entities, etc.). So if that wasn't the real goal, what was?
The judge in this case strongly suspects the real purpose of the (bogus) lawsuit was to use it as a vehicle for fundraising. The vast scope of characters sued matches with this explanation because while a disparate cast of defendants legally frustrated the lawsuit in the courtroom, it does make for a better headline when soliciting donations (Clinton! Adam Schiff! James Comey! Lisa Page! Peter Strzok!). Trump has a pattern of filing frivolous lawsuits (like suing the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation for awarding NYT and WaPo) and then following up with "breaking news alerts" soliciting donations for his Save America PAC, so the timing matches up. The fundraising efforts appear to be working well, with the PAC having about $70 million on hand as of last fall.
The sanction this judge imposed is the highest by far imposed on any of Trump's attorneys. It's possible this is a coincidence, but the day after the sanctions, Trump voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit he filed in Florida (??) against New York's Attorney General. I'm assuming the judge hopes the $1 million penalty will discourage further waste of time for the courts and other potential defendants, but the fundraising mechanism I described feeds itself. The higher the sanction imposed, the more urgent the breaking news alert begging for money will be.
=edited
Or, for instance, when someone writes a long comment purporting to be about the US legal system, but is really just a vehicle to take a shot at Trump.
It's less about general criticism, and more that this is ymeskhout's specific hobby horse that has been flayed for years at this point, and regularly comes with standards called for against Trump that were not followed or applied (in general or by ymeskhout personally) on the lawfare against Trump. As with other pet topics, it repeats old themes to the point of evaporative cooling, which then leverage's ymeskhout's bad habit of dismissing/forgetting/claiming prior engagements on points either didn't occur or have been dismissed, for lack of an engaged opposition to engage otherwise.
As far as Trump-related lawfare goes, ymeskhout's a partisan and an old one at this point. At this point I only pay attention when he starts being petty towards people calling him out, like how this time he edited-in a callout- against The_Nybbler and then edited it out after being called out for it.
Is there any theme discussed at this point on the Motte for which one could not make the exact same argument as the one you make against @ymeshkout?
People tend to have their opinions, which they change rarely through discussion. And culture war issues are only so many.
If your contention were made into a rule, this site would need to shut down.
This mistakes my contention. The contention is not that a position doesn't change and this should be banned- the contention is that the position is re-raised regularly without regard or even accurate reflection of previous engagements, and with poor conduct towards other in the process.
Ways to avoid this include not misrepresenting people's current positions, not mis-representing previous engagements, and not making one's hobby-horse a top level post with regular slights towards other posters.
This also describes many other regular posters on the Motte (and @ymeskhout much less so than many others I could name), and yet strangely receive far less pushback, and even provoke resentful carping when they push it too far and get modded.
Most reports we see are 100% partisan and can be summarized as "A person I don't like said something I don't like."
Both sides(tm) do this, but because of the increasingly skewed nature of the Motte, the majority is directed at people like ymeskhout expressing left-wing viewpoints.
What's strange about it?
The well established climate currated by the mods here is that not pushing back against many sorts of posters is a survival strategy, as the sorts of posters who would push back strenuously against the Darwins or Julius's of the motte were also the ones more likely to be banned than the Darwins or Julius's of the Motte. When moderates have open commentary on calibrating mod action based on political composition of forum, or accuse censored posters of ban-worthy tresspasses while simultaneously not doing so, it creates a pretty clear climate of what is more or less acceptable, and 'more pushback' is often the less acceptable path for long-term motte posters if they want to remain long-term motte posters. This is an old and well established failure state of the Motte, where bad posters both poison the culture and get the mods to ban better posters reacting against them, but this has been defended in the past an acceptable cost for the target goal of the Motte to not punish what people say, but how they say it.
But it is still a basic punitive incentive structure as enforced by the mod team, and as a consequence pushback that does occur will exist within other contextual boundaries- such as the acceptable areas of criticism such as treatment of other posters, or when it exists within the space allowed by the social dynamics of when a mod is involved. These social dynamics involved when mods don't want to be involved in moderating either other mods (internal group dynamics of people who do/have worked together for common causes, a desire to privately raise concerns out of public view) or when mods don't want to get involved in the personal non-mod disputes of a mod and other conflicts (public optic dynamics of not wanting to present mod solidarity). This creates greater conflict space- an overton window if you prefer- for more pushback to people who act within the ven diagram overlap of 'takes condemnable swipes at other posters' and 'is a mod.'
In so much as this is a problem for the broader motte space, the solution is to reduce the ven diagram overlap.
I imagine most non-quality post reports would be summarizable as 'A person I don't like said something I don't like' whether it was partisan or not. Most internet fights seeking higher sanction against another are not between people who like eachother fighting over how much they like eacother.
Is ymsekhout being criticized for expressing left-wing viewpoints, or is ymeskhout being criticized for his character in how he responded to a very minor barb about how his own post could be viewed from a non left-wing viewpoint?
"Pushing back" against the Darwins and the Juliuses never got anyone banned. Losing one's emotional equilibrium and going off on them did. I won't deny there is a failure mode here where someone very good at writing provocative posts that fall within the rules can result in some decent posters losing their shit when they can't take it any longer and getting themselves banned. On the other hand, someone who only does that once or twice doesn't get banned for very long, and Darwin and Julius both eventually got booted long-term. We have never had a great solution for getting rid of bad but effortful posters who poison the discourse without breaking the rules, and I have yet to hear proposals that don't amount to "Ban this hobby horse" or "Just admit that this person is terrible and ban them." (The latter we very occasionally do under the egregiously obnoxious wildcard rule, but every time we do it burns some of the membership's goodwill... remember, there are people who got on our case every time we modded Julius, and some of those people were not Julius's alts.)
I also do not think ymeshkout can fairly be compared to Darwin or Julius.
I am saying a large percentage of reports are "non-quality" as you put it - not people genuinely concerned about the tone and quality of arguments here, but simply seeking to punish their enemies.
Both, IMO. He writes long, effortful posts that are hard to take apart on the facts, as you'd expect when debating a lawyer, but he also criticizes Trump a lot, so a lot of people see "Long-winded criticism of Trump" which makes them angry, but they can't really muster a cogent response to explain why the criticism is wrong, but they also notice him taking a few pokes at his interlocutors, which triggers even more rage. No, I seriously do not think he would get this kind of pushback if he were writing similar posts about how corrupt Joe Biden is. (He'd get some, but not like this where you're trying to make him the new Darwin.)
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