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Trump Indicted: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/donald-trump-indicted-in-hush-money-payment-case.html
This is a major enough story that I think it goes beyond needing more than just a link.
I tend not to blame Ford for pardoning Nixon. When your chief executive fears legal annihilation if he ever transfers power to enemies, there's no telling what can happen. For one, it's the proximate cause of the death of the Roman Republic. Caesar knew he would have charges brought against him once his proconsulship in Gaul ended, so the price of crossing the Rubicon and of letting his term expire were the same.
This is a stupid escalation of precedent.
When your chief executive fears nothing, period, there’s no telling what can happen.
Whereas here, we have a pretty good idea of what can happen. He’s not going to get executed or even go to prison for a campaign finance crime.
Not really. When powers are separated, the executive can rattle around in its little box, hemmed in on all sides, and then leave power, frustrated but not existentially threatened.
As I said, it's an escalation. The Biden adminsistration has apparently made prosecuting Trump on something, anything, a major goal. And now for the first time in history a president has been indicted. Don't you think this will be returned with interest if the faction Trump represents gets back in power?
That proves too much.
Say Trump shot someone on 5th Avenue. New York doesn't do death penalties, but life without parole is pretty close to "legal annihilation." Should he face charges?
The whole point of murder laws is that (prospective) murderers should feel existentially threatened. Political concerns don't supersede that. The perverse incentives are obvious.
But this isn't murder, it's campaign finance! Sure--where do you draw the line? Tax evasion? Defamation? Petty theft? I don't believe a public figure should gain immunity to any of those charges. What makes campaign finance different?
I don't have a problem with the argument that this particular charge is brought in bad faith, or that a Democrat in Trump's position would be unfairly privileged. It seems quite plausible! No, I'm objecting to the general argument for holding our executive branch to a lower standard.
Personally, I think this ought to be covered by the normal protection of a jury trial. If they're going to try for a federal charge, the jury pool should cover that jurisdiction. A true jury of his peers should be able to cut through any fabricated charges.
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.
You are aware that "would be prosecuted for that" and "that is illegal" are not the same thing?
Obviously. I don't see your point. Please speak plainly.
You are using a motte and bailey where the easier to defend idea is "Trump did something that is illegal when you don't squint at it" and the hard to defend idea is "Trump did something that you or I would be prosecuted for". They are not the same thing, but you seem to think that because you can defend the former, the latter must be true.
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This prosecution isn't coming from the Biden administration. It is coming from a locally elected District Attorney in Manhattan. The personal incentives facing Alvin Bragg (particularly the possibility of a future run for Mayor or Governor in New York where the main opposition is other Democrats) mean he might bring a prosecution that Biden and national Democratic leadership would prefer he didn't.
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Having asked Blue Tribers this point blank before on the Old Place, the answer I got was Whig History: that Trump's faction will never get back into power, because the arc of history bends towards justice and no-one will vote for ReThuglicans in the enlightened future.
There's also a pinch of Machiavelli in here, that "Men should either be treated kindly or destroyed utterly". Fear that the enemy will get back into power is a reason to lawfare them MORE, not less, because if you lawfare them enough that decreases their chances of getting back into power.
I am extremely skeptical that any such conversation happened back at the Old Place, let alone that multiple "Blue Tribe" regulars expressed such a sentiment.
This seems like a comment intended to cause friction and adds little to the conversation, a similar transgression you felt the need to mod comment another user about. Seems like you want to be a bully and it really irks me.
Be as irked as you like that I am prone to challenging dubious assertions. There's nothing bullying about asking "Why would you claim that?"
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I think it's reasonable to assume this can not happen because the bureaucracy is not nonpartisan. Lawfare is a weapon that can only mostly be used by those with institutional backing.
Backing like a triple majority in a state?
Nope. Backing by the unelected lawyers and staffers that actually do the work.
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Enter Texas and the fifth circuit.
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no, he's just going to provide another object lesson on the mile-high stack that the points are made up, the rules don't matter, and any appeal to norms or procedure should be assumed to be bad-faith on sight. How many completely novel legal theories have been applied to Trump and his associates and supporters now? Is it because he's really that novel, or is it because we're well past the point where the paper system mattered?
The time to stop this was five or six years ago, and it's far too late now, so let's keep going and see what happens.
Logan Act attempts at General Flynn. He should have told them to fuck off and admitted to it. The law might be unconstitutional. And literally every administration has violated between Election Day and inagauration. And has been attempted twice. That really hurt the Trump administration getting up and running because it became apparent novel legal theories or anything that’s never prosecuted would be investigated in you if you took a trump admin position.
Trumps actually probably violated the Logan act since office. I believe he’s said he could make peace in Ukraine which could be construed as negotiating with a foreign government.
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I don’t think that’s a good reason to give officials a vague, absolute defense against charges. The “Rubicon” analogy proves way too much. Should Trump be immune to less objectionable felony charges, if such a thing even exists? To misdemeanors? Which of those count as “legal annihilation”?
I don't think the rubicon analogy holds water either, and I enthusiastically support prosecution of officials who break the law, provided I'm confident that such prosecution is actually being applied in an impartial and unbiased manner.
Do you think that Trump's prosecution is how this would play out for someone in good standing with Blue Tribe elites?
Nah, I'm pretty skeptical of this one. At least going off the limited details.
Actually, it looks like we have a counterfactual. John Edwards, who went after the Dem nomination in 2008, was charged with six counts relating to payments funneled towards his mistress and their son.
I'm not clear on whether the prosecution fumbled this or there really was no case. This is probably where the "novel" federal-state stuff comes in, which is the biggest red flag for political grandstanding. Why can't the state prosecutor just bring the state misdemeanor charges?
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It is almost exactly how it played out with John Edwards.
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Parliamentary immunity seems to be a fairly common feature of the world’s democracies; for a few years that was a major loophole in use in Italian abortion law.
Parliamentary immunity protects current elected officials, not former ones. The purpose (to prevent the executive using criminal prosecution as a weapon against the legislature) is not served by protecting former officials.
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