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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

After nine days of deliberations, a jury acquitted Edwards of one charge of accepting an illegal donation, but was hopelessly deadlocked on the other five counts, resulting in a mistrial. The Department of Justice chose not to re-try Edwards.

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?

It is almost exactly how it played out with John Edwards.

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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