Everyday Erinyes #365

 Posted by at 6:01 pm  Politics
Apr 092023
 

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

“Protecting the Institution of the Presidency,” in and of itself,is not a bad idea. The bad ideas come in when it becomes confused with “protecting the President at all costs,” which is NOT the same thing by any means. I don’t expect to need to explain that to anyone here, but it apparently does need to be explained to a lot of people who really should know better. And way too many of those people are in Congress and sprinkled throughout the courts. Hopefully a look at what the founding fathers ctually thought – as evidenced by what they actually said (and did) could help to clear this up a bit.
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Trump’s indictment is unprecedented, but it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers

Former U.S. President Donald Trump sits with his attorneys for his arraignment at the Manhattan criminal court on April 4, 2023, in New York City.
Pool/ Getty Images News via Getty Images North America

Austin Sarat, Amherst College

Much has been made of the unprecedented nature of the April 4, 2023 arraignment on criminal charges of former President Donald Trump following an indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. But a closer look at American history shows that the indictment of a former president was not unforeseen.

What the Constitution says about prosecuting a president

The Constitution’s authors contemplated the arrest of a current or former president. At several points since the nation’s founding, our leaders have been called before the bar of justice.

Article 1, Section 3, of the Constitution says that when a federal government official is impeached and removed from office, they “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

In his defense of this constitutional provision, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton noted that, unlike the British king, for whom “there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected,” a president once removed from office would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Trump has been impeached twice, but not removed from office.

As a scholar with expertise in legal history and criminal law, I believe the punishment our Founding Fathers envisioned for high officeholders removed from office would also apply to those who left office in other ways.

Tench Coxe, a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress from 1788–89, echoed Hamilton. He explained that while the Constitution’s speech and debate clause permanently immunized members of Congress from liability for anything they might do or say as part of their official duties, the president “is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives; for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”

In Coxe’s view, even a sitting president could be arrested, tried and punished for violating the law. And, though Coxe didn’t say it explicitly, I’d argue that it follows that if a president can be charged with a crime while in office, once out of office, he could be held responsible like anyone else.

The indictment of Aaron Burr

Hamilton’s and Coxe’s positions were put to an early test soon after the Constitution was ratified. The test came when jurors in New Jersey indicted Vice President Aaron Burr for killing Hamilton in a duel in that state.

Black-and-white illustration showing Aaron Burr, in black top hat and coat, shooting Alexander Hamilton in a wooded area. Two eyewitnesses stand in the background.
An artist’s depiction of the Burr–Hamilton duel on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded, and Burr was indicted for his death.
Ivan-96/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

The indictment charged that “Aaron Burr late of the Township of Bergen in the County of Bergen esquire not having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil … feloniously willfully and of his malice aforethought did make an assault upon Alexander Hamilton … [who] of the said Mortal wounds died.”

While Burr’s powerful friends subsequently interceded and persuaded state officials to drop the charges, their success had nothing to do with any immunity that Burr enjoyed as an executive officer of the United States.

Indeed, Burr’s legal troubles were not over. In February 1807, after his term as vice president ended, he was arrested and charged with treason for plotting to create a new and independent nation separate from the U.S. This time, he stood trial and was acquitted.

The Strange case of Ulysses S. Grant

Fast forward to 1872, when the incumbent president, Ulysses S. Grant, was arrested in Washington, D.C., for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage.

The arresting officer told Grant, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”

As The New York Post recently recounted the story, Grant “was ordered to put up 20 bucks as collateral.” But he never stood trial.

20th and 21st century precedents

A little over a century later, Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew had a more serious brush with the law when he was accused by the Department of Justice of a pattern of political corruption starting when he was a county executive in Maryland and continuing through his tenure as vice president.

On Oct. 10, 1973, Agnew agreed to a plea bargain. He resigned his office and pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the federal government dropping charges of political corruption. He was fined US$10,000 and sentenced to three years’ probation.

Surrounded by Secret Service agents, Spiro Agnew speaks to reporters outside a federal courthouse.
Spiro Agnew leaves a Baltimore federal courthouse on Oct. 10, 1973, after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges and resigning as vice president.
Bettmann via Getty Images

Richard Nixon, the president with whom Agnew served, narrowly escaped being indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary and its cover-up. In 2018, the National Archives released documents, labeled the Watergate Road Map, that showed just how close Nixon had come to being charged.

The documents reveal that “a grand jury planned to charge Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation.” But an indictment was never handed down because, by that time, Hamilton’s and Coxe’s views had been displaced by a belief that a sitting president should not be indicted.

Nixon was later saved from criminal charges after he left office when his successor, President Gerald Ford, granted him a full and complete pardon.

Another occasion on which a president came close to being charged with a crime
occurred in January 2001, when, as an article in The Atlantic notes, independent prosecutor Robert Ray considered indicting former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Ultimately, Ray decided that if Clinton publicly admitted to “having been misleading and evasive under oath … he didn’t need to see him indicted.”

And in February 2021, after President Trump had left office, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that the former president, who had escaped being removed from office twice after being impeached, would still be legally “liable for everything he did while he was in office … We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

What history teaches about Trump’s indictment

This brings us to the present moment.

For any prosecutor, including Alvin Bragg, the indictment and arrest of a former president is a genuinely momentous act. As Henry Ruth, one of the prosecutors who was involved in the Nixon case, explained in 1974, “Signing one’s name to the indictment of an ex-president is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one’s self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.”

For the rest of us, this nation’s history is a reminder that ours is not the first generation of Americans who have been called to deal with alleged wrongdoing by our leaders and former leaders.The Conversation

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I would have liked to read something about, say, Jackson, and Harding – but since neither faced any prosecution, their stories would really not add to this article, which is about actual and potential precedent. The point is, anyone who actually cared about what the founding fathers (would have) wanted would take steps to ascertain what that acually was, would they not? Republicans today are making it pretty obvious that they don’t care.

The Furies and I will be back.

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Mar 252023
 

Glenn Kirschner – Jim Jordan tries to interfere in Trump’s NY case, DA Alvin Bragg SCHOOLS Jordan on the Constitution!

Politics Girl – Trump Arrest

MSNBC – Judge rules Trump lawyer must testify in special counsel probe of classified documents

TYT – Georgia Rep. Completely CRUSHES Republicans (hanky alert?)

Reasons My Cat Wouldn’t Survive In The Wild

Beau – Let’s talk about the GOP getting news from the budget office….

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Mar 212023
 

Yesterday, I got an email that Al Franken is hosting the Daily Show this week. If you are a regular viewer, you probably already know that. If not, you will have missed a show by now, but they probably can be streamed through The Daily Show’s YouTube channel – if not in full, at the very least highlights (and the guest was only Lindsay Graham anyway). You’re welcome. I also got confirmation to visit Virgil Sunday.

Cartoon – 21 0321Cartoon.jpg

Short Takes –

Steve Schmidt – Donald Trump: innocent until proven guilty
Quote – I am saying these things because I am about to make an important point — and I want to remind people of my bonafides to make it on the eve of Donald Trump’s long-overdue arrest. Donald Trump is innocent. Let me say it again. Donald Trump is innocent until proven guilty. This moment requires restraint from Donald Trump’s fiercest and most committed antagonists, of which I am certainly one. This moment requires Trump’s most ferocious opponents to be better than his most committed fanatics. This moment requires those of us who despise Trump the most to be the loudest voices for his constitutional rights to due process.
Click through for full article. It is extremely easy to forget this point of law, particularly when the defendant in question is someone you despise, and even more so if you feel that you already have evidence. This reminder is coming from someone who is in both those categories, and is therefore, I believe particularly compelling.

Pro Publica – This Georgia County Spent $1 Million to Avoid Paying for One Employee’s Gender-Affirming Care
Quote – When a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia’s Houston County sought surgery as part of her gender transition, local officials refused to change the department’s health insurance plan to cover it, citing cost as the primary reason. In the years that followed, the central Georgia county paid a private law firm nearly $1.2 million to fight Sgt. Anna Lange in federal court — far more than it would have cost the county to offer such coverage to all of its 1,500 health plan members, according to expert analyses…. In 2016, the county’s insurance administrator recommended changing the policy to align with a new federal nondiscrimination rule. But Houston County leaders said no.
Click through for sad story. It’s nearly always cheaper to do the right thing. Seriously, if an insurance administrator suggests spending money, you can take it to the bank that that spending is going to save you money in the long run.

Food For Thought

The fact that someone found this content offensive is quite a self-own by that person.  For a transcript, highlight the following with your mouse :  Being LGBTQ is not a choice. Being black is not a choice. Being the child of animmigrant is not a choice. Being a Christian IS a choice. Being a busybody IS a choice. Being a Christian busybody IS a really annoying choice. Mind your own business. Learn to leave others in peace.

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Feb 032023
 

Glenn Kirschner – Rep. Jim Jordan demands details of pending DOJ investigations. DOJ tells Jordan to ‘pound sand.’

The Lincoln Project – Last Week in the Republican Party – January 31, 2023

Ring of Fire – Ted Cruz Refuses To Apology For Spreading Pelosi Conspiracies

Really American – Chip Franklin RIPS Conservative talking heads over their CREEPY obsession with M&Ms sexuality.

This Cat’s Favorite Word Is Exactly What You’d Expect

Beau – Let’s talk about the Constitution and mixed messages….

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Jan 192023
 

Glenn Kirschner – ANOTHER Federal Judge calls out Donald Trump for being responsible for the insurrection!

The Lincolm Project – Republicans + Retirement

MSNBC – Police arrest disgruntled Republican candidate in connection with shootings in New Mexico

Farron Balanced – Former Staffer Says George Santos Is DEFINITELY Going To Jail

Mother Dog Reunited With Her Puppies All Grown Up

Beau – Let’s talk about default and the Constitution….

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Sep 202022
 

Yesterday, when I opened up Weather Underground to record the times of sunrise and sunset (I want to have a full year), I noticed two things. The first one I couldn’t have missed, becausethe first thing that shows up id a 10-day graph of local weather conditions with the temperatiure in red – and yesterday, showing that Wednesday and Thursday are going to be cold. Most people might not think so, but for me, highs in the high fifties and lows in the low forties are “bundle up, or spend the day sneezing” weather. But the other thing I noticed was that California is due for some much-needed rain. I hope it goes into all the places that need it the most, and doesn’t flood too much. I expect Colleen will keep us up to date – hopefully her home will not flood.

Cartoon – 20 Meredith loaded

Short Takes –

Civil Discourse – Will the 11th Circuit Trump Trump?
Quote – By now, we all know that DOJ executed a lawful search warrant at Mar-a-Lago after Trump spent months haggling over the return of papers that belonged to the government. Ultimately one of his lawyers signed a document certifying that all of the materials were returned. This was a lie. Numerous records including approximately one hundred classified documents were found when DOJ executed its search warrant. Some folders that should have contained classified material were empty. Nothing is publicly known about the fate of those documents.
Click through. This is a great summry of how we got to where we are in the documents investigation (and they are not all that easy to keep straight.)

Justice News – Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Administers the Oath of Allegiance and Delivers Congratulatory Remarks at Ellis Island Ceremony in Celebration of Constitution Week and Citizenship Day
Quote – Like [the authors of the Constitution], each of you has now made a commitment not only to this nation and your fellow Americans, but to the generations of Americans who will come after you. In that commitment, you have given your posterity – and the posterity of all of us – a precious gift. I know how valuable that gift is because it is the same one my grandparents gave my family and me…. Of course, we still have work to do to make a more perfect union. Although the Rule of Law has always been our guiding light, we have not always been faithful to it. The Rule of Law is not assured. It is fragile. It demands constant effort and vigilance.
Click through for the full speech. Yes, this is a feel-good article. We sometimes need (at least I do) to allow ourselves to feel good, even though what we are feeling good about may not be perfct.

Food For Thought

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Sep 112022
 

Glenn Kirschner – Bannon indicted again; DOJ appeals “special master” ruling; former US Attorney exposes Trump & Barr (the sound is so poor on this that everyone will need the CC. Not only is the volume about half or less of usual, bu there’s a slight echo. I realize they are tweaking the studio … and have invited comments on that … so if anyone is a YouTube member, you might just comment on the sound.)

Meidas Touch – Steve Bannon SURRENDERS in NY as he is INDICTED on new STATE CRIMINAL CHARGES

The Lincoln Project – Rick Reacts – Trump**’s Meltdown

Thom Hartmann – This Constitutional Law Says Trump & His Traitors CAN’T Hold Office

Rocky Mountain Mike – Happiness Is A Jailed Trump

Beau – Let’s talk about New Mexico, Jan 6, and the 14th Amendment…

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Jun 302022
 

Yesterday, the news was filled with testimony from Tuesday’s hearing. And rightly so – I guess a lot of people did not realize, and still don’t, who Trump** so obviously is. Of course he throws dishes against the wall. Of course he tries to do bodily harm to anyone who pisses him off. Of course he’s the last person in the world who shold have the nuclear codes. How did so may people miss that? And I don’t even mean his cultists. I mean how did so may sane people still manage not to see that? It’s not as if Hillary didn’t warn us. At least more people are realizing it now. The other thing that was in the news (at least my news feed) was our primaries. I already reported that Tina Peters, the County Clerk who stole the voting equipment, lost her primary to run for Secretary of State (the bad news is that the winner is almost as bad.) Other bad news is that Boebert won her primary. I had no part in that, but I still apologize on behalf of my state to the entire nation. We can only hope that Democrats and Unaffiliateds combine to oust her. Sadly, that’s merely a hope.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

The New Yorker – The “Gap” in the Constitution That Led to January 6th
Quote – Yes, it’s absolutely true that our Presidential-election system in particular has significant vulnerabilities. Some of those vulnerabilities are in the Constitution itself. As long as we retain the constitutional provision for the Electoral College, we won’t be completely out of the woods. State legislatures have the authority to replace a popular vote, to directly appoint the electors for their state. But they can’t do it retroactively. And that gets to what Giuliani and Trump were trying to do.
Click through for full discussion. All communication requires those communicating to share at least some assumptions (there’s a group exercise invilving peanut butter and jelly which brings this point home vividly), and one of those assumptions that we make without realizing it is that we expect our elected officials to act in good faith. For much of my life, though that wasn’t 100% true, there were enough who were that it was safe to assume it. Then came Reagan, Gingrich, and a host of others, and now it is no longer safe to make that assumption.

Robert Reich – The rogue court and the fight ahead
Quote – I keep telling the young people I work with and in the classes I teach that I grew up in an America that expanded constitutional rights, battled racism and protected voting rights, and enlarged the middle class. I tell them that if we did it then, we can do so again. They hear me but I’m not sure they believe me. Their young lives have been marked mostly by public failure. Many were motivated to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016, and against Trump in 2020, but their patience is wearing thin.
Clivk through for full argument (there’s also a video). I know, voting is not enough, but it has to start with voting. We have to give good leaders some authority – something to work with. If we don’t, their leaders get authority.

Food For Thought – I think this is the first time I have seen a New Yorker cartoon depict a real person, though it’s probably happened.

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