MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
That is a shockingly bad post by Calabresi. The Constitution explicitly allows Congress to delegate the appointment of inferior officers to the Courts. Calabresi's response is that they can't have meant it because the Constitution sets up a unitary executive, and the clause allowing Congress to delegate appointment of inferior officers to the Courts can only apply to Court clerks and suchlike. [I am not a historian and don't know the reason for the clause, but my guess is that the framers expected the local district judge to be the highest federal official in the sticks, and therefore best-placed to make local interim appointments before a message could get to Washington]
But the only reason why you might think the Constitution sets up a unitary executive is the text of the Constitution and, critically, the Appointments Clause. You can't just say "if I ignore this sub-clause, the vibes of the rest of the text imply X. Because X, this sub-clause should be ignored."
I'm not sure appeals to original intent help here - the framers would have been horrified at the idea of a corps of full-time professional civilian Federal prosecutors, because they didn't want the Federal government to be creating enough civilian criminal law to support one. You should look at the words they wrote, not the vibes here. And the words are clear.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Dems basically controlled the house from FDR until Gingrich
It was a very different Democratic party though - it cheerfully included Dixiecrats, even if they voted with the Republicans on hot-button left-right issues. Part of the 1994 Gingrich landslide is about thermostatic backlash against Clinton (and Hilarycare in particular). Part of it is about generational turnover in Congress replacing older conservative Dixiecrats with younger conservative Republicans, meaning Congressional conservatives are all in the same party and can therefore now elect leadership that reflects their views. The generational turnover was particularly strong in 1994 because most of Congress had been caught up in a chickenshit cheque-kiting scandal of the type that really annoys a lot of voters.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
CW is that (holding quality of trauma care constant) murder closely tracks other violent crime, but is measured more reliably.
If the motte is that property crime disproportionately effects trans people, then it isn't connected to the bailey that the "trans day of remembrance" crowd are trying to occupy.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Very much agreed - for instance all legislators vote publicly on legislation and when electing officers such as the Speaker. But there are a lot of corner cases when it comes to internal party elections. One particularly important one is MPs electing their party leaders - which in Parliamentary democracies will usually be a de facto election of a Prime Minister or selection of a candidate Prime Minister. Almost all parties in almost all functioning Parliamentary democracies have decided to give MPs a secret ballot in the internal vote. (UK parties have a range of processes for combining the views of MPs and grassroots members when electing their leaders). Obviously MPs are expected to vote non-secretly for their party's preferred candidate for PM in the external vote.
This is why the London Labour thing was controversial - Blair made the MP ballot public even though analogous internal elections usually give MPs a secret ballot.
Something similar is supposed to happen in Congressional leadership elections in the US. The House majority caucus elects the Speaker-designate by secret ballot, and then all caucus members should vote for the chosen candidate in the recorded House vote for Speaker
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Also Litvinenko and Salisbury. Russia has attacked the UK with WMD twice - this makes "Russia is our enemy, so Russia's enemy is our friend" a much easier sell than in most other Western countries. Corbyn's apparent popularity ended with his pathetic response to Salisbury - suggesting that this attitude is bottom-up as well as top-down.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
A paralegal or wet-behind-the-ears junior associate writing under a Biglaw letterhead.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Then in 2007 it brought them back.
The key background to this is that as soon as the 2006 law passed GW Bush fired a bunch of his own Senate-confirmed US Attorneys for no obvious reason and replaced them with long-term interims. Democrats tried to run with this as a massive abuse-of-power Bushitler scandal and Republican senators saw it as an attack on their patronage. (The mos maiorum was that home-state senators from the President's party had a major role in picking US Attorneys). So if you are trying to tea-leaf-read Congress's intent (which you should only be doing if the actual statutory text is ambiguous, but on a superficial reading it appears to be) there was a bipartisan consensus against long-term interim US Attorneys.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial,
To be fair, that is a moderately impressive achievement (unless she was handing the trial work off to a trial specialist). That type of law firm avoids trials like the plague.
The Comey indictment paperwork screwup is one of the all-time great amateur hour screwups and the Lowering the Bar and/or Above the Law accounts of it are going to be coffee/keyboard risks. If Trump were more personally involved I would say it is an example of his scofflaw attitude and calculated contempt for procedural regularity and cast aspersions that he was trying to lose on a technicality deliberately in order to avoid losing on the merits, but in this case I think it is just that Halligan is incompetent and either she didn't bother to find a competent junior career AUSA to help her with the paperwork or the whole thing is so outrageous to the culture of career prosecutors that she couldn't.
The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Corvos probably knows more than me, but there is an extensive history of arguments about whether internal elections in left groups, and particularly in militant unions, should be by secret ballot. Some of it is good-faith arguments the scope of the principle that people voting in a representative capacity don't get a secret ballot because they are accountable to the people they are representing. Some of it is the hard left favoring public votes as a loyalty oath with democratic-sounding characteristics (cf elections in people's democracies).
The announcement that Labour MPs representing London constituencies would not get a secret ballot in the 2000 Mayoral selection was the point at which it became obvious to people paying attention that the selection was rigged and that Ken Livingstone would run as, and probably win as, an independent.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Apologies. I was trying to distinguish between conservatives who are idiots and conservatives who are not - the "idiotarian" in "right-idiotarian" is restrictive and not descriptive. I don't think idiocy is necessarily tied to any flavour of politics, although empirically right-populism and socialism attract somewhat more idiots than liberalism and religiously-based social conservatism.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
If you are talking about the e-mail server case, the official reason why she wasn't prosecuted (and presumably the real reason why Trump didn't try to prosecute her after taking office) was the difficulty of proving that it was deliberate.
The private server was supposed to be for unclassified e-mail only (including SBU material and material subject to mandatory record retention laws that should have been held on official government servers). Hillary used the proper secure systems for most of her classified comms. Over the four years she was Secretary of State, there were a few hundred e-mails on the server that should have been classified Confidential, including a single-digit number that actually had been classified Confidential and marked as such, a few dozen that should have been classified Secret (none of which actually were) and two that should have been classified Top Secret.
It isn't clear if mishandling Confidential information is a crime or not. (The criminal laws relate to the actual threat to national security, not to the level of protective marking, and most Confidential information is not that sensitive). And it is pretty hard to prove that the mishandling of Secret and Top Secret material was "willful" if it involves a small number of e-mails which should have been marked classified but were not.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Also the types of Christian conservatism pushed by actual God-fearing Christians (including Mormons) tend to be an antidote against some of the nuttier online stuff. The stereotypical right-idiotarian ticks the "Christian" box on the census but attends church at most three times a year.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Yes, the Baby Boom happened. But... that was it. TFR peaked in 1960, collapsed, and remained collapsed. You want that back, you probably need to win a non-nuclear WWIII -- and that condition is probably necessary but not sufficient.
The Baby Boom happened in Germany and Japan as well. It isn't obvious what caused it, but it wasn't winning WW2.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
successfully changing the result of an election
They didn't even successfully suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story - the failed cover-up attracted far more attention than the story would have done organically. Nor would honest reporting of the laptop have changed the result of the election - if it had been reported honestly the story would have broken in the summer, and it would have become clear that it was basically a nothingburger ("Hunter Biden is a corrupt failson" was already priced in after the Burisma story and the first Trump impeachment) well before polling day.
"We might have won if an October surprise based on a strategically timed leak of an ongoing criminal investigation had gone off perfectly" doesn't constitute a claim of a stolen election.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers.
Empirically, this isn't true for cisHajnal societies. In both the UK and France, most of the women whose prospective husbands died in WW1 ended up as childless spinsters. I have seen, and take seriously, the theory that the 1950's sex relations were the way they were because WW2 casulaties (not just deaths - also physical or psychological wounds which tank a man's marriage market value) created a female-heavy marriage market.
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers.
If you look at countries which faced existential mechanised wars and actually tried to win them, it is a pretty short list. The UK in WW2, Israel multiple times, Ukraine now. Corner cases on the "mechanised" point include the USSR in WW2 and Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, as well as multiple belligerents in WW1. In most of these cases (though notably not Ukraine), there was heavy coercive mobilisation of women for war work, including war work that was profoundly not "women's work", with an understanding that lost fertility was part of the tradeoff. The reason why women were not on the front lines was that the low teeth-to-tail ratio of modern mechanised armies meant that they weren't needed - in WW2 and later wars there are more male conscripts than front-line roles to fill. So "Should we have women in the army?" boils down to "which REMFS should be in uniform and subject to military discipline?".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
But yeah, a lot of young women just treat the workplace as another playground for being cute ("aww here's me being cuuttte") and doing cute, fun things ("Gen Z Boss and a Mini! Gen Z Boss and a Mini!"). Plus, a lot of young women have never heard "no" all their lives, so someone disagreeing with them—even gently—feels like a massive insult to their Wonderfulness.
Just to check, you know the women in the Gen Z Boss and a Mini video were running a profitable startup?
I think male startup founders sometimes goof off for a few minutes too - certainly everything Paul Graham says about the culture of successful startups implies that you want a culture where any goofing off happens with colleagues in the office and not with mates in the pub.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
The same is true for common elective procedures in private hospitals in the UK. You can't get a completely fixed price for reasons that aren't clear to me, but the permitted escalation is limited and transparent. (In most cases it is just the basic room rate for an extended hospital stay).
Billing per highly granular code is a choice.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12d ago
(and no one even thought it could be used this way)
Apart from the trial judge and 4/5 appellate judges. The Higgitt/Rosado opinion agrees that executive law 63(12) applies - nothing in the text of the law says it only covers frauds against "little guys", that's just how it has historically been enforced. (It also agrees that if the facts found by Engoron are correct, the Trump Org defendants are guilty - the disagreement is about whether Engoron was allowed to make those factual findings at the summary judgement stage of proceedings).
Not only would the state of New York not "prosecute" (remember, this is an equity action) some rando for similar behavior using this law and its novel legal theory,
You are technically correct here - if you or I misstated the square footage of an appartment by a factor of three, or valued a property subject to deed restrictions on the basis that it wasn't, and got caught (which is admittedly unlikely), then we would be facing a normal prosecution for mortgage fraud. I don't know why James used executive law 63(12) - I always assumed that as a civil forfeiture statute it allows a lower standard of proof than a criminal statute.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
- Given the wording of the rider, the question isn't "does it count as renting?". it is "did James intend to give her relative the rights of a long-term tenant, including the legal right to exclude James from her own home?" If the amount of money is as James said it was (<$5000 over a multi-year period) that is more consistent with "no - James intended to grant her relative a license" than "yes - James intended to grant a legally binding tenancy at a soft rent". The Fannie/Freddie guidance on occupancy types explicitly says that the receipt of rent is not sufficient to disqualify a property from second home status.
- I don't consider James' statements to be uncorroborated. There are documents. I haven't seen them, but the career prosecutors and Trump-appointed US Attorney who have think the case is not prosecutable. That strongly suggests that the statements are corroborated, and we will get to see the corroborating evidence if there is a trial.
The other point is that this was economically a second home transaction, not an investment - James's motives for buying the house and allowing her relative to live in it were personal and not commercial, and she was paying the mortgage out of her own resources, not the rent. The business reason for charging a higher interest rate on investment mortgages than second homes is that
- investment borrowers are relying on rental income to pay the mortgage (and the way they are underwritten reflects this) and can therefore be forced into a foreclosure situation by a long void period or non-paying tenant.
- investment borrowers have no non-financial stake in the property and are therefore more likely to walk away from an underwater mortgage even if they could pay.
The first of these is the key one - in the UK you get "second home" pricing on a mortgage if you can qualify based on non-rental income, regardless of who is occupying the property. This doesn't change the fact that James is guilty if she misrepresented her plans for occupancy, but it is relevant to the plausibility of her story that she was honest about what she was doing with the lender and they agreed to underwrite the loan as a second home anyway.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
A secondary question: Perhaps, much like the mainstream media, I am omitting important context from my summary. Are there additional facts I should consider which would (or should) change the way I see this lawfare business?
The critical point you are ignoring is that Trump was guilty, but James appears to be innocent. The behaviour she has been indicted for is applying for a mortgage on the basis that the house on Peronne Avenue would be a secondary residence when she was in fact intending to rent it out. James claims that she allowed a family member to live in the house in exchange for a small contribution to utilities and maintenance, and that she accurately described her plans to the bank. If James is telling the truth, then no crime. The evidence that would allow me to determine who is telling the truth here is not public, but we do know that the career AUSAs assigned to prosecute the case declined to do so, and that the Trump-appointed US Attorney resigned rather than overruling them.
AFAIK, no President of the United States has previously ordered the malicious prosecution of someone they should have known was innocent.
Normally in situations like this, the mortgage applicant is not prosecuted.
As an entirely separate point, this is a problem. Primary residence fraud is not victimless - among other things it defeats the homeownership-promotion mission of Fannie and Freddie. But because it is almost never prosecuted it appears to be common.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
I'm not sure if "unprovoked" is quite the right word, since (as far as I know) Trump et al had not engaged in that sort of lawfare previously.
From the anti-Trump perspective, the attempts to prosecute Trump were provoked by his committing crimes - they were not intended to be a tit-for-tat lawfare campaign. Letitia James' decision to prioritise bringing that particular civil fraud suit was motivated by animus, but the type of fraud Trump was charged with was something he was in fact guilty of (Trump's successful appeal was about the size of the fine, not guilt), and which you or I would be prosecuted for in the unlikely event that we (a) did it and (b) got caught. The federal and Georgia election-related cases and the documents case were prosecutions for egregious wrongdoing of which Trump was unquestionably guilty - any functioning justice system would have prosecuted in the absence of a clearly established immunity bar. I'm happy to admit that the Stormy Daniels false accounting case was basically pure lawfare - I think Trump was technically guilty, but it wouldn't have been prosecuted against someone who wasn't a political opponent.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
One thing that a lot of analyses leave out is that the inquisition and it’s excesses in both Europe and the New World were the result of Christendom being besieged by Islam for 500 years.
I don't think this is true. The periods of peak inquisition activity were around the time of the Albigensian Crusade (which happened during a period of temporary respite for the Holy Land Crusaders because the Muslim states of the Middle East were being ravaged by Genghis Khan) and the Spanish Inquisition (which happens after the Reconquista is complete, in the country that was about as far as you could get from the Ottoman Empire). It is almost like the absence of an external enemy causes the search for an internal enemy.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
In the UK, fish in school (including explicitly C of E schools) and workplace canteens on Friday had been the default since well before I was born, and I am reasonably sure that it became the default back when anti-Catholicism was still part of the national identity. I grew up associating it with Christianity generally, not Catholicism.
Of course, the traditional English fish and chips is not exactly an abstemious meal - and indeed the English Catholic hierarchy has warned the faithful that eating a huge plateful of fish and chips defeats the purpose of the Friday fast. I remember playing bridge on Friday evening against a man who was some kind of Catholic lay minister, and as we stuffed ourselves with fish he explained that his parish was pushing the idea of "eat what you want on Friday, but only 2/3 as much as you normally would".
Doesn't affect the argument, but Big Four is for accountants (and accountant-adjacent management consultants). The equivalent for law is Biglaw, or if you want to be specific to the top tier in prestige and not just size, White-Shoe in the US and Magic Circle (or Silver Circle for the next tier down) in the UK.
More options
Context Copy link