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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I think the answer is ‘if you’re going after trump, maybe you should go after one of the dozen odd similarly ranking officials who has also done this same thing, instead of just the main general election opponent for the sitting president who both has a 38% approval rating and who is one of those dozen’.

In general I don’t think democrats should be prosecuting republicans for this kind of thing, and Vice versa(that is, things politicians do all the time and usually don’t get prosecuted for). But I suppose bipartisan investment in good governance is too much to ask.

I think the answer is ‘if you’re going after trump, maybe you should go after one of the dozen odd similarly ranking officials who has also done this same thing, instead of just the main general election opponent for the sitting president who both has a 38% approval rating and who is one of those dozen’.

Basically this.

If the FBI wants to avoid the appearance of this being a political hit job they might want to indict a few high-ranking democrats while they're at it. But as it stands the FBI only seems to seriously pursue these cases to when the individual in question happens to be a GOP front-runner (Powell, Petraeus, and now Trump) and the normies are starting to notice.

Colin Powell was investigated by the FBI ?

Yes, 20 years ago now, but ultimately let off because the rules as written at the time hadn't really caught up with the existence of the internet yet. Powell's acquittal was routinely cited by Clinton defenders as evidence that she was being unfairly investigated.

the normies are starting to notice.

The normies are busy telling each other "Did you see that Trump gave classified documents to Kid Rock? I hope they put that orange freak in jail for a hundred years!"

Isn't Kid Rock the guy that shot up the case of Bud Light? Seems like there might be a few normies would think this classified documents thing just makes him (and Trump) extra cool 😁

Is it true, or is it just bait for liberals that he did this?

At the risk of eating another ban, I will continue to assert that your self-selected bubble of progressive Manhattanites is not representative of the wider nation. See my previous link.

I live in the suburbs. I even know some Republicans. The Republicans are convinced by the law-and-order arguments (they don't care that the other party has done worse, they've got PRINCIPLES), the Democrats believe anything they hear on CNN.

That means for example, you can give a governor tons of cash in a briefcase to get his favor generally and have him lobby other state officials on your behalf, as long as you don't specifically have him sign something for you using gubernatorial powers.

You want to be careful with this though. It is a fact that you can not get elected to any position of significance without having a large network of supporters and, to be blunt, donors. And pretending these people would support you because they like your haircut and your honesty is both delusional and, frankly, defeats the whole point of democracy, where people elect representatives to enact policies they'd like enacted. Criminalizing this means either pushing it to the underground, or exposing any candidate to constant threat of prosecution - which inevitably will be wielded as the weapon of influence and intimidation. Living in an environment where public officials are constantly investigated is not healthy for the society too - it promotes a cynical outlook that everybody is corrupt anyway, and the prosecution is based on who has the power. And that outlook may also be completely correct.

Third, you need to massively beef up disclosure laws.

And thus, open people - especially small and medium-size donors that don't have FU money - to the threat of intimidation and cancellation. Donated to a wrong politician/cause? You are fired. Supported a group which supported a group which stood next to a group which once had a member who is now unperson? Congratulations, you are now unemployable and a social pariah. This makes the whole politics insanely toxic, because you can't just support some cause anymore - you have to wage the war of elimination against the opposition, otherwise they would eliminate you.

massively increase the salaries of the most senior government officials

How massively you're talking about? So massive that any crime committed while seeking the post is worth it, because the prize is worth the risk? If you observe billionaires, you see many of them working tirelessly at increasing their wealth, and their influence, and some of them are not above corruption to facilitate that. Obviously, making each government official a billionaire is not enough. How much would be enough - trillions? Quintillions?

To supplement all this, I'd make a fourth proposal that's just hugely unpopular: massively increase the salaries of the most senior government officials. Right now, being a Member of Congress or a cabinet Secretary pays very little as compared to the other career options the typical officeholder has. If we're going to put the screws on corruption, and make it both a difficult and dangerous job to have in terms of criminal exposure, we should relieve the money pressure on the other side, and make it so that it is easy to live an upper-class lifestyle on the salary alone.

I've seen this offered from time to time, but I don't think it will work. They still have incredible power, and the power is worth buying if you are in the space. US senators make $174k. If we tripled that and more and made it $600k, that still wouldn't get you anywhere close to making up for Hunter Biden's Burisma contract + his Chinese dealings (and thats just the money we 100% know about). That wouldn't get you to Mitch McConnell's stock portfolio being like $30 million up on the S&P 500 over his tenure. All you'd end up getting is a little extra inflation in the DC housing market.

I actually don’t disagree with your fourth suggestion. I would pay government officials a lot more while at the same time have things like term limits and limitations on going back into the private sector.

Ted Stevens is an awkward example, because there's a lot of pretty good evidence that he didn't do it: the prosecution's case depended on the claim a contractor was underbilling him, and that contractor said in an interview with the FBI (concealed from the defense) that work was worth at most a third of the government's estimate, that the whole house wasn't worth the government's estimate, and that the contractor had refused to send bills to Stevens when Stevens had asked, while prosecutors either stood by without correcting or suborned perjury.

My point isn't that the prosecutors were Bad People, though I think they were. My bigger objection is that Stevens quite probably was innocent, and more likely than not well in compliance with the spirit of the law, rather than skirting on the edges. Even presuming that the appropriate level of prosecutor misconduct or prosecution of a marginal case isn't zero, it seems like there's a lot more low-hanging fruit than one where suborned perjury resulted in an innocent man being found guilty.

I think Gillum and McDonnell cases are lower-hanging fruit from a rhetorical perspective, in that it's pretty clear that they did the things, that the behavior was intended to fall in the bounds of the law, and it's mostly a matter of whether they had sufficient cutouts (for Gillum) or where the law was written specifically enough to cover the bad behavior (McDonnell). BridgeGate is more difficult, since the behavior by Kelly and Baroni were definitely Bad Things, and they should be illegal, but the wire fraud statute was a really stupid approach to try and go after them.

There's a lot of stuff like this, and it's far broader (and often worse!) than mere corruption.

I just don't think, given the available evidence, that Stevens was in that set. The law clearly prohibited what he was alleged to have done -- there's a reason he and the Bridge to Nowhere were a staple reference from the (GOP-leaning!) Porkbusters set until the second shoe dropped -- it's just that the government had very strong reasons to believe that he didn't do those things.

If we're talking anti-corruption reform one that probably won't happen but would be a good idea would be a guarantee that any politician removed for corruption reasons is replaced by a member of the same party. Make it a vote of their co-partisans from their home state legislature or something but the key would be removing the incentive to cover up a co-partisans corruption to keep a majority. That wouldn't help when it's a big time figurehead like Trump but it would help get rid of embarrassments like George Santos.

To be clear, my sincere position of policy is ‘we should have parliamentary immunity equivalence for these sorts of things’. I just think ‘prosecute everyone who does it’ is slightly better than ‘only prosecute trump’.

Sure. We should write in by statute that current and former federal elected officials, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet level officials cannot be prosecuted for procedural crimes without previously being removed from office successfully through impeachment.

I personally would be in favor of far less apprehension with prosecuting government officials. If we assume that Clinton, Biden, etc. all get prosecuted for mishandling records with a similar zeal, how much of an effect would it have in mollifying those that believe Trump is the victim of unwarranted legal action?

It would (mostly) dispel me of the idea that Trump is being treated unfairly by the legal system, but I don't think that would be good policy. Anyone in charge of large amounts of money, important records, or other sensitive material almost certainly commits multiple felonies over their career. There's just no way to be effective at your job while following all of the rules all of the time, and some of the federal fraud statutes are very broad.

I think that's the end result of what's happening now -- if someone isn't willing to indict Biden (and/or Newsom, and whatever) in the next six years, grassroots Republicans will find someone nutty enough to do so, whether or not the law supports that particular matter. It's possible that this turns out to be a sword that doesn't cut both ways, but if so, they're going to go up a rung and chop out sections of the FBI or DoJ until it happens. There's ways you can separate each and every other big-wig politician or politically-connected actor who violated the law and got off scot free, but there's few ways to do so and not seem post-hoc justifications -- and it's far too dangerous a tool to be only available to one team.

And I think that would mollify conservatives, if not necessarily as many Trumpists.

Of course, the flip side is that it'd be extraordinarily bad on its own merits. Even the steelman of 'just' going after 'genuine' cases will result in federal officials facing a barrage of 1983 suits, but conservatives have fifteen or twenty years of genuine or imagined overlooked misbehavior to bring forward.

Is Newsom corrupt? Beyond the usual run of Californian politics, I mean. I was less than gruntled by the description of Ivy Getty's fairy tale wedding, where all the Democrat big names in California were pretty much at the beck and call of the Gettys - there's a thin line between "attending as friend of the family" and "performing favours for the grandees who bankrolled my political career".

He's grandstanding about DeSantis and Florida, but that's par for the course. He avoided the recall due to having the party swing in behind him and campaign on his behalf, but is there any gossip about him being a naughty boy? Apart from the 'dining during Covid' stuff which politicians everywhere were doing (including in my own country).

I don't know that he's (unusually) corrupt, and I doubt most political corruption goes from blue states into deep red ones.

I just don't think corruption is the only or even most available avenue for political indictments. Make a false statement during online fundraising? (State) wire fraud statutes could be written expansively enough to cover anything close to them. Harass a business in another state? Many states, especially southern states, have laws against deprivation and attempted deprivation of right under color of law; these are mostly civil for now, but that's mostly so they're available for private rights of action (and for lower standards of proof) rather than some deep requirement. There's some 11th Amendment complexities, here, but they largely reflect needing to pursue state officials as individuals rather than states themselves -- but if your intent is to harass rather than to get an injunction, that's kinda besides the point.

This isn't something states do, right now; there's a reason that all the handwringing about DeSantis kidnapping charges didn't have people bringing up a potential constitutional crisis. And there's very good reasons that they don't! But it's a weapon on the table.

in the next six years, grassroots Republicans will find someone nutty enough to do so

And how are they going to do that with the Democrats in control of the Deep State and the presidency? This is the endgame; the Democrats aren't worried about tit-for-tat because they don't intend to relinquish power again.

Naively, there's a chance people will recognize the tooling; politics is at least theoretically anti-inductive. To an extent, this is currently one of Trump's biggest selling points, damning with faint praise as that might be. Given past events, I'm not that optimistic.

More pessimistically... there was a case in the late 90s where a federal agent shot an unarmed woman holding a baby. That case was somewhat complicated over past Supremacy Clause questions over where a federal officer's official processes start and where reasonable behavior ends. But states do not have to limit themselves to good, fair, or honest laws, that a federal employee might only violate when taking their duty to its most extreme edges.

States just don't do that, and that's why you've not heard much about the few cases that even started. And the feds can put the pressures in; the Clinton-era fed put a lot of pressure to get Lon Horuchi's prosecutor limited as much as possible. It's even possible that federal judges will quickly develop new immunities or theories of impossible requirements of standing. But taking it off the table entirely as a threat requires taking every state, not just the federal gov.

I can't speak for anyone else but seeing Clinton and/or Hunter Biden go to jail would go a good way towards convincing me that the FBI isn't just a bunch of DNC thugs.

I'm honestly not sure that sending Hunter to jail would achieve anything. He's got the connections and the pull to get the Club Fed version rather than "thrown in with the ordinary criminals" and I can't see him learning anything from that, indeed I could see him boasting about how he's done time and is now a bona fide tough guy (because he strikes me as that much of an idiot).

Joe will always protect him. That's family love. How far he's gone to do that, and how much real interference with the law that entailed, we won't know unless someone does go after it, and why would the Democrats just sit back and let that happen?

I'm honestly not sure that sending Hunter to jail would achieve anything.

It would at least provide the implication of consistency and rule of law. I don't blame Biden for defending his kid but I do blame the rest of the Democratic party for trying to gaslight us into believing that this is anything other than what it very obviously is. What I want to see Cimafara, HeelBearClub, GDanning and the rest of the partisan hacks here who were defending Clinton back in 2016 but are now bitching about Trump admit that they were wrong.

If Trump is guilty, Huma Abadien, Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, and John Podesta are even more so what say we clean house?

Look, it seems patently obvious that hunter Biden committed some serious crimes. It seems simply true that Joe was somehow involved in those crimes, at the very least intervening illegally to protect his son, although I don’t think the evidence is strong enough to convict him and furthermore may not be strong enough to indict.

I totally understand why Joe Biden is so willing to protect his son. What I don’t understand is why so many other prominent democrats seem to think it’s so important- after all, Joe is probably not going to get prosecuted.

I think we are in agreement.

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