There is a fear that finding President Trump not guilty of abuse of power in the U.S. Senate will cause him to revert to and possibly even expand on the abuses of power he has displayed in the past. In the area of campaign finance law, Trump has already displayed a pattern of illegal behavior.
Leaving aside the payment of "hush" money, in which either Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal could have derailed Donald Trump's presidential campaign in its latter stages by revealing their respective relationships with him, the pattern of violating campaign finance law began with Trump's televised appeal to the Russian government that if it is listening, please try to find Hillary Clinton's missing 30,000 emails, and the media would appreciate it. Trump's pattern of violating campaign finance law continued when he tried to justify the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting, attended by three top campaign officials, that "everybody" would have taken the meeting; also, he described getting "dirt" on Hillary Clinton as legitimate "opo (opposition) research."
The pattern continued when in an Oval Office interview with George Stephanopolos, President Trump said that if he had information that a foreign entity had negative information about a political rival, he would take a call and then decide if he would report the call to the FBI or some other governmental entity. Knowing Trump's practice of seeking advantage of a political opponent by any means necessary, if one foreign entity had a dump truck load of dirt, and another had only a thimble's full, which call would Trump be most likely to report? Hint: it would not be the dump truck load of dirt.
Finally, coming to Trump's public request to China to investigate the Bidens because Hunter Biden served on the board of a Chinese company, and the demand made to Ukraine to link investigations to a White House visit, and the release of military aid/security assistance to the 2016 presidential election, these are further indications of Trump's lack of respect for campaign finance law. This linkage is bribery under 18 U.S.C. 201 (b), a quid pro quo as referenced in that statute, and a violation of campaign finance law by exchanging an action of a foreign entity, investigations of the Bidens and Ukraine's possible meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, with a "thing of value," dirtying up a potential 2020 election political opponent, Joe Biden.
Showing posts with label abuse of power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abuse of power. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
History of Impeachment
I. History of Impeachment
"Impeachment is an ancient relic, a rusty legal instrument and political weapon first specified by the English Parliament, in 1376, to wrest power from the King by charging his ministers with abuses of power, convicting them, removing them from office,and throwing them in prison." "After conducting at least ten impeachments between 1376 and 1450, Parliament didn't impeach anyone for more than a hundred and seventy years, partly because Parliament met only when the King summoned it, and, if Parliament was going to impeach his ministers, he'd show them by never summoning it, unless he really had to, as when he needed to levy taxes." [1]
"Steeped in the lore of Parliament's seventeenth-century battles with the Stuarts, men like Adams considered the right of impeachment to be one of the fundamental rights of Enlightenment." "All four of the original plans for a new constitution allowed for Presidential impeachment." "Some mode of displacing an unfit magistrate is rendered indispensable by the fallibility of those who choose, as well as by the corruptibility of the men chosen, the Virginia delegate George Mason said: "An impeachment offense is an abuse of the power of the office that violates the public trust, and runs counter to the national interest, and undermines the Republic."
"Nothing in American history, from the founding of the earliest colonies, suggests that an impeachable offense has to be an indictable crime." Johnson's acquittal also elevated the Presidency by making impeachment seem doomed."
"The impeachment of an American President is certain to lead to no end of political mischief and almost certain to fail. Still, worse could happen. Heaven forbid this Republic should become one man's kingdom."
II. Family Court, and Police Domestic Violence
"In the ninety-nineties, researchers found that forty-one per cent of male [police] officers admitted that in the previous year, they'd been physically aggressive toward their spouses, and nearly ten per cent acknowledged choking strangling, or using -- or threatening to use -- a knife or a gun." "The Citizens Police Data Project, in Chicago, analyzed the records of Chicago cops between 2000 and 2016 and found that officers accused of domestic abuse received fifty per cent more complaints than their colleagues for using excessive force." [2]
III. Merit Badges
"Research shows that the more selective a college admissions process, the greater the economic value of the degree. The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side." "Taxpayers spend a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year to support higher education through subsidies and grants." [3]
"Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic and forty-two per cent of students are male." "In a survey conducted in 2014, fifty-five per cent of Americans identified as lower class or working class." "Since 1998, the average score of students whose parents are well-educated has increased by five points, while the average score of students whose parents have only an associates' (two-year college) college degree has dropped by twenty-seven points. It turns out that the SAT is, in fact, the friend of privilege." "According to the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children whose parents are in the top one per cent of the income distribution --roughly 1.6 million households -- are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children who are in the bottom income quintile (about twenty-five million households.)"
"The educated elite has become a self-perpetuating caste, drilling its children in the rituals of meritocratic advancement and walling itself off from the world of the average American." Steven Brint, in 'Two Cheers for Higher Education,' says that the average appropriation per student in public institutions declined by twenty per cent between 1990 and 2015." "There are sixty thousand undergraduates in Ivy League colleges."
"As a polity, we are in a bizarre place were workers whose lives and prospects have been damaged by the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth and income have helped bring to power a government whose most significant legislative accomplishment is the passage of a tax law that effectively redistributes wealth upwards."
ADDENDUM:
*About three billion people around the world cook on open fires. "Billions of people live in these parts of the world, and many of them are considered 'last mile' -- beyond the last mile of road..." "There are at least fourteen thousand solar cookers already in Haiti." [4]
Footnotes:
[1] Jill Lepore, "You're Fired," The New Yorker, October 28, 2019.
[2] Rachel Oniv, "Show of Force," The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.
[3] Louis Menard, "Merit Badges," The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.
[4] Ian Frajir, "Brave New World," The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.
"Impeachment is an ancient relic, a rusty legal instrument and political weapon first specified by the English Parliament, in 1376, to wrest power from the King by charging his ministers with abuses of power, convicting them, removing them from office,and throwing them in prison." "After conducting at least ten impeachments between 1376 and 1450, Parliament didn't impeach anyone for more than a hundred and seventy years, partly because Parliament met only when the King summoned it, and, if Parliament was going to impeach his ministers, he'd show them by never summoning it, unless he really had to, as when he needed to levy taxes." [1]
"Steeped in the lore of Parliament's seventeenth-century battles with the Stuarts, men like Adams considered the right of impeachment to be one of the fundamental rights of Enlightenment." "All four of the original plans for a new constitution allowed for Presidential impeachment." "Some mode of displacing an unfit magistrate is rendered indispensable by the fallibility of those who choose, as well as by the corruptibility of the men chosen, the Virginia delegate George Mason said: "An impeachment offense is an abuse of the power of the office that violates the public trust, and runs counter to the national interest, and undermines the Republic."
"Nothing in American history, from the founding of the earliest colonies, suggests that an impeachable offense has to be an indictable crime." Johnson's acquittal also elevated the Presidency by making impeachment seem doomed."
"The impeachment of an American President is certain to lead to no end of political mischief and almost certain to fail. Still, worse could happen. Heaven forbid this Republic should become one man's kingdom."
II. Family Court, and Police Domestic Violence
"In the ninety-nineties, researchers found that forty-one per cent of male [police] officers admitted that in the previous year, they'd been physically aggressive toward their spouses, and nearly ten per cent acknowledged choking strangling, or using -- or threatening to use -- a knife or a gun." "The Citizens Police Data Project, in Chicago, analyzed the records of Chicago cops between 2000 and 2016 and found that officers accused of domestic abuse received fifty per cent more complaints than their colleagues for using excessive force." [2]
III. Merit Badges
"Research shows that the more selective a college admissions process, the greater the economic value of the degree. The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side." "Taxpayers spend a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year to support higher education through subsidies and grants." [3]
"Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic and forty-two per cent of students are male." "In a survey conducted in 2014, fifty-five per cent of Americans identified as lower class or working class." "Since 1998, the average score of students whose parents are well-educated has increased by five points, while the average score of students whose parents have only an associates' (two-year college) college degree has dropped by twenty-seven points. It turns out that the SAT is, in fact, the friend of privilege." "According to the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children whose parents are in the top one per cent of the income distribution --roughly 1.6 million households -- are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children who are in the bottom income quintile (about twenty-five million households.)"
"The educated elite has become a self-perpetuating caste, drilling its children in the rituals of meritocratic advancement and walling itself off from the world of the average American." Steven Brint, in 'Two Cheers for Higher Education,' says that the average appropriation per student in public institutions declined by twenty per cent between 1990 and 2015." "There are sixty thousand undergraduates in Ivy League colleges."
"As a polity, we are in a bizarre place were workers whose lives and prospects have been damaged by the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth and income have helped bring to power a government whose most significant legislative accomplishment is the passage of a tax law that effectively redistributes wealth upwards."
ADDENDUM:
*About three billion people around the world cook on open fires. "Billions of people live in these parts of the world, and many of them are considered 'last mile' -- beyond the last mile of road..." "There are at least fourteen thousand solar cookers already in Haiti." [4]
Footnotes:
[1] Jill Lepore, "You're Fired," The New Yorker, October 28, 2019.
[2] Rachel Oniv, "Show of Force," The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.
[3] Louis Menard, "Merit Badges," The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.
[4] Ian Frajir, "Brave New World," The New Yorker, September 30, 2019.
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