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This is an advertising campaign, not a serious inquiry. The Democrats are doing the same thing as selling soap. The truth is secondary, or in this case , irrelevant. There is no purpose related to truth or evidence. It is aimed at women who watch soap operas and those who resemble them in intelligence and general knowledge.
Don’t bother with the whistle-blower complaint. It is not legally applicable to the president (per Andy McCarthy) is means nothing more than a hearsay from anyone. The only thing that matters is the substance of the complaint: the bad politics of quid-pro-quo with a Ukraine. Since that is not illegal (the president has unlimited negotiating rights), this is all a nothingburger. I say you should relax and stock up on popcorn.
what quid pro quo exactly?
Dear Lord, at least Reagan actually sold arms to terrorists to get back hostages. Trump did not even do anything.
A small quibble.
McCarthy was right !
The fruit of those he was accusing are all around us, and they are winning.
Fact? Evidence? Hearsay rules? These concepts are not found on planet Leftoid. Trump is a barrier to implementing an ideology that is at war with human nature, economic reality and the tyranny of morals and common sense. Why would we expect his attackers to be bound by truth, rules, fairness or any of that other patriarchal baggage?
Well, Conservatism, inc is busy telling us we should not defend Trump on the no quid pro quo, because, hey, something might yet come out.
I have known many excellent lawyers, and they are people I have the utmost respect for. Where is the American Bar Association to put a stop to this? They are supposed to be protecting justice first and foremost. Without that, we will be left to live in a Lord of the Flies world.
The positive take away-they AREN’T proposing any ridiculous legislation. This is all consuming for them.
It is only 95% of lawyers who give the other 5% a bad name.
Activist lawyers are less likely to have actual legal work to do so they predominate in all the committees and peripheral work of local, state and national bar associations. Much like college admin positions, lefties worm into slots that provide a voice and the appearance of authority even if not real power. Once the partisan noise level gets loud enough, the non-organized normals shy away from the effort and energy required to oppose the echo chamber (again, the normals tend to have real legal work to do). The uniformity and volume of the noise content emboldens the lefties and cows any normals who remain in positions of authority.
Academic networks from the prestige law schools skew left as our politics is more about the aesthetics of class warfare than actual policy and law school graduates identify with the secular urban upscale tribe.
I fear there is a shift among the elite from the idea that it is a privilege, solemn duty and honor to be entrusted with the law (and the law is very much in the custody of graduates of our top law schools) to the notion that the law is theirs because their SAT and LSAT scores entitle them to remake the law in their own image and people in lower percentiles should just shut up.
That’s interesting. It’s a familiar pattern in a lot of other professions. I’m disappointed to hear it about law.
Or worse yet because in their reading of the Transcript there is a penumbra and emanation of a quid pro quo. One wonders at their endgame in all this. Also I beggars belief that you could defend the Obama administration’s investigation of Trump on the flimsiest of evidence, yet condemn Trump for looking into a situation that is entirely public knowledge and reeks to high heaven of corruption. I think many of our friends are letting their anti-trump sentiments cloud their reason.
They have been on the side of the whores for decades. The American Medical Association, which I have more experience with, is no better,
The term you are looking for is “retail lawyer”. I really wish I had the time to ponder the issues John Yoo opines on but I too must focus on the pedestrian issues you enumerate. Our focus must be laser sharp on “justice justice” as opposed to “social justice”
Excellent post, by the way. Thanks.
Why are you holding back? Hehe . . .
To paraphrase recent works by Kurt Schlicter, Tucker Carlson, and Charles Murray (and to some extent, Andrew McCarthy): Our elites suck. That’s how we got Trump.
The ABA like the AMA is a guild. All guilds exist to protect the members. Minimize the members and maximize the income. The AMA does not care about “medicine” and the AFT does not care about K-12 “education”.
Am I too cynical? Probably not, I have my cynicism turned up to ’11’.
Normally that is true, but in this case I believe the official reasoning is, “Yeah, but it’s Trump.”
So what are you afraid of? A trial based on rumors and hearsay that ends up being nothing? Thats the Democrats right to waste money on. Sounds like Russiagate (if you’re right)……and it amounted to pretty much nothing. So far, the “hearsay” seems pretty accurate though. We’ve got the smoking gun “transcript” after all. So, probably should focus on defending that.
The American Bar Association????? Are you kidding? The ABA’s been in the tank for the left since the 80’s, at least. Probably supply names of willing anti-Trump activist lawyers for more “lawfare.”
The water at the shore recedes shortly before the tsunami.
Sure, but he was Trump while he didn’t even do anything and that’s bad enough.
Congress is largely composed of lawyers and writes the laws that lawyers live from. I can’t imagine the ABA has any plans to criticize them.
I guess a circus is a small price to pay for gridlock.
That is a penetrating observation. I’m going to try to remember to refer to them as guilds henceforth.
For a possibly alternate view – But we aren’t at trial. We are at filing complaint stage, and so the standard is more “notice pleading” – “on information and belief.”
Now, dragging the people of the USA through the division, acrimony, and other pain that will be involved in a presidential impeachment proceeding still seems to me to be a steep price to pay for a claim with such flimsy sourcing and minimal consequence.
With the release of the “transcript” (and it is not a verbatim transcript, it is a merged summary of multiple people recording the call) the complaint has now been verified. And what you can testify to, “Joe told me such and such” is also not hearsay, though Joe must now be questioned.
So what Trump said is not at issue. The issue is now what did he mean. And the issue is this: did Trump asking for a foreign government to investigate a US citizen not under investigation in the US constitute an abuse of power. It can be reasonable stated that it is an abuse as the ask for for political gain.
So the question is simple: is this an impeachable offense.
I welcome the opportunity to converse with a fellow Churchillian! As to your first observation, accepting the accuracy of your description of the Rule against Hearsay for the sake of argument, so far I have not only seen no evidence of “Joe” anywhere in sight, but would wager that we will never see “Joe”, if, indeed, there is a “Joe”, in the absence of an indictment for leaking classified government materials. If that remains the case, the entirety of the case we are supposed to believe is the foundation for a “legitimate” move to impeach and remove the President, thereby reversing my vote and that of 60 Million other Citizens disappears.
With respect to your second question, while I suspect my view of the reach of the power of the Executive may be quite a bit more expansive that yours, or many others, it is my considered opinion, based on the love of history I see we share, that there are very few limits on the scope of the President’s authority to have any discussion with any Head of State about a broad range of topics. This would definitely include a topic which bears upon the veracity or truthfulness of the recent Vice-President who, as I understand it, might very well still be under investigation by officials in Ukraine; it seems to me to a perfectly appropriate area to explore with the new Head of State of a nation which has been beset by rampant corruption for quite a long time. Also, there is the question of the President inquiring into efforts by citizens of Ukraine to influence the 2016 election, a matter which, until a few minutes ago, was the most important issue in the Universe to Democrats. Now–not so much! My concern is the effect all of this anti-Trump spying on the ability of the President, whoever he or she may be, to freely conduct diplomacy with others, in an atmosphere of assurance to those other Heads of State, that their words will not be warped by the Thespian antics of despicable politicians like Schiff.
Thanks for your comment, Jim
The complete whistle blower complaint names the people who told the whistle blower of the call. The forthcoming impeachment investigation will most likely interview these people. But the fact remains that the president has stated that he did make the request. Juliani at first denied this then admitted to it. So the “Joes” don’t really matter that much.
And, in an impeachment investigation, no other ground is off limits. This will also include the Mueller investigation and a whole range of other things, even down to the emoluments clause issue.
Edited to add:
Yes, I am sure that presidents have all kinds of conversations (imagine what LBG may have raised!). But none of it came to light. Trump’s conversation(s) come to light because there are a lot of people in the government who have found him to be a danger or unacceptable. In particular, the “intelligence community” is in conflict with the president, and he helped to create that situation.
For a real good book related to Churchill, try “Troublesome Young Men”. Excellent.
Really? Ukraine has got to be one of the biggest scandals in history that failed to explode into the public square. We still don’t know what really happened there ~2013-2015. Why did the American establishment so enthusiastically support the Maidan coup? It’s not like Ukraine was being run by a dictator.
I think the dirty truth is that sowing chaos in Ukraine has been enormously beneficial to both Russia and the West, and both sides have had a hand in it. The conflict in Ukraine is pretty much the only thing checking German power; without Russian aggression the EU may already have collapsed, and without it the EU would almost certainly collapse in the near future. Putin’s regime has also been dependent on the conflict in Ukraine; if not for it he might have been ousted from power by now.