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The spectacle of Georgia’s grand jury forepermix is enough to induce a grand mal seizure, but we move on quickly from that spectacle to the specter of the Supreme Court pondering the Heisenberg Uncertainty Point of the Constitution: is the vice president, as first in line of succession, part of the executive branch, or, as president of the Senate, part of the legislative branch? The answer is Yes. But can Vice President Pence involve the “speech and debate” clause of Article I to assert privilege against testifying to a special prosecutor? “Separation of powers” you say? A quandary indeed.
From there we talk about Jimmy Carter, who is likely not to be with us much longer, but defer our criticisms to a later time. Well most of them anyway. From there, a few summary judgments about Speaker McCarthy releasing the January 6 videotape archive to Tucker Carlson (Lucretia smells a rat), what to make of the derailed train that looks to derail Pee-Wee Herman’s presidential ambitions, and whether the latest entries into the GOP presidential field mean anything at all. (Steve has a theory of the case.)
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John,
You owe it to yourself to watch the video of the jury foreperson. Never have I seen a greater disparity between how someone comes off in print and how they come off on video. She sounds a little odd in print, but in video is flat out jaw dropping. I see that Michael Beschloss over at MSNBC has donned a tinfoil hat of his own to suggest she is part of a conspiracy to help Trump. Of course, I’ve been saying that about AOC for years.
What is the saying-??? Envy is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die.
The legal discussions on this podcast are fascinating and highly informative, but they always bring me back to what I see as the biggest barrier to justice: the obscurant character of the law itself. If regular citizens can’t understand the legal process practically speaking, its rulings are always subject to self-serving sophistry, aka a crap shoot. I’m not in the habit of quoting Scripture, but, to me, our first law book got it exactly right: “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ For whatever is more than these is from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37, notably part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount).
My first year lectures often talked about how courts don’t have judicial impartiality; but that you have to pretend they do in order to make it all work. As it was my first year, I think I forgot the more eloquent term for it…
Thought experiment, would an anarchists ever get confirmed as a supreme court justice? Or for the sake of a more sound scenario, Richard Epstein. I’d assume no, so the ilk of judges are always going to be skewed towards the state’s interest. By state’s interest I don’t mean people’s.
On McCarthy releasing the J6 videos to Tucker Carlson: I find it bizarre that a public official is releasing the videos to a private person who competes with other private persons and institutions to provide the news.
Part of the problem is that Congress has exempted itself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that the executive branch is supposed to follow.
But in any case, those videos are public records. One journalist or group of journalists should not be favored over another in their release.
On the Supreme Court ruling on executive privilege: Before you say that the Supreme Court has or shouldn’t have, no jurisdiction to limit executive privilege, tell me where the constitution explicitly grants it to the president.
It does explicitly grant a similar privilege to members of Congress, why not the executive? You need a legal institution like a court to even establish precedential framework to establish such a privilege. Another weak argument from Lucretia.
Would have been nice if McCarthy gave the tapes to James O’Keefe
Is this cruel and unusual punishment?
https://twitter.com/zhao_dashuai/status/1630411865837961217?s=61&t=obcqQ-Gz9knVoAA43uwnaA