Can I Get A Witness?

Do not adjust your podcast app or web browser, you are in fact seeing this week’s Ricochet Podcast drop a day early. And we’ve got a good one for you: Chief Impeachment Pundit John Yoo stops by to grade Alan Dershowitz’s impeachment defense arguments and then The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel gives no you-know-what’s about the Democrats and their tactics. Also, our crew punditizes (we just made that word up) on the Middle East, Lileks gives Post of The Week honors to @henrycastaigne for his Epic Crossover Event: Dr. Who Battles the Gods of the Copybook Headings, we’ve got a new Long Poll question, and a new jingle! 

Music from this week’s episode: Can I Get A Witness by Marvin Gaye

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There are 43 comments.

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  1. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    JuliaBlaschke (View Comment):

    Trump, the Republicans and the Democrats are all acting in their personal interests and the national interest can go hang. Sadly that’s where we are. Maybe we have always been there and maybe we always will. Churchill was so right when he said: ‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.… ‘

    Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™

    The only way to solve this is to adopt every single idea from Mises.org . 

     

    • #31
  2. Wolfsheim Member
    Wolfsheim
    @Wolfsheim

    On a Saturday evening here in Japan, I regularly tune in to the podcast and now was delighted to see that John Yoo would be a guest.

    A graduate of UC Berkeley, with friends who went to law school there, I was just beginning to learn Korean when Prof. Yoo was born in his native land. (I wonder how he feels about the recent posthumous defenestration of Boalt.)

    It has been many decades since I lived in America, but Prof. Yoo makes me proud to have been born there. As ever, as in his discussions with Richard Epstein, his legal reasoning for those of us who are not lawyers makes eminent sense. And his wit is likewise a delight. Please have him back on soon!

    • #32
  3. Blue Yeti Admin
    Blue Yeti
    @BlueYeti

    Wolfsheim (View Comment):
    (I wonder how he feels about the recent posthumous defenestration of Boalt.)

    You don’t have to wonder. 

    • #33
  4. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    He will drag Bernie over the finish line with defibrillators if he has to. lol

    —-

    That was a really good show. The head chef for Butcher Box is on Howie Carr every month or so, and I have to say he sounds like the real deal, not some corporate formula or whatever. 

    • #34
  5. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    James Lileks (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    James: Rush stole borrowed “skulls full of mush” from Professor Kingsfield.

    Rush got that line the old fashioned way: he stole it!

    Bosh. My grandfather used the phrase “skull full of mush” before John J. Osborn Jr. wrote The Paper Chase. He might have said “noggin” though.

    I wish I could remember who he was talking about …

    • #35
  6. James Lileks Contributor
    James Lileks
    @jameslileks

    Percival (View Comment):

    James Lileks (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    James: Rush stole borrowed “skulls full of mush” from Professor Kingsfield.

    Rush got that line the old fashioned way: he stole it!

    Bosh. My grandfather used the phrase “skull full of mush” before John J. Osborn Jr. wrote The Paper Chase. He might have said “noggin” though.

    I wish I could remember who he was talking about …

    Sorry; I was making an E. F. Hutton reference.

    • #36
  7. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    James Lileks (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    James Lileks (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    James: Rush stole borrowed “skulls full of mush” from Professor Kingsfield.

    Rush got that line the old fashioned way: he stole it!

    Bosh. My grandfather used the phrase “skull full of mush” before John J. Osborn Jr. wrote The Paper Chase. He might have said “noggin” though.

    I wish I could remember who he was talking about …

    Sorry; I was making an E. F. Hutton reference.

    So, how about that Picard = Trump?  Or perhaps more usefully, Trump = Picard?

    • #37
  8. jerrykrause Inactive
    jerrykrause
    @jerrykrause

    kedavis (View Comment):

    James: Rush stole borrowed “skulls full of mush” from Professor Kingsfield.

    p.s. I hate wings. Sorry, Butcher Box.

    l wasn’t aware Rush posited as only his

    • #38
  9. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    jerrykrause (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    James: Rush stole borrowed “skulls full of mush” from Professor Kingsfield.

    p.s. I hate wings. Sorry, Butcher Box.

    l wasn’t aware Rush posited as only his

    I don’t think he ever has, my point was just that attributing it to Rush misses at least one previous level.

    • #39
  10. Kevin Inactive
    Kevin
    @JaredSturgeon

    Rob starts by saying that Trump is guilty and now the only issue is the sentence.  Guilty of what?  Quid pro quo is not illegal for the president – its the essence of how we work with other nations.  Thats not a crime.  This is the problem with the Democrats being so partisan that they are blinded into doing a poor job.  They didn’t even establish the crime.  Rob seems to assume that the crime is a politician he didn’t like doing something he doesn’t like (which is how the Democrats in the house defined it).  But you need a whole lot more than that.  We need to explore motivations which gets into mind reading.  

    If Trumps motivations are complex but we only look at the selfish components and say it was a crime than Eric Ciaramella committed treason, all the House democrats who planned to impeach Trump from day one are treasonous, etc. 

    Ultimately the Senators decided they didn’t want to prolong this sham trial, but one of the reasons was that Boltons testimony added nothing because quid pro quo is not a crime, its business as usual.  Only if Bolton was going to say – “Trump told me that there was no corruption but he thought it would help him politically to investigate the son of a political rival and to use foreign aide as a bribe for that investigation” would it have mattered.  So the sham should end.

    • #40
  11. Taras Coolidge
    Taras
    @Taras

    Kevin (View Comment):

    Rob starts by saying that Trump is guilty and now the only issue is the sentence. Guilty of what? Quid pro quo is not illegal for the president – its the essence of how we work with other nations. Thats not a crime. This is the problem with the Democrats being so partisan that they are blinded into doing a poor job. They didn’t even establish the crime. Rob seems to assume that the crime is a politician he didn’t like doing something he doesn’t like (which is how the Democrats in the house defined it). But you need a whole lot more than that. We need to explore motivations which gets into mind reading.

    If Trumps motivations are complex but we only look at the selfish components and say it was a crime than Eric Ciaramella committed treason, all the House democrats who planned to impeach Trump from day one are treasonous, etc.

    Ultimately the Senators decided they didn’t want to prolong this sham trial, but one of the reasons was that Boltons testimony added nothing because quid pro quo is not a crime, its business as usual. Only if Bolton was going to say – “Trump told me that there was no corruption but he thought it would help him politically to investigate the son of a political rival and to use foreign aide as a bribe for that investigation” would it have mattered. So the sham should end.

    Well put!  This is exactly what Alan Dershowitz has been trying to explain to the Never Trumpers and the Democrats.

    If this had been a real impeachment; that is, if the goal was really to remove the President, then the Democrats in the House would have included Republicans in the process from the start.

    Let the Republicans call their own witnesses; let them ask whatever questions they wanted; answer every objection they had.

    Of course, this is exactly the opposite of what the Democrats actually did, because this impeachment was never real.

    • #41
  12. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Pelosi also just called it an impeachment unilaterally. One person from the kookiest district in the country.The whole body was supposed to vote on it. I’m not up on all of the implications, but it’s disgusting. 

     

     

    • #42
  13. Architectus Coolidge
    Architectus
    @Architectus

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Architectus (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Bishop Wash, Blk X-man/Wh pilot (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Wait, what? “No tie-breaker in the Senate,” Kimberly Strassel? Does the VP not get the tie-breaking vote in these matters?

    I don’t know but he’d definitely have a vested interest. I thought that’s why the Chief Justice presides instead of the VP.

    Seems like the VP would have a vested interest in anything else he gets the tie-breaking vote on too. So what? ALL the senators have a vested interest, really. In EVERYTHING they vote on.

    It dates all the way back to when the President and the Vice President could be from different parties. They did not want a case where an opposing-party VP would preside over an impeachment-related issue and cast a vote that could make himself president.

    But the VP could never cast the deciding vote in an impeachment trial, because the vote to convict/remove can’t be just 51-50. And the VP doesn’t get to vote unless it IS to break a tie.

    If I am not mistaken, only the vote to convict must be a super-majority, but that is not a requirement for every “impeachment-related issue” that could be up for a vote during the proceedings, such as whether to call witnesses.  So the influence of an opposing party VP could be decisive in that respect, and needed to be circumscribed. 

    • #43
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