Monthly Archives: January 2020

“The ‘Corrupt Purposes’ Impeachment”

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The Wall Street Journal offered some thoughts along these lines re the current impeachment trial.

Especially pernicious is the new House “corrupt purposes” standard for removing a President from office.

“Corrupt Purposes,” though, isn’t the only failure of this so-called impeachment that’s being tried in the Senate.  Just as pernicious, certainly far more dangerous, is Progressive-Democrats’ repeated (including Wednesday afternoon by Jerry Nadler in his presentation before the Senate) demand that Trump produce documents, witnesses to prove his innocence.

This attacks the very core of American jurisprudence; it sets every American, not just a Party-hated President, at direct, personal risk.

It’s dismaying that the NLMSM, not the WSJ alone, wholly ignores this unAmerican attack on one of our foundational principles.

More Censorship in the Offing

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Amazon and YouTube are two companies peddling streamed videos, and they’re looking at “filtering” certain content.

An (unidentified) Amazon spokeswoman says

We continuously review and monitor titles to ensure that they are in accordance with our policies and guidelines. If content is identified as not meeting those standards, it is immediately removed.

YouTube, also:

[A] self-avowed creature of user-generated video, also has faced the challenge of policing objectionable content on its site.

Policing objectionable content.

Indeed.

It’s the same “challenge” faced by all sites, not only Amazon or YouTube, though, and it’s rank censorship.  Whose definition of “objectionable,” what “policing” techniques are used—with whose consent? Not the user, not a citizen.  This is a challenge best ignored altogether.

The Wall Street Journal, at the link above, also asked a question:

What steps, if any, should Amazon take to help viewers differentiate between professional and amateur content in its video library?

I’ll extend the question to include “objectionable” content, and the answer is plain: the same steps any site should take, and they’re similar to those taken since movies were invented: ID the producer(s), director(s), and leading actors, and if those names are unavailable, note that, too.

Viewers are fully capable of taking this information and determining for themselves what programming is legitimate or unobjectionable. It is, after all, their criteria of “legitimate” and of “objectionable” that matters, and these criteria are unique to each person.

In the end, it is, or should be, the viewer’s choice of what to watch, not the censors’.

“An Explanation of Modern Monetary Theory”

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A Tuesday Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor writer offered one.

[I]nflation is the only reason to limit budget deficits. The national debt is never a valid reason in countries with their own currencies; they can always make payments as they come due and can never be forced to default.

In particular,

The debt can always be paid by creating money.

Here are a couple more thoughts on the matter.

Printing money is, in and of itself, inflationary if production doesn’t rise in a way that substantially keeps pace with the increase in dollars chasing those goods and services. Using printed money to pay a national debt doesn’t cut it. Otherwise, Treasury could simply declare our national debt paid off, deeming the dollars printed.

Alternatively, Treasury could execute that middle step; the money printed to pay the debt still must go somewhere after the debt instruments are retired, it won’t simply disappear into the æther—it’ll enter the economy and inflate prices.

And this claim:

Treasurys are completely marketable. If a wealthy bondholder wants to buy something, she will sell bonds.

To whom will this wealthy bondholder sell the bonds (I’ll elide questions about the per centage of outstanding bonds this “wealthy” class holds)? There must be a buyer. If the idea is that Government will use the money to buy its own debt, we’re back to the above. Failing that, it’d be interesting to see this wealthy person take one of his bonds to his grocery store to buy food. Or use one to pay his cab driver—and tip well or ask for change.

This isn’t a theoretical disagreement, either; we have the example of Zimbabwe, courtesy of another writer in his Letter:

Zimbabwe’s government, which printed so much currency that it became worthless and had to be abandoned in favor of US currency.

This writer is the proud owner of a Zimbabwe Z$100 Trillion (yes, with a “T”) note that he picked up for two bucks, US—and he says he overpaid.

“Credible Military Capabilities”

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The European Union needs some, says Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President.

In order to respond to crises, the EU needs “credible military capabilities,” the leader of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.
The bloc has already “set up the building blocks of a European defense union,” the former German defense minister said in her speech.
“It is complementary to NATO and it is different,” she added. “There is a European way to foreign policy and foreign security policy where hard power is an important tool […] but it is never the only one.”

Well, NSS.

This is much of what President Donald Trump has been saying since he began campaigning for office in 2015. It’s part of his long push (which is beginning to have some success) for NATO’s European member nations to quit freeloading off our treasure and blood and actually honor their NATO commitments with more of their own money and blood.

It’s also a clear indication that those nations, whose prosperity appeared and grew under American protection, can—and have been able to for a long time—do more for NATO than they have been. After all, it will cost much more to develop an additional defense establishment with the building blocks of a European defense union that is complementary to NATO and…is different.”

Von der Leyen says the EU can afford both.

Some Thoughts on Impeachment and Trial

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Some thoughts. Alan Dershowitz has some, and so do I. His last is irrelevant to the present context; I’ve included it solely for completeness’ sake. The core of the present context is in his (3 of 3) tweet.

(1 of 3) To the extent there are inconsistencies between my current position and what I said 22 years ago, I am correct today. During the Clinton impeachment, the issue was not whether a technical crime was required, because he was charged with perjury.
(2 of 3) Therefore, I didn’t research the issue; I relied on the academic consensus that a crime was not required. In Trump impeachment, on the other hand, that is the critical issue, because abuse of power and obstruction of congress are neither crimes nor criminal-like behavior.
(3 of 3) So I have now thoroughly researched the issue and concluded that although a technical crime with all the elements may not be required, criminal-like behavior akin to treason and bribery is required.
(3 of 3 cont) To the extent therefore that my 1998 off-the-cuff interview statement suggested the opposite, I retract it. Scholars learn to adapt and even change old views as they do more research.

I disagree concerning whether criminal-like behavior is sufficient; behavior must actually be criminal to justify, legally as opposed to politically, impeachment and removal from office.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

That’s a clear statement of the requirement for overt criminal behavior in order to justify the Article I, Sections 2 and 3 impeachment and trial procedure.

And yet, the President (or Vice President or any civil Officers) cannot be criminally convicted of anything. The impeachment/trial procedure under our Constitution is, explicitly, not a criminal proceeding:

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification….

Guilt and acquittal simply are meaningless concepts here.

This goes further to a central point of the matter that keeps getting missed by the Republicans: Progressive-Democrats and their NLMSM keep bleating about adding witnesses, evidence, etc throughout the course of the Senate’s trial “like any other trial,” and “what kind of a trial is it without witnesses?” They keep conflating the Senate’s portion of the impeachment/trial procedure with an Article III court (or State court) trial.

In fact, the two have nothing to do with each other. The impeachment/trial procedure requires a crime in order to remove a President from office, but to convict him of that crime, he has to be haled into an Article III court for a separate, actually criminal, trial.

“Criminal-like” isn’t enough: looking, quacking, walking like a duck is insufficient here.

On the other hand, from a purely political, raw power perspective, Gerald Ford was right, and criminality becomes irrelevant: impeachable (and subsequent removal from office) is whatever Congress says it is. Which goes to the center of us being governed by less than angels. Those who have the power to make our laws also have the power to ignore their own lawlessness.

(Another central point that keeps getting missed is the Progressive-Democrats’ constant demand that the President provide his own evidence to prove his innocence. The Republican legal team and Republicans generally, keep not disputing that unAmerican contention. Kellyanne Conway finally started approaching this, tangentially, in a Monday night interview.)