Impeachment And Trial

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is continuing to refuse to deliver her caucus’ Article of Impeachment to the Senate for trial.  Leave aside the premises that by withholding her Articles, she is confessing that her caucus has no case to present for trial or that she is functionally absolving President Donald Trump of any impeachable wrong-doing.  As The Wall Street Journal noted, her move only trivializ[es] a serious constitutional power and process. As the WSJ further noted,

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says impeachment requires a formal transmittal of the articles to the Senate, whether by sedan chair or overnight FedEx, or that the House must appoint impeachment managers.

Here, though, the WSJ misstated the case:

If she never sends the articles and there is no trial, she will have effectively trampled on executive power and Senate prerogatives by maligning a President without the chance for acquittal at trial.

The claim is certainly true in the latter part, if there is no trial; however, Pelosi’s not sending along the Articles does not mean there can be no trial.

The Progressive-Democrat caucus’ Articles of Impeachment are recorded in the House Journal IAW our Constitution’s Article I, Section 5:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy….

Of course, there’s nothing requiring Secrecy in the publicly done impeachment process.  The Senate can simply collect the Articles from the House’s publicly available Journal and proceed from there. If current Senate Rules don’t have provision for that, it’s a simply enough matter—a majority vote—to adjust its Rules.

Even with the Articles collected on Senate initiative, its current Rules say that a trial can’t be begun until the House appoints its impeachment managers, which Pelosi also is refusing to do. This is another easy adjustment to relevant Senate Rules.

The Progressive-Democrats have impeached our President, and with that, the House’s role in the process is done. All that’s happening now on the House side is a toddler’s temper tantrum, a toddler holding his breath until he turns…blue.

Capitalism and the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Barton Swaim, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, pointed out “socialists'” error when they claim that capitalism is a system.  Their attempts at such a definition—whether of economics, or politics, of…whatever—is necessary, though, in order for them to draw their supposedly favorable comparisons between the socialism flavor of the moment and capitalism.

But capitalism isn’t a system at all, as Simone Weil pointed out 80 years ago, using the then-European economy as her example, and which Swaim cited:

…consists in certain methods of production, consumption, and exchange, which are continually varying, however, and which depend upon certain fundamental relationships: between the production and the circulation of goods, between the circulation of goods and money, between money and production, between money and consumption.

Or, it’s consumers and producers, buyers and sellers, coming together entirely voluntarily and of their own volition, to exchange things each party valued for valued things the other party had—and after which exchange, all parties were better off than they were before the exchange.

The critical part of this arrangement, this unsystematic economy, consists in its voluntary and self-initiated nature.  It cannot be a system because it does not even approach anything systematic.

Sadly, the obfuscation of “systematizing” what they claim to be “capitalism” is all that the 21st century crop of socialists, the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party, have. They certainly have no coherent economic, or political, or whatever policies on which to expound, other than these:

  1. Big Government is the answer

Then recursively,

2. Raising taxes

3. Raising Government spending

Humor

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…just to extend the holiday a bit. Along that line, this is the only post for today.

Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at them and says, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger.”

Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it, too.

As one frog said to the other, “How time is fun when you are having flies.”

A Priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar; the Minister ducked.

A rabbi, a priest, and a minister are attending an ecumenical conference in another town, and they stop at a bar at the end of the day. The priest pulls out a deck of cards and pretty soon they’ve got a little poker game going — only to be busted by an overzealous policeman enforcing the town’s strict anti-gambling laws. So they’re hauled before a judge the next morning, and everybody’s kind of embarrassed about it, including the judge.
“Look,” he says, “just tell me you weren’t gambling, and I’ll let you go.”
“Well,” says the priest, “gambling qua gambling seems to me to imply some sort of intent to win money or with the idea that it would exchange hands at the end of the evening, whereas considering a hypothetical situation such as the one we were engaged in where the money is taking on more of the role of a token merely for tracking the interplay of the game and the relative …” and so on.
“Fine,” says the judge, “You can go.”
The minister steps up. “It seems to me that given divine foreknowledge of all events, even if we mortals are not so gifted raises the question of whether gambling as a concept can really ..” and so on also, and is similarly dismissed by the judge, just leaving the rabbi in the courtroom.
“Well?” asks the judge. “Rabbi, were you gambling?”
The rabbi looks around and shrugs his shoulders. “Gambling? With who?”

A chicken walks into a bar.
The bartender says, “Oh come on! We don’t serve chickens in here!”
The chicken says, “Do you know somewhere that does?”
The bartender says, “Yeah.”
The chicken asks, “Well, where is it?”
The bartender says, “It’s across the road.”

I was sitting in a bar one day and two really large women came in, talking in an interesting accent.
So I said, “Cool accent, are you two ladies from Ireland?”
One of them snarled at me, “It’s Wales, dumbo!”
So I corrected myself, “Oh, right, so are you two whales from Ireland?”
That’s about as far as I remember.

Merry Christmas

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First posted in 2011, I repeat it here.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.  If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Why do bells ring at Christmas?
Because someone pulls the rope.

Harms in Public Spaces

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The Brits are working out a new way to intervene in private lives and in private businesses, this time in an attempt to control “harms” done via (not by, mind you) “online platforms”—social media.

Under the [British] government’s proposal, a new regulator would have the power to require companies to protect users from a number of identified online harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.

And

[T]he pair talked through the different terms that had been used to describe social media in a legal context, looking for the right analogy. They tried “platform,” “pipe” and “intermediary.” Nothing seemed to fit. Then “we thought of a ‘public space,'” says Ms Woods. “People do different things online. It was just like ‘how do we regulate spaces?'”

“Identified” online harms? We can’t even define the harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.  Even Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ultimately walked back his foolish I know it when I see it nonsense, recognizing that such a nebulous “definition” had no place in law.

We have not—we cannot—define any of these harms, much less what constitutes a “public space;” there is no basis for Government regulating these things.

Nor have we succeeded in recognizing who actually is responsible for these harms, whether public or private.  See the disconnect, at a high level, between the Left’s Big Government is responsible on the one hand and the Right’s focus on individual responsibility on the other.

The British government may want to create a whole new, intrusive bureaucratic agency for controlling one more aspect of British citizens’ lives. When we wrote our Constitution and ratified it those two and a quarter centuries ago, we explicitly walked away from the British system of governance for a number of reasons; central among them being the illegitimacy of Government intrusions into private lives.

This is one more example.