Tag Archives: politics

The Trump Conviction

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Manhattan Prosecutor Alvin Bragg campaigned on his explicit promise to get former President Donald Trump (R), not to uphold the law generally. His campaign was to target the man and then find a crime. He did list, though, a broad number of violent crimes that he would not prosecute at all. Now Bragg has gotten his 34 counts of guilty on a case that wouldn’t have been a felony case at all but for his claim that the 34 counts on which Trump was tried were done to cover up another crime.

Here’s what the 6th Amendment to our Constitution says on criminal trials:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor….

Here are some tidbits regarding that trial. It’s not an exhaustive list, just a few of the larger, more obvious ones.

Trump’s team was denied by the presiding judge the opportunity to call all of the witnesses they wished to call, including an expert witness who could have explained to the jury the election law that Bragg’s team made a key part of its case. The judge reserved that explanation for himself, and he testified as an expert in the guise of his jury instructions after both sides had rested their cases.

Trump’s team—and Trump himself—were never informed of the nature and cause of the accusation bringing him to trial. At no time did Bragg’s team say what the covered-up crime was, not in the indictment, not in the charge sheet initiating the trial, not at any time during the trial. Not even the jury’s sheet on which they were to mark their Guilty or Not Guilty verdict for each count indicates what that other crime was.

In the judge’s jury instruction, the judge identified three potential covered-up crimes—not the prosecutor, the judge—that the jury could find was the covered up crime that made the 34 actually charged counts crimes of which they could convict Trump. The judge’s instruction further said the jury did not have to be unanimous in its selection of that covered up crime: they could pick and choose among the list, and so long as one juror chose one (or more) from the list, that would be sufficient to convict.

As far back as 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in Thompson v Utah that

a defendant enjoys a “constitutional right to demand that his liberty should not be taken from him except by the joint action of the court and the unanimous verdict of a jury of twelve persons.”

The Court’s 1940 ruling in Andres v United States expanded on that:

Unanimity in jury verdicts is required where the Sixth and Seventh Amendments apply. In criminal cases this requirement of unanimity extends to all issues—character or degree of the crime, guilt and punishment—which are left to the jury.

Trump was denied that unanimity.

But this wasn’t a political hit job. Not at all.

School Choice, Public Schools

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section is opposed to Educational Savings Accounts that Texas parents could use to send their children to private schools.

School choice in Texas will benefit no one except those who already pay for private school. Moving to public funding of private schools will also tend to resegregate society. Our state-level elected officials are doing the bidding of billionaires in- and out-of-state who have other agendas than excellence in our public schools.

School choice will greatly benefit the children, especially those in families on Texas’ lower economic rungs, by letting them escape from failing public schools. Nor is it an either-or choice; the one leads to improvements in the other. School choice, from that competition, will greatly benefit those children remaining in public schools.

That success, far from increasing segregation, will contribute to decreasing it. The majority of those kids on the lower rung are from minority families. Being increasing their ability to compete academically, they’ll be better able to compete for jobs, and for promotions once employed, as adults. That more even competition is the stuff of desegregation.

The idea that no one but a few billionaires will benefit is just so much irrational hype.

He concluded with:

Let’s put public funding of private schools to a statewide vote.

We just did. In the Republican primaries and the runoffs in some of those primaries, public funding won very widespread support. We will again soon: school choice will be on the ballot again this November. Those State-level elected officials, elected in the primaries and will be elected in the general election, having campaigned on the matter, are much more likely to do the bidding of those who hired and will hire them—their constituents—than were Texas to maintain the status quo with its politicians in November.

Gerrymandering

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The Supreme Court a few days ago ruled 6-3 that a US House districting map in South Carolina was not an illegal racial gerrymander but was an entirely legitimate political gerrymander and so beyond the reach of courts to intervene in. Political gerrymanders are entirely political matters and the sole province of a State’s legislature, the Court held.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent,

This Court has prohibited race-based gerrymanders for a reason. They divide citizens on racial lines to engineer the results of elections.

I suggest that Kagan has, by mistake, hit upon the larger problem that any gerrymandering creates. Political gerrymandering divides citizens on political lines explicitly to engineer the results of elections. How is that any more acceptable?

The idea of barring racial gerrymanders is to prevent the exclusion of racial minorities in a district from electing government representatives who will represent them.

Yet political gerrymanders, which set districts along purely political party lines, are a legitimate means of excluding political minorities, even major parties in a State’s legislative minority, in a district from electing government representatives who will represent those parties’ members.

How is that in any way different from racial gerrymanders? The group that’s in power is allowed, through gerrymandering, to perpetuate its power by permanently reducing the power of those not in power.

Better to draw House districts—or at least US House districts—as rectangles of substantially equal populations, without regard to race or politics.

The first article of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution includes this:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….

Article I, Section 4, of our Constitution is this:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

Congress has some (not absolute) authority over the States’ political decisions regarding the Regulations for holding elections, and that would seem to include districting rules.

Finally, surely among the privileges of an American citizen is the privilege—the right—to vote. Every voter should be on an equal footing with every other voter rather than some voters, by dint of their inclusion in a particular race or political bent, having political advantage over other voters. Disadvantaged voters most assuredly are seeing their voting privilege abridged.

In fine, either all American citizens are equal under law, or we are not.

Crimes and Stolen Data

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Ira Stoll, of FutureOfCapitalism LLC, pointed out in his 27 May Wall Street Journal op-ed, that he’s a victim of a crime, namely the “leak” of his personal tax data (along with the “leaks” of many thousands of other Americans’ personal tax data) by the IRS to ProPublica, among others.

Stoll proposed a solution to the larger problem, that of government possession of confidential data of any sort:

Much of this could be solved if the government simply collected and stored less confidential data.

He’s absolutely right on that. However, his proposal addresses only the front end of the crime. It’s a take the keys to your car with you as you go about your business, rather than tossing them onto the front seat, kind of solution. It’s necessary, but woefully inadequate, especially since it’s the confidential data storer that’s tossing your keys onto the front seat.

The back end of the crime needs to be worked, also.

In most other areas of US law, receiving stolen property is itself a felony. That should apply to journalism, also.

At the very least, journalists should be required to turn the received stolen goods over to the police or to return them to the source (and, in the case of digital goods, to certify that all electronic copies have been irretrievably deleted and in the case of hard copy documents to certify that no hard or digital copies have been retained), and journalists should be required to identify the source from whom they received the stolen goods. Criminals in the midst of committing their crimes are not sources that should be protectable by journalistic “investigative reporting” imperatives or by any other excuse. Journalism’s “public interest” is not served by being allowed to abet a crime. More importantly, the public’s public interest is actively harmed by allowing journalists to abet a crime.

Either all American citizens are equal under law, or we are not.

Terminology…and a Solution

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Two questions sit before Congress over the coming year, as posed (correctly IMNSHO) by The Wall Street Journal in its headline and lede:

Republicans’ $4 Trillion Question: Should They Pay for Extending Trump Tax Cuts?

And

Republicans want to extend the Trump-era tax cuts that lapse after 2025. A big point of debate now: should they cover any or all of the $4 trillion cost—and how?

The terminology confusion is illustrated by the WSJ‘s change in wording from “pay for” in its headline to “cover” in its lede.

It’s long been my contention that it doesn’t cost the government anything to not get what doesn’t belong to it in the first place; there’s nothing for which government need pay. On the other hand, there’s the real world imbalance between tax collections and spending when the latter exceeds the former, as any grade schooler understands when he wants to spend more than his allowance will cover, whether he’s saved fractions of his allowance against an upcoming large expenditure or he’s spending as he gets. And, yes, the analogy is that direct.

There’s also the real world, empirically demonstrated, fact that within broad limits, the more money left in the hands of us average Americans and our businesses—the nation’s private economy—the more economic activity, now including government spending, there is overall, and from that increase, revenues to government, those tax collections, increase even in the face of reduced tax rates. The broad limit is the minimum of tax collections—the allowances we grant the government—needed to cover the constitutionally mandated spending requirements of paying the government’s debts, providing for an adequate national defense, and paying for the constitutionally defined items constituting the general Welfare.

Given the government’s current spending levels, that increased economic activity-driven increase in revenues to government won’t cover all of the government’s spending. That spending includes vast amounts of welfare spending. In the early days of our republic, we couldn’t afford any welfare spending, to the point that then-Congressman James Madison made a constitutional argument against helping Haitian refugees in the aftermath of an earthquake. From the Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 3rd Congress, 1st Session:

Mr Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity.  He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

The inability to identify the Article remains today, but that notwithstanding, our republic’s weal has improved to the point that we can, as a nation, afford a measure of welfare for our citizens (and for other nations, but that’s for another discussion). But not too much. The external threats to our nation have grown immensely, and so has the cost of our defending ourselves against them. Profligacy in spending, especially after WWII, has so far exceeded tax collections that our national debt has exploded, and the need to pay that down and then off, also has grown commensurately.

Spending outside those three constitutional mandates needs to be greatly cut back. There are three types of that extra spending that come to mind out of the myriad of them. These are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and infrastructure.

I’ve written before about those first two; I’ll only summarize here: privatize Social Security and Medicare, which will be deucedly expensive in the transition, but that cost will only get worse with delay—and doing nothing will itself result in a 25% cut in Social Security payout, anyway, within the next 10 years, and an even more severe cut in Medicaid, if after a longer delay. Medicaid transfers to each of the several States should be converted to block transfers on an annually declining basis until the block grants have bee eliminated altogether. Medicaid is after all, and as it should be, a State-run program.

Regarding infrastructure, all Federal transfers to the States should be on a matching basis, with the States required to make the first and then sustained moves: no money should flow from Federal coffers to a State until the State has let contracts with the builders; ground has been broken; and concrete, publicly measurable and assessable progress has been made in the building. The match itself should be no more than 50% of what the State has spent and subsequently spends in accordance with its contracted schedule, and those subsequent Federal transfers should flow only after the State has spent its own citizens’ tax remittances on the State’s contracted schedule.

None of that is possible, though, without clearing up that terminology confusion. As long as politicians think tax monies remitted to government are owed to and are the property of government, they’ll spend and tax without limit.