Tag Archives: rights

“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’.

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.)

The Contempt of the Left

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden says it’s time to start censoring private enterprise eliminate protections for tech platforms that publish user posts [emphasis added].

“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one,” Biden said in the interview, which was published on Friday.
The law, which was enacted in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act, gives websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter broad legal immunity—essentially, it eliminates the possibility of legal consequences over what their users post. The statute was created to protect free speech on the internet.

Biden went further:

…we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy[.]

This is just more of Progressive-Democrats “be like Europe” sewage.

Biden did more:

[The Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But [Zuckerberg] can….

This…foolishness…is a deliberately false analogy. Facebook isn’t originating content like [The Times] does. A more honest, albeit equally loose, analogy would be to liken Facebook to the distributor of editions of [The Times].  Maybe Biden wants newsstands, or the neighborhood paperboy, censored as responsible for [The Times]’s content.

It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false….

This is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us average Americans. We’re just too grindingly stupid, Biden and his fellows insist, to discriminate for ourselves among the false, the erroneous, the satire, the foolish, the uncomfortably true, the simply true, etc. Our Know Betters have to do that for us.

There’s much over which to criticize Facebook, but government censoring free speech isn’t on that list.

Security Considerations

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is building a massive central database in order to facilitate regulators’ market surveillance, and they’re forcing all brokerages to sign contracts to connect their systems to this Consolidated Audit Trail.

Proponents say the CAT will help regulators make sense of complex US financial markets, by putting data from disparate markets in one place and pinning down the time of each trade to the millisecond. … When complete, it is expected to ingest more than 58 billion records a day to become the world’s largest repository of stock-trading data.

Brokers and the ACLU both object vehemently to the requirement. The ACLU says,

We are concerned that the CAT will pose significant risks to the privacy of millions of investors….

because

the project for plans to store the personal data, such as Social Security numbers and birth dates, of individuals behind stock trades.

Of course, this just provides a convenient site for the government to peruse, at whim, the personal data of any one or group of us. Government, though has no need of these data and no right of access to these data absent search warrants issued solely on

probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But it’s more than that. Stipulate that explicitly personal data won’t be collected, after all, that only those stock trades and timing data would be collected.

It’s not enough.

It’s like these guys have never heard of OPSEC or COMSEC.

This is a move aimed solely at the personal convenience of bureaucrats, which makes it useless as well as dangerous.