Govt & Election Reform Mega Thread

[TGHusker]

  

51 minutes ago, Archy1221 said:

Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz would disagree with you.  You’ve lost your credibility when you make specific claims about posters you refuse to source and back up.  

 

Turley doing the goal post dance  - say one thing talking about the Clinton impeachment and another on the Trump impeachment.

 

The Republicans’ Star Impeachment Scholar Is a Shameless Hack | The Nation

 

 

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Turley did not disappoint. He told Republicans what they wanted to hear right from his opening statement: “I’m concerned about lowering impeachment standard to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger. I believe this impeachment not only fails to satisfy the standard of past impeachments, but would create a dangerous precedent for future impeachments…. This would be the first impeachment in history where there would be considerable debate, and in my view, not compelling evidence, of the commission of a crime.”

Turley beclowned himself with his remarks, because this is not the first time Jonathan Turley has testified about impeachment. In 1998, testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment hearing, Turley said, “No matter how you feel about President Clinton, no matter how you feel about the independent counsel, by his own conduct, he has deprived himself of the perceived legitimacy to govern. You need both political and legal legitimacy to govern this nation, because the President must be able to demand an absolute sacrifice from the public at a moment’s notice.”

It’s impossible to explain the shameless hypocrisy of Turley’s conflicting statements without concluding that his testimony, in both hearings, was offered in bad faith. Can Turley really expect us to believe that he would support impeachment if Trump lied about what he got on Volodymyr Zelensky’s blue dress, but would also support Bill Clinton’s right to extort a foreign power to influence an American election? Turley can’t square his Trump testimony with his Clinton testimony; all he can hope for is that people are too polite to call him a hypocrite to his face.

 

 

 

Dershowitz, seems to be more of a high priced celebrity lawyer - more interested in helping slimy people get out of trouble then an interest in constitutional law especially as it pertains to the  impeachment. 

Quote

 

Alan Dershowitz - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dershowitz

Alan Morton Dershowitz is an American lawyer known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law. He taught at Harvard Law School from 1964 through 2013, where he was appointed as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993. Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst. Dershowitz is known for taking on high-profile and often unpopular causes and clients. As of 2009, he had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer. Dershowitz has represented celebrity clients including Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Julian Assange, and Jim Bakker. Major legal victories have included two successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976, followed by Claus von Bülow in 1984 who had been convicted for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the O. J. Simpson murder trial, part of the legal "Dream Team", alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. Dershowitz was a member of the defense team for Harvey Weinstein in 2018 and for the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in 2020. He was a member of the legal defense team for Jeffrey Epstein and helped to negotiate a 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein's behalf. He was later accused of rape by one of Epstein's underage victims in a sworn affidavit and in the Netflix documentary, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which resulted in a lawsuit and his own counter lawsuit. Dershowitz is the author of several books about politics and the law, including Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (1985), the basis of the 1990 film; Chutzpah (1991); Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case (1996); The Case for Israel (2003); and The Case for Peace (2005). His two most recent works are: The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018) and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019). An ardent Zionist and supporter of Israel, he has written several books on the Arab–Israeli conflict.

 

 

In the below OPED, Jonathan Turley disagrees wt Dershowitz - who moves the goal post when talking about Clinton vs Trump impeachments:

 

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Mr. Dershowitz, an ardent civil libertarian, has been a criminal defense lawyer throughout his long and distinguished career. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is not exactly a poster child for the A.C.L.U.: Remember his advice to police officers dealing with criminal suspects? “Please don’t be too nice.”

Two months before President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings began in 1998, Larry King asked Mr. Dershowitz whether he agrees that “some of the most grievous offenses against our constitutional form of government may not entail violations of the criminal law.”

 

“I do,” he answered. If those offenses “subvert the very essence of democracy.”

In the same interview, Mr. Dershowitz also said: “It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty. You don’t need a technical crime. We look at their acts of state. We look at how they conduct the foreign policy. We look at whether they try to subvert the Constitution.”

But on Sunday, Mr. Dershowitz was acting as one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers when he said to George Stephanopoulos that abusive or obstructive conduct is not impeachable and that an “actual crime” is required. And although the evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump has committed crimes, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that, unless those crimes are explicitly stated in articles of impeachment, they cannot lead to Mr. Trump’s removal from office.

Mr. Dershowitz said that he was defending Mr. Trump to protect the Constitution, but serious constitutional scholars didn’t buy his argument. Another of my former professors, the constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe, responded with an op-ed essay in The Washington Post. “The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts on the subject,” he wrote. “There is no evidence that the phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ was understood in the 1780s to mean indictable crimes.”

 

Mr. Tribe likewise debunked Mr. Dershowitz’s argument that the president could not be impeached for “abuse of power,” noting, “No serious constitutional scholar has ever agreed with it.” Among those scholars is the Republicans’ designated constitutional law expert, Jonathan Turley. He testified before the House Judiciary Committee that impeachment could result from conduct that was not technically a criminal act.

Mr. Dershowitz is an expert on civil liberties and criminal law and procedure, not constitutional law generally. Facing widespread criticism and trying to reconcile his 1998 statements with his new position, he now says that Congress doesn’t need a “technical crime” to impeach, but there must be “criminal-like” conduct, or conduct “akin to treason and bribery.” To the extent his earlier statement “suggested the opposite,” he retracts it.

Such sophistry might be rhetorically pleasing to Mr. Dershowitz, but his 1998 view is still the correct one. And the articles of impeachment against the president plainly satisfy Mr. Dershowitz’s newest standard too.

In his 1995 introduction to a new printing of Clarence Darrow’s autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” Mr. Dershowitz offered this advice to young lawyers: “The lawyer may not become part of the corruption in order to fight for justice.”

I’m not suggesting that Mr. Dershowitz is corrupt. But he doesn’t seem to be protecting the Constitution or fighting for anything that looks like justice.

Steven J. Harper (@StevenJHarper1) is a lawyer, an adjunct professor at Northwestern University Law School and the author of “Crossing Hoffa: A Teamster’s Story" and “The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis.”

 

 

Opinion | Why Did Alan Dershowitz Say Yes to Trump? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

[RedDenver]

1 hour ago, Dr. Strangelove said:

I would probably be on board with all of these suggestions. However, I'm unsure how I feel about district lines at all. I think proportional Representation for each state reduces future risk of extreme partisanship taking hold. 

I'd be ok with proportional representation as well.

[BigRedBuster]

I just don’t understand America’s love of pumping more and more money into the military. 
 

 

[DevoHusker]

 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[RedDenver]

Insider trading by politicians should be made illegal:

 

[Archy1221]

1 hour ago, RedDenver said:

Insider trading by politicians should be made illegal:

 

Agreed.  Would not be opposed to him getting the boot from Senate if this happened. 

[knapplc]

I feel like this is a harbinger of the end of American democracy.

 

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[BigRedBuster]

 

[BigRedBuster]

So much of the problem. 
 

 

[knapplc]

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

I can pretty much agree with this list.

 

 

[RedDenver]

 

[funhusker]

On 11/30/2021 at 11:20 AM, BigRedBuster said:

I can pretty much agree with this list.

 

 

Go figure...

 

The most hyper-partisan are the worst.

 

Now if only American voters would stand up to the "theatre".