Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
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I love the assumption that offering a position with no pay (even if that is true) means it has no value. Lets look that the flawed reasoning behind that: Someone is offered "A" in return for "B". If "A" has no value, why would the offering party expect to receive "B" in return? Because this was an exchange, "A" must inherently have value or else the proposal would have never come to pass and the offering party would have simply asked for "B" without offering anything. Now I'm not one of the people intoning such exaggerated consequences as impeachment, but this was tampering and a significant abuse of power, and if everything went down the way its been explained so far there should be consequences. My suggestion would be the resignation of Rahm Emanuel, who is am embarrassment to the white house as it is. His resignation alone would improve bipartisanship. |
Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
Oh come on, Strangler. You don't really think anything Obama could do up to and including the firing of Rahm Emanuel would improve bipartisanship at this point, do you? The GOP is a rump party for a reason.
And I know that the White House nominally said that they support Specter, but that was some pretty weak support they were throwing his way. Joe Biden couldn't even be bothered to give an endorsement speech when he was traveling through Pennsylvania. Oh and by the way, the very worst reading possible of what we know is that the White House may have offered Joe Sestak a position in the administration in order to get him to drop his primary campaign against Specter because the Hatch Act prohibits someone from being a member of the executive branch and also being a candidate for office. Accepting that all to be true, I'm very hard pressed to see where the outrageous abuse of executive power is here. Do you really think Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter and everybody all the way back to LBJ has never struck a deal like this? It's not even illegal. Some people have tried to cite 18 USC 595 as a statute saying this is illegal bribery, but the case law just doesn't back them up and I have not seen any legal professional saying that it does. |
Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
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Even if if doesn't improve bipartisanship, that doesn't mean that he shouldn't face consequences for unethical and very possibly illegal behavior. Quote:
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1) Lets also look at 18 USC 211 Quote:
The spirit of the law is obliterated and ethics are out the window, but yes, the letter of the law has been observed. If that's good enough for, God bless you. I think Socrates just threw up in his grave a little. But wait! There's MORE! 2) You are missing 18 USC 600 on that list Quote:
But even all of this skirts the issue: The administration offered compensation so that they could affect the outcome of an election. Even in the unlikely event that this did not violate any laws, the severity of the offense to ethics and democracy in general cannot be stated. Its hard enough getting good candidates to run in a two party system... we don't need the White House fudging things even more. All of this has just begun. It will be interesting to see what else is dug up on this case, and since Rahm is involved, there is probably a LOT of dirt to uncover. |
Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
You were advocating about how the letter of the law had to be followed in the manga porn guy thread.
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Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
Look, Strangler, you can't just quote a law and say, "There! That describes the situation we're talking about so it's illegal!" That's not how our legal system works. Those statutes are so vaguely written that technically I could be prosecuted for getting a job in a Congressman's office after volunteering on his campaign. After all, I received "employment" and "compensation" for a "political activity." But that's not how you interpret statutes, and in fact you and I are not the ones who decide how statutes are interpreted. There's a reason we pay highly trained experts to interpret statutes for us. You have the text of the law and then you have the interpretation of the law as provided by the courts. USC 600, for example, has been around since 1948. If it really is applicable to this situation as you claim, there should be hundreds of cases where it is interpreted that way by now, but the case law doesn't back you up. The courts have always treated this sort of thing as "politics as usual" and prosecutors have never batted an eye at it. So unless you can show me case law where somebody is prosecuted under the statutes you cite, there's nothing to this scandal.
I guess this kind of deal removes us from an idealized, perfectly functioning, 100% efficient democracy that we never had in our entire history. I'm not going to weep about the fact that our republican form of government involves some horse trading. And by the way, the chief White House ethics officer under George W. Bush thinks there's no scandal here. He points out that the position wouldn't even have prevented Sestak from running for office under the Hatch Act. Sestak could have taken the advisory position and then kept right on running for Senate. Bush's Attorney General also thinks trying to apply the statute (the article doesn't say which one) to this situation would be "a stretch". So cite me some legal authority, one that doesn't have a political agenda, which says this is illegal. |
Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
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Xantar: If case law essentially reverses the law itself, then what is the point of making laws? At that point, aren't judges just making shit up as they go? I have a hard time believing that after reading 18 USC 600 that no law was broken. If our legal system can be that backwards, there is a serious problem. In any case, the legalities of this are far less damning to me than the ethical violations. Natural law is not the same as human law, nor should it be. Law does not equal ethics, and the minute we use the legal system to judge whether or not an action was ethical is the minute our society crumbles. This entire escapade is utterly unethical and is tampering whether you would like to turn the other cheek or not. A bribe was offered from the White House to alter a political campaign. Your argument in defense of the White House is STILL "hey, I think they did it, so its ok" or "this guy says its ok so its ok". Stop referring to other people to make judgements for you. Look at what happened. The important question is "Do you think this type of behavior is acceptable from our highest public officals or not, or not?" |
Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
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And it's not a phenomenon we can really get rid of either. In fact, you could argue that we shouldn't completely prohibit it. Governor Jim Huntsman of Colorado was appointed to be Ambassador to China. Yeah, it so happens that he was talked about as a Republican Presidential contender in 2012 and he got taken out of the running by this appointment. But he is also a hugely successful businessman who worked as a missionary in China when he was younger and is fluent in Mandarin. I honestly can't think of a better person for the job. It would be ludicrously naive to think that political considerations had nothing to do with his appointment, but we got a politically savvy, economically knowledgeable and well-qualified ambassador to China out of the bargain. Yes, I think that's perfectly acceptable. |
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My tolerance for the underside of politics has worn considerably. I am done supporting or defending this type of nonsense from any party. The political process to be for those that are represented, not to continue a machine whose only ethical defense is "but its what we've always done." Oh, and in case anyone simply thinks I'm being a partisan hack, I am no longer a Republican or a Conservative (listening to that obnoxious theocrat Santorum cured me of that disease). The best way to describe my current political ideology would be Constitutional Libertarian, I guess. |
Re: Bill Clinton Bribes Sestak?
Oh, and apparently Romanoff (Colorado) was offered his choice of a series of positions off of the political a la carte menu..
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32417684/M...Romanoff-Email "Um, do fries come with the Director, U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) or the Deputy Assistant Administrator for Latin America and Caribbean, USAID? Oh, to hell with the diet... I'll have the Director, Office of Democracy and Governance, USAID." Sounds democratically DELICIOUS! YAY ETHICS! |
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