Quote:
|
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.
|
The fact that you are making this argument quite frankly demonstrates that you have no legal training. It doesn't reverse the law. It just clarifies what the hell the law says. Look at all the statutes you quoted. Can you even pretend that those are written in plain English? They have all kinds of terms of art in there, and any English professor is going to throw up their hands in despair halfway through reading them. It's up to the court system to make sense of it, and judges both conservative and liberal have all said for over 50 years that political horse trading is fine. And yes, as much as some would like to pretend otherwise, court rulings are part of the law. This is Legal Theory 101. Judges do make law. That is what it means to have a common law legal system such as we have in the United States: a precedent set by a previous court ruling is binding upon all future court rulings even if the judge might personally disagree with it. You have a problem with that? Change the legal system to a Civil Law system like they have in France or Hong Kong. I might even join you. But this is the way our legal system works. Any lawyer will tell you the same thing. Go ahead and ask one.
Quote:
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?"
|
Do I think it's acceptable? Yes. I don't think it's ideal, I don't think it's great, and I don't think it's the absolute best way to govern if the world was a simulation run on my computer. But I think it's acceptable. You keep trying to dismiss my real world cases and examples because they don't fit your perfect ethical world view, but here's the thing: those are the real world. I live in the real world. This kind of horse trading has happened in every form of representative government that has ever existed and many governments that weren't representative as well. We've done fine with it so far. If you want to get worked up into such a blustery high dudgeon about it, I suggest you go indict the corpse of Ronald Reagan.
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.