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?
Threaded Mode
