Article

2024-02-23 Government Corruption

[American Thinker] Imagine a crime committed right on the floor of the United States Senate. "Will my colleague from New York agree," asks the senator from California, "that at five o’clock next Saturday, we will shoot the president in the middle of Fifth Avenue?"

"I agree," replies the senator from New York. "To help us accomplish our end, I will now vote to disband the Secret Service."

After the senators commit criminal conspiracy live on C-SPAN -- that’s agreeing to a crime and taking one act to accomplish it -- nothing happens. Neither get so much as much as a ticket. That’s because the senators are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution under the Constitution.

The Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause provides that a congressman may not be put on trial for any "legislative act." Hence Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska could commit a grave felony in 1971 when he disclosed the top-secret Pentagon Papers. He did so at a hearing of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, so no prosecutor could touch him. Had he released the papers in the hallway outside the hearing room, he’d have been in handcuffs.

A president has it harder, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith. In the Justice Department’s prosecution of President Trump for contesting the 2020 election results, Smith argues that he may put Trump on trial for official presidential acts. All that’s required to arrest Trump, says Smith, is that just over half of a biased Washington, D.C., grand jury conclude that his words or deeds fall within the vague wording of a rarely charged criminal statute. In Smith’s telling, he may put a president on trial for standing in the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor to urge congressmen to vote against certifying an election -- but because voting is a legislative act, not the congressmen who stand three feet away and actually cast the votes as urged.

Smith admits that a president must be protected by at least a qualified immunity from criminal prosecution -- but he refuses to spell out exactly what that immunity is. Smith could propose an immunity covering only acts that double as political speech or petition or permitting prosecution only for clear crimes. Smith instead just swings his bat at a baseball he cannot see and declares a home run: whatever immunity a president has, he asserts, it cannot cover President Trump.

Posted by Besoeker 2024-02-23 05:30|| || Front Page|| [11130 views ] Top

#1

Smith is perverting Justice by clearly using politics as the reason for his efforts.

May he become Karma's top poster child for it.

Posted by NN2N1 2024-02-23 06:43|| 2024-02-23 06:43|| Front Page Top

#2 Brazil's political situation is worse. Lula is in cahoots with the top judge of their supreme court to keep his opponents at bay.

Posted by Shoth Gratch3103 2024-02-23 07:03|| 2024-02-23 07:03|| Front Page Top

/\ One might suspect, a system pattered after our own.

Posted by Besoeker 2024-02-23 07:09|| 2024-02-23 07:09|| Front Page Top

#4 One difference. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters just gave the Trump campaign the largest donation permissible by law for the first time since 2000 for a Republican candidate.

Jack should know, humility is a virtue.

Posted by Shoth Gratch3103 2024-02-23 07:43|| 2024-02-23 07:43|| Front Page Top

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