Archive for the ‘extortion’ Category
Laws are more important than constitutions, get it?
Watching proceedings from afar against Trump and his blundering bovver boys, I become more agitated than I probably need to, but I quite often find my frustration directed more at the prosecutors than at Trump’s mostly contemptible allies. For example, MSNBC commentators and many of their guests, not to mention Nancy Pelosi, are still claiming that the crime here is bribery, when it’s clearly extortion, which is generally considered a more serious crime.
So what’s the difference? It should be obvious. A bribe generally involves appealing to a person’s venality. It’s usually presented in positive terms, as in ‘I’ll make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice if you just do this dirty job for me’. Extortion however is presented in more menacingly negative terms – ‘if you don’t do this dirty job for me, you’ll really really regret it’. Now, it’s notable that the infamous phone call from Trump was relatively polite, which is why he’s trying to characterise it as ‘perfect’. After all, by his boorishly bullying standards, it probably was. The near-polite asking of a favour, then, might be characterised as a bribe, but what was happening behind the scenes, directed by Trump, was definitely extortionate. That’s why focussing on the phone call as the main incident is definitely a mistake, and that’s why Giuliani, Mulvaney and Trump himself need to testify, and should of course be made to, and jailed immediately if they refuse, as should happen in any nation worthy of respect.
But this would only happen if the matter was being dealt with in court – where of course it should be dealt with.
Americans are profoundly worshipful of their constitution and their founding fathers. Indeed they seem to have been fine, upstanding, as well as colourful fellows. It’s my view, though, that given current circumstances, they’d have been the first to realise that the constitutional provisions for dealing with a law-breaking, rogue President were wholly inadequate. This isn’t surprising – experience is the best teacher in these matters, and the US experience has been mostly of Presidents priding themselves on being ‘gentlemen’. This is the only silver lining of this presidency, that it has exposed manifold inadequacies of the constitutional presidency system.
Constitutions are guides to how governments are to be constituted. I don’t think the framers of this or any other constitution ever imagined that later followers would expect that it constituted the entire law under which the head of state operated. That, to me, is virtually proven by the vague and minimalist treatment of the legal liabilities of the President in the US Constitution. Surely the founding fathers took it for granted that the President would be subject to all the laws of the land that any other citizen would be subject to. How could it be otherwise for someone in leadership, someone expected to set an example? Even minor infractions would be seen as ‘the thin end of the wedge’, and generally this is the case under the Westminster system.
The worst argument that could possibly be given for the kind of immunity granted to the US President is that he’s too powerful to be charged with a crime. You might call this the Putin argument (or the Stalin, Ghengis Khan or Ramses II argument, or name your favourite dictator). The argument hasn’t improved over the last 3000 years.
USA – suffering for its own failure
The commentariat is divided, though perhaps not entirely on partisan lines, on the treatment of the American President.
It’s becoming clear that, in the USA and elsewhere, people are inhabiting their own social media bubbles. There’s no doubt this is a massive change. Twenty years ago, the term ‘social media’ didn’t exist. Today, when you walk down the street, or catch public transport, you will see people clutching their social media connection machine in their hands as if their life depended on it, and much of the time they’re fully engaged with it. I’m not sure that this social media world can be divided clearly on left/right political lines, but it’s fairly clearly affecting the political understanding of vast numbers of people.
The commentariat, however, more or less represent the intelligentsia, and we expect them to be less in thrall to social media. Yet the division is striking, even if, it seems, uneven. I may be biased, I’m not sure, but it seems to me that those disparaging and mocking, or claiming to be bored by the career diplomats testifying to their frustration and alarm regarding the covert operation to extort the Ukraine government, are in a minority, though a loud one. At the same time, the US President was smearing, via Twitter, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, as she was about to testify. As all the evidence shows, Yovanovitch was removed from her post by Trump, and threatened by him in a phone call to the Ukrainian President, saying ‘she’s going to go through some things’. The President described this phone call as ‘perfect’.
All of this is well known, as is the reason for Yovanovitch’s removal. She was a hindrance to the extortion plot.
So why isn’t the President in prison, as should and would occur in every reasonably regulated democratic country? The case is easy to prove, it is admitted by the culprit, and involves a number of first-hand witnesses. This morning I heard a member of the commentariat lay this all out in some detail, then lament that it’s ‘very unfortunate and appalling’, and so forth. And of course many others agreed. Their helplessness is sad, indeed tormenting, to behold.
The President should be held without bail, because of his known compulsion for witness tampering and intimidation, until the date of his trial, but of course this isn’t happening, not because the President is immune from prosecution while in office, but because – despite the massive opportunity for any holder of presidential office to pervert the course of justice – there is no clear law regarding how to treat a criminal President. That this is so, is damning. Waiting for that President to leave office is not a solution, as should be abundantly clear, even to a ten-year-old.
What continually astonishes outsiders like myself is that the commentariat within the USA seems perversely unaware of this failure in the US politico-legal system. With great power – and the power of the US president is, IMHO, far too great – must come great legal responsibility. It’s one of the many failings of the American presidential system that this is not made abundantly clear though black letter law, and plenty of it. Depending on the Constitution, brilliant and wondrous though it might be, is insufficient.