Civics 101 and turds in the sandbox
Quick review of government procedures for those of you who missed the 11th grade.
The Constitution provides for three co-equal branches of government, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary. If the President ignores Congressional subpoenas, rewrites laws with signing statements, ignores judicial decisions, and orders his Attorney General not to execute the laws of the country, we have a Constitutional problem.
If a rogue county District Attorney violates the law in the course of prosecuting a case, is forced to resign as a result, disbarred, convicted, and held liable for his actions in a court of law, not a Constitutional problem.
It's hard, but not impossible, to fathom the workings of a mind that would seek to conflate the two different issues, or consider prosecutorial malfeasance to be as grave a threat to the Republic as the attempt to establish a unitary executive. Is it a case of ego, of thinking that your own issues supercede that of the entire nation? Is it simply that, as a result of coming to age in a life of privilege, anything that forces the real world to intrude upon that privilege must be inflated to the greatest threat to our very way of life, evah?
Who can really know?
A 30 second Google search on "wrongful prosecution" will reveal hundreds, if not thousands of instances. "Wrongful conviction" will reveal many more. The very existence of the Innocence Project, and the success it's had in freeing those who might otherwise have spent the majority of their lives in prison, or even have been executed, for crimes they did not commit, speaks to the widespread nature of the problem, and belies the singular importance or uniqueness of any one case. This does not minimize the importance of holding prosecutors and police departments accountable for their actions, and requiring them to function within the law. But to equate any of these cases with the actions of the Executive Branch of the US government in ignoring its duties and covering up its own crimes is, in the final analysis, wrong.
Moving on to other stuff, i have to say i got tired of stepping in turds every time i went to play in the sandbox. So for the time being, i've disabled anonymous comments. This may or may not reduce the actual turd volume, but it will at least let people distinguish whose turds they're stepping in. You'll need to have a Blogger account, or an OpenID account to post a comment for the near future. And i really, really don't give a shit what anyone thinks about it.
Continue reading Civics 101 and turds in the sandbox
The Constitution provides for three co-equal branches of government, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary. If the President ignores Congressional subpoenas, rewrites laws with signing statements, ignores judicial decisions, and orders his Attorney General not to execute the laws of the country, we have a Constitutional problem.
If a rogue county District Attorney violates the law in the course of prosecuting a case, is forced to resign as a result, disbarred, convicted, and held liable for his actions in a court of law, not a Constitutional problem.
It's hard, but not impossible, to fathom the workings of a mind that would seek to conflate the two different issues, or consider prosecutorial malfeasance to be as grave a threat to the Republic as the attempt to establish a unitary executive. Is it a case of ego, of thinking that your own issues supercede that of the entire nation? Is it simply that, as a result of coming to age in a life of privilege, anything that forces the real world to intrude upon that privilege must be inflated to the greatest threat to our very way of life, evah?
Who can really know?
A 30 second Google search on "wrongful prosecution" will reveal hundreds, if not thousands of instances. "Wrongful conviction" will reveal many more. The very existence of the Innocence Project, and the success it's had in freeing those who might otherwise have spent the majority of their lives in prison, or even have been executed, for crimes they did not commit, speaks to the widespread nature of the problem, and belies the singular importance or uniqueness of any one case. This does not minimize the importance of holding prosecutors and police departments accountable for their actions, and requiring them to function within the law. But to equate any of these cases with the actions of the Executive Branch of the US government in ignoring its duties and covering up its own crimes is, in the final analysis, wrong.
Moving on to other stuff, i have to say i got tired of stepping in turds every time i went to play in the sandbox. So for the time being, i've disabled anonymous comments. This may or may not reduce the actual turd volume, but it will at least let people distinguish whose turds they're stepping in. You'll need to have a Blogger account, or an OpenID account to post a comment for the near future. And i really, really don't give a shit what anyone thinks about it.
Labels: Bush administration, Constitution, metablogging
Continue reading Civics 101 and turds in the sandbox
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11:09 PM
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