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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

We need to amend the Constitution to strike pardon power and give the Congress the power to pass property taxes (aka wealth taxes) and regulate donations to campaigns, candidates, parties and partisan causes.

We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.

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> a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS.

This is my only significant disagreement with you. This should be two justices:

1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term

2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice.

> 1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term 2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice

I like No. 1.

No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering retirements in the way Art. 1 § 3 cl. 2 staggers the Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some dirty tricks.

In every country that regularly prosecutes elected officials, it becomes a political weapon that ultimately destabilizes the country.

Wow, maybe the republicans should have considered the consequences before letting the Trump administration weaponize the DOJ.

They didn’t, and they own the consequences.

This is an observation about the world in general, not U.S. politics specifically. Prosecuting elected officials basically means that you trust the bureaucracy more than voters. This has not proven to be a successful approach.

We have been very lucky in the U.S. to avoid these problems. And it's not because nobody before Trump ever did anything rising to the level of paying off a porn star and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we have had a taboo against prosecuting politicians.

> And it's not because nobody before Trump ever did anything rising to the level of paying off a porn star and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we have had a taboo against prosecuting politicians.

Are you somehow under the impression that is the actual complaint about illegal behavior and weaponization of the government? You won't be able to contribute meaningfully to this discussion if you insist on pretending that the hush money payment is the limit of the criminality being discussed here.

Please go do some research into the recent actions of the DoJ before trying to defend them like this, irrelevant whataboutisms will not move this conversation forward.

> every country that regularly prosecutes elected officials

The bar should be high. We’ve set it impossibly high. In terms of instability risk, corruption is currently causing runaway prosecutions.

You can't police that. The only thing you can reliably do is allocate power. If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote for. This power gets abused in virtually every country where it's normalized.

The safeguards within the justice system are appropriate for prosecuting individuals. They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.

If you don't believe that, then consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose. Except only Texas courts and prosecutors have jurisdiction.

> If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote for

Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.

> consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose

Literally the current DoJ and FBI.

> Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.

Courts are designed to make decisions about individual cases, not ones that affect the trajectory of the whole country. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.

> Literally the current DoJ and FBI

Not even close. I don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool. AOC’s district is MAGA by comparison at 33% Trump voters.

The DoJ is literally run by trump’s personal lawyer. You can play this game where you pretend it’s all the same but the rest of us have eyes too.

The DOJ has thousands of lawyers, almost all of whom are are the most ideological kind of democrats.[1] Law is a very specialized field that attracts a very narrow, highly unrepresentative slice of the population. Normally this is fine because the DOJ’s work doesn’t have much of a political valance.

[1] Every DOJ person I know is a great lawyer, phenomenal at their job, and the most upstanding, orderly, conscientious type of American. But they can’t be trusted with that much power over politics. It’s like how you can’t give the One Ring to Gandalf. You have to give it to the Hobbits.

And? Is "people [allegedly] have different political views than me" supposed to be equivalent to "this is the personal defense lawyer for POTUS?"

Re your analogy: the power is with Hobbits. We call them grand and petit juries.

You can’t give such an ideologically homogenous group of people that much power over elections and candidates. People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively.

You’re getting closer with juries. But the DC jury pool is extremely skewed. Its like Aragorn trying to get a fair trial in Mordor District Court.

> can’t give such an ideologically homogenous group of people that much power over elections and candidates

Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.

The solution is something more flexible than we have now, but still with a high bar. The check is the courts. America didn’t fall apart when Bob Menendez went to jail.

> People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively

We don’t need them to. Prosecutorial discretion means anyone can charged with anything. The test is whether it sticks. (The FBI already has, and has already abused, the powers you’re concerned about.)

Nobody is suggesting prosecutors be allowed to unilaterally jail politicians. If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.

> Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.

Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession. That’s a solution worse than the problem.

> If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.

You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.

> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.

Then it sounds like you need to amend the Constitution. Because that's how our system works. You are indicted by a grand jury in the jurisdiction in which you are accused of a crime and then you are put in front of a petit jury. Both sides agree on who the jury is.

I'm struggling to understand the alternative system you're imagining.

> Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession

“Make corruption cases easier to bring” is “institutional capture of elections”? What?

> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction

If your only issue is with the jury pool, don’t give DC special jurisdiction. A Senator from Montana should be tried there.

It also seems like you’ve forgotten about appeals.

> to make such consequential decisions for the whole country

We have an election system that’s corrupted by social media, money and the electoral college. That means smaller groups of unaccountable people already make consequential decisions for the whole country.

The folks on January 6th were idiots. But they believed they were saving their republic. A lot more people, today, believe we’re at a precipice of losing it due to corruption.

So yeah, if not a jury it could be something more extreme. (At a certain point, not today but not la-la land, it needs to be.) A state or district electing corrupt fuckwits endangers us all—the folks pushing for decertifying elections for shits and giggles set the precedent for this anyway.

As expected, you ignore the actual complaint and just draw specious comparisons, making unsubstantiated claims that "most" of the people at the DoJ are totally democrats, trust me dude.

I'll just leave this here, since this was the actual complaint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche

The comparison was between the current “DOJ” and the Texas AG’s Office. Not just the guy in charge, the whole agency. No matter who you put in charge, an agency of 10,000 lawyers who are overwhelmingly democrats is going to be very different in terms of partisan behavior than the Texas AG’s office.

As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about political donations at federal agencies is public.

>> The DoJ is literally run by trump’s personal lawyer. <<

> As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about political donations at federal agencies is public.

I'm sure many of the rank-and-file at the DOJ DO donate to democrats these days, after all the republican party has demonstrated rank criminality across the last ~ 15 years, which is only getting worse. Anyone at the DOJ who still cares about criminal justice and the rule of law is going to likely support the only remaining party that isn't bending the knee to criminals and con men.

It still doesn't change my original criticism - that the DOJ is run by Trump's personal lawyer - and it doesn't make your whataboutism suddenly relevant.

https://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/governmental_legislativ...

> It’s simply the wrong tool for the job

It’s all we’ve got. Hand waving away corruption when we’ve got destabilizing quantities of it today is unsustainable.

> don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool

Which is the judiciary (broadly) protecting us from rogue prosecutors.

The alternative being that a criminal can have perma-immunity by simply running for office or getting elected?

> They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.

Right, they're set up to ascertain guilt of a crime. Why is it or should it be their concern if people want to vote for that person or if that person has political aspirations?

You're advocating for criminal law to simply not apply to some people. That is fucking insane.

The idea that American voters are a check on corrupt officials is dead on the side of the road.

If American voters think the stakes are high enough to overlook corruption, isn’t that their prerogative? Voters are the source of truth in a democracy.

No, that's why there's nowhere in any legal code in the US that "running for office makes you immune to criminal charges."

These are two completely distinct systems. By design.

I remember that you are a foreigner (from some corrupt third world county if I recall?) with a limited understanding of American legal history and political culture, but the idea that voters simply get to decide who is a criminal or not is flatly contrary to America's culture.

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