Sentence first, verdict afterwards

When even Slate has given up on impeachment, you know it's dire. This article jams in just about every stale metaphor we have to describe a boring exercise: clown car, muddying the question, summer rerun season, miring in a sloppy fight, confusing mishmash, food fight, circus, boxes checked, hoops jumped through. My favorite line, though, is
Compared with the staid and productive fact-finding work conducted by the House Intelligence Committee over the past few weeks, this hearing will almost certainly be a disaster.
"Staid and productive fact-finding work." The author is being kind, but it's also damning with faint praise.

I take it back. My real favorite is the Republican complaint that Nadler plans to give the jury instructions before the evidence. That one's actually good, like the Red Queen declaring "Sentence first--verdict afterwards."

The article also bemoans Nadler's probable unwillingness to improve matters by simply gaveling Republicans into silence.  And maybe his stated intention of wearing a big red clown nose with a kangaroo suit.

4 comments:

Cassandra said...

Tex, if you haven't seen it - this video of Turley's closing is amazing. Too many wonderful lines to excerpt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcoc6Y4Iusc&feature=emb_logo

He also release a pdf of his entire testimony this morning at his blog. Well worth the time to read:

https://jonathanturley.org/2019/12/04/turley-testifies-at-trump-impeachment-hearing/

Texan99 said...

"The wind that would blow then" speech has been on my mind since this travesty began so long ago.

Cassandra said...

I loved these lines:

In this age of rage, many are appealing for us to simply put the law aside and “just do it” like this is some impulse-buy Nike sneaker. You can certainly do that. You can declare the definitions of crimes alleged are immaterial and this is an exercise of politics, not law. However, the legal definitions and standards that I have addressed in my testimony are the very thing dividing rage from reason.

This is a nuanced point, but very worth making. McCarthy argues that impeachment is political, not legal. And that's a good point. On the otter heiny, the reason due process is build into our legal code is to preserve the legitimacy of the courts and constrain fallible/biased human beings to treat others as they would be treated.

Can you imagine the Dems being OK with the process they are ramming down our throats? Are these the standards by which they would wish to be judged?

Also this, which I believe got lost when he cut short his closing:

To return to Wordsworth, the Constitution is not a call to arms for the “Happy Warriors.” The Constitution calls for circumspection, not celebration, at the prospect of the removal of an American president. It is easy to allow one’s “judgment [to be] affected by your moral approval of the lines” in an impeachment narrative. But your oath demands more, even personal and political sacrifice, in deciding whether to impeach a president for only the third time in the history of this Republic.

Cassandra said...

The Wordsworth allusion is to this, from Turley's opening:

Before I address these questions, I would like to make one last cautionary observation regarding the current political atmosphere. In his poem “The Happy Warrior,” William Wordsworth paid homage to Lord Horatio Nelson, a famous admiral and hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Wordsworth began by asking “Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he what every man in arms should wish to be?” The poem captured the deep public sentiment felt by Nelson’s passing and one reader sent Wordsworth a gushing letter proclaiming his love for the poem. Surprisingly, Wordsworth sent back an admonishing response. He told the reader “you are mistaken; your judgment is affected by your moral approval of the lines.”8 Wordsworth’s point was that it was not his poem that the reader loved, but its subject. My point is only this: it is easy to fall in love with lines that appeal to one’s moral approval. In impeachments, one’s feeling about the subject can distort one’s judgment on the true meaning or quality of an argument. We have too many happy warriors in this impeachment on both sides. What we need are more objective noncombatants, members willing to set aside political passion in favor of constitutional circumspection.