VDH on Collapsing Legal Protections

This is another article on the rampant corruption and unfairness attendant to the multiple lawfare attacks on a certain Republican presidential candidate, but it's by VDH and has his usual care. I think he raises some very important issues, especially his first three points: the vacating of statutes of limitations in virtual bills of attainder; violations of the Bill of Rights being allowed and entertained -- even encouraged -- by the courts; and what he calls "the invention of crimes," which I have described here as "very novel legal theories" about what exactly the crimes are supposed to have been.

It's likely as not that these failures of our normal legal protections will end up hurting the rest of us too. It probably won't be the case that these weapons are cast aside once they've been used against their intended victim. If they prove powerful, those interested in power will continue to want them.

4 comments:

Gringo said...

and what he calls "the invention of crimes,"
Which reminds me of that famous quote from Beria, Stalin's last secret police(NKVD?) chief: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

Dad29 said...

those interested in power will continue to want them.

And those who resist their power will escalate their resistance.

Anonymous said...

To say its unprecedented and dangerous is to devalue the meaning of the words.

No victim, out of date statutes, ex-convicts and sex workers presented by government prosecutors as unimpeachable star witnesses, a judge threatening to jail the defendant if he protests in public the unjustifiable nonsense of it all even as the Alinsky Nuuuz reporters opine and print every word of it.

So the only person deprived of their right to freedom of speech is the defendant. Pure Soviet.
nmewn

ErisGuy said...

Why have by the thousands lawyers suddenly abandoned centuries of legal tradition, by the millions people abandoned traditions about family, by the thousands economists abandoned centuries of scholarship, by the hundreds of thousands scholars threw aside the culture and object of their scholarship… None of this knowledge, scholarship, or tradition has been refuted. It has been abandoned.

Despite warnings, millions persist (“she persisted”) in following their harmful and destructive ideologies.

What do I hear in response? Poetry: “The Gods of Copybook Headings….” Comedy: “I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.” And hate: “racist, sexist, fascist, breeder, homo/trans phobe, etc..”

The chaos of the Hellenistic era or the fall of the Roman Empire or war Thucydides wrote about has returned.

I wondered “why did the Catholic Church choose as priests men who obviously had no interest in Catholicism?” But this can be extended to America, too: we are ruled by people who have no interest in the scholarship and traditions that made America. And yet in both cases the enemies within are graduates of the schools whose purpose it was to perpetuate those teachings.

I’m told “you can’t vote your way out of socialism.” We can’t vote our way out of any of this.