Indicting the President

Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for the ability to indict a sitting President for criminal activity, and promised, if elected, to appoint officials to the Justice Department who would reverse existing policy, which holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Allow me to explain why these are bad ideas.

The primary problem is that they open the door to the criminalization of politics. Alan Dershowitz explained the pattern two years ago.

It is deliberately hard to impeach a president. The Constitution grants to the Senate the power to try all impeachments, and requires a two-thirds majority to convict. Only two presidents have been impeached and brought to trial, and neither was convicted. Three articles of impeachment were recommended by the House Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon, but he resigned before the House could vote on them.

Impeachment is a political process, but is only for extraordinary political use. Merely having a policy difference with the president is not a reason to pursue impeachment.

In nations with sham democracies, such as Venezuela, criminalization of politics is a well-tried and proven tactic for governing strongmen to use on their opponents. In April of this year, allies of President Nicolas Maduro proposed government action to strip opposition leader Juan Guaidó of his parliamentary immunity.

In the Ukraine, after Viktor Yanukovych took power in 2010 elections, his government systematically pursued his predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko, claiming a wide array of charges. The Yanukovych government also went after Tymoshenko allies, including her attorney. Tymoshenko was found guilty of abusing her office and sent to prison in 2011. The Yanukovych government hired Paul Manafort to run the international public relations offensive against Tymoshenko. After Yanukovych was forced out of power in 2014, Tymoshenko was released and the case against her was voided by the Ukrainian Supreme Court.

We don’t want those sorts of shenanigans going on here. The remedy for criminal behavior by a President, as provided in the Constitution, is impeachment. The Constitution is clear that “high crimes” are grounds for impeachment.

The country is sharply divided, and that division will be made worse by people who ignore process in pursuit of the outcome they want. I have already discussed the problems with centering the case against Donald Trump on obstruction of justice.

In two important cases from the 1980s, the Supreme Court has struck down provisions by which Congress can implement a legislative veto of Presidential actions. Maybe now Congress would like to be more clear about the powers it delegates in its laws. The Supreme Court has closed off the avenue of granting wide powers and then armchair quarterbacking how the President uses them.

Whether legislators believe that Trump has committed high crimes or simply demonstrated misfeasance, they have a potential remedy available to them. Yes, they had better be sure that they take the public along with them. Opening up the possibilities for criminalization of politics is not only unnecessary, but dangerous.

 

Poverty and Infrastructure

Bill Gates is making the rounds again, promoting the initiatives of the charity he and his wife run to fight poverty in Africa. In an interview with Chris Wallace, Gates correctly identifies raising agricultural productivity as a key success factor in a nation’s effort to escape poverty, but he also asserts the importance of building infrastructure.

Also this week, a tsunami struck the Sunda Strait, which separates the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java, killing over 300. We learned that the early warning system has not been properly operational since 2012, due to “vandalism, lack of funds, technical faults.”

The two stories are related. The Indonesian early warning system is a species of infrastructure. I am not hearing anyone calling Indonesia a failed state, yet the country was unable to prevent people from plundering the early warning system.

A nation whose government is not sufficiently strong to keep people from looting its infrastructure projects can’t have them. No one in his right mind would build public works just to have people trash them.

A nation whose government is sufficiently strong to keep people from looting its infrastructure projects will become tyrannical unless the people can assert accountability and force the government to obey its own laws. The Soviet Union was an outstanding example of this degenerate form. Thus, before investment in infrastructure makes any sense, the nation has to work out its own political system.

Consider Britain in 1642. There wasn’t a whole lot of public infrastructure around, and most of what existed was some form of prison: Newgate and the Tower of London were two examples. British political life developed in the most advantageous order. They fought a destructive civil war early, establishing that the king was under the law and accountable to Parliament. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the British were well positioned both to invest in agricultural productivity and to build infrastructure projects and expect them to be respected and maintained.

Building public infrastructure is unworkable in a nation that cannot prevent the government or the people from looting it. It is a fools errand that accomplishes nothing.

Smoke Detectors Made Difficult

When the smoke detector battery starts to fail, the smoke detector starts beeping very loudly. This can interfere with your ability to sleep. The manufacturer intended that.

Evidently, the previous owners of the house confronted this issue. They weren’t always good at getting the smoke detector down in such a way as to be able to get it back up as designed. No worries: Glue it back up. By the time the battery wears down again, we will have sold the house and it will be the new owners’ problem how to get in there and change the battery.

Superglue tab A into slot B. It will stay attached after that.

I know that they encountered the issue before. The house has about ten smoke detectors. I found one upstairs that was badly taped to the mounting fixture.

The purpose of this post is to express my gratitude for their forethought.