If on the grounds of an anonymous witness (meaning testimony cant be verified) an elected president is removed, I don’t know what else you call that but a coup.
Questions from thereon range from the unaskable to the unanswerable.
The age of Aquarius upon us.
war style
Carlyle
When you create and enforce laws; that is a court. This impeachment “inquiry”, is a court. You can’t weasel out of it.
And to base prosecutions on Anonymous accusers, is Unjust, Immoral, and Unethical. While I believe Anonymity should be protected in most cases, absolutely NOT in the case of Impeachment of the President of the United States, and absolutely NOT when such an allegation comes to publicly, duly and fairly elected Government Officers. Because, then, “anonymous” sources, at random, can be used as pawns as false and unprovable allegations, to smear any candidate, at anytime, for anything. This is a direct refutation of Democratic AND Republican values. Completely Unjust.
And Unconstitutional, since Anonymity is no guarantee and no “Right” automatically afforded, nor should it be.
If you want to accuse powerful people of powerful crimes, then you need to man-up and do so publicly. “Fear of Retaliation” does not apply when it comes to the very core of Government institution itself. It doesn’t matter how “corrupt” the Government could be, a President could be, etc. The PEOPLE have a right to know the nature and source of allegations that lead to the overthrow of DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED officials. Because then the anonymous accusation is a violation of democracy-itself.
The fact that people would tolerate such a spooky procedure to attack their president shows how oblivious people are to their own disdain for the law. It is very deeply seated, this Off switch for civilization - they don’t notice when its being switched.
This is what we are up against - people who don’t know what they are doing. Who would, if they were to put 1 and 1 together, be in shock and reverse their course.
That is why it’s more a question of wether this court of public opinion can weigh evidence, which concerns opinion based facts regarding levels of intelligence procurence and judgement.
I consider it a severe attack against the core and foundation, the Constitution, Law, and Democracy of USA.
I believe it’s time for the ‘Center’ to move. The fact that the Liberal-Left and “Democrats” feel that they are entitled to do this, or “see nothing wrong” as Carleas and PK state, is further evidence of severity of the situation. That amount of self-righteousness is blinding, meaning, this is new and dangerous territory. The ramifications are already set, just a matter of discovering their severity. The further attacks on Free Speech, on the side-lines, are the other ominous sign of the next era to come. I consider that, now more than ever, Free Speech and the First Amendment are specifically being attacked by the corrupt “Deep” State, or in otherwords, those Self-Righteous, feeling ‘invincible’ and immune from scrutiny, by the system they-themselves setup, that now those attacking Free Speech don’t even realize what they are doing, nor can they be “talked down”, back off, or be reasoned with.
The Sixth Amendment contains the Confrontation Clause that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him”.
However, note that this is only applicable to criminal wrongs, not civil wrongs - such as impeachment.
Article One of the US Constitution only covers how the House of Representatives has sole power of impeachment (in interpreting an impeachable offense) and that the Senate has sole power to try all impeachments.
That’s about it for constitutional coverage of impeachment.
If you accept the democratic election of your President, you accept the democratic election of your representatives. Due process can determine their impeachment in line with the above all it wants.
The First Amendment allows you to speak however you will, but it doesn’t force those protecting the anonymity of anyone involved in impeachment to reveal their identity.
Impeachment is Civil and Criminal prosecution, and involves the Democratically elected official, in this case, the US President. Thus the President, and all those who voted for him (Trump), have Right to Due Process along with all other Rights afforded by the Bill of Rights.
If impeachment is considered criminal prosecution as it suggests in this article, then the Sixth Amendment constitutionally allows the President to confront the witness and the First Amendment allows them to speak about it.
That’s about the extent of my knowledge on the US constitution.
Any lawyers on this forum?
I think “Congress” (House of Rep) has a general allowance and leeway to begin and run an impeachment “however they want to”, but the presumption is, from my understanding of Ethics and Law, that there must maintain the basic processes of Due-process, which entitles basic Rights of Trial, accusations and witnesses as well. Now the Democrats have invoked and pushed “whistleblower protections”, but this is an exception historically, and it seems obvious, and common sense, that you cannot begin grounds of Impeachment of the duly and fairly elected President of the United States, explicitly under the basis of an Anonymous Source. Not only does that stink of corruption and abuse-of-power (by the House of Representatives), but look at what precedent it sets.
That…any house majority can accuse a sitting president of any crime based on an Anonymous source and that this “anonymous source” is Immune from outing.
There is no Legal precedent for such, except some legal cases which “protect whistleblowers”, but this is Unconstitutional as I’ve laid out, especially in this case.
Whistleblowers are usually enacted in Corporate and Mafia criminal cases, and based on the severity of such crimes and implications. Because this source is used as a method of impeachment of the President, or worse, as the premise, then this is simply unethical, immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional.
Again, the Precedent this sets, is that issues of Impeachment can begin in the future, from any and all “Anonymous” sources, and if you question or want to defend against such “Anonymous” sources, that you have no recourse to do so. Congress will push it anyway. This is clearly abuse-of-power and overreaching. Pragmatically, it’s simply partisan politics, Democrats trying to impeach a fairly elected President. But it is Unconstitutional. There is no “Absolute Right of Anonymity”, and articles of Impeachment must strictly follow the US Constitution, otherwise Congress is overreaching or overextending their Authority.
The House Judiciary Committee should have overruled these means of Impeachment already, or should do so now. It’s flagrantly wrong.
Yes, it is also my understanding that the Obama administration was hard on whistleblowers, though I do not know of a case where a whistleblower followed the procedure prescribed for reporting misdeeds up the chain and was subsequently punished. I wouldn’t be surprised if there cases like that, I just don’t know of any. But I think even Snowden should have been given more leniency than he was.
But the whistleblower thing is a distraction here. Look at the way it’s being used in this thread, as though it were the whistleblower alone impeaching the President, rather than the House of Representatives, and as though the House were basing its actions solely on the report of the whistleblower, rather than on the public comments of the President, the memo released by the White House, and the growing list of insiders who are testifying publicly and privately to congressional committees. We don’t need the whistleblower’s identity because we don’t need his testimony to establish the allegations that are likely to be forwarded to the Senate.
Listen: there is no sequence of events where this will happen. So far, we’ve had over twenty hours of public hearings in which both Republicans and Democrats were able to question known members of the Trump administration, who made allegations of significant wrongdoing by the President. If the President is removed from office, it will be on the grounds of the current and growing body of public evidence that Trump abused his power to pressure a foreign government to investigate a domestic political rival for his personal gain.
No it isn’t. You have a habit of switching back and forth between technical meanings, colloquial meanings, and metaphorical meanings. In the technical sense, the sense that is relevant when we’re talking about how Constitutional rights apply, Congress is not an Article 1, Article 3, or Article 4 tribunal. It is not a court in a Constitutionally relevant sense.
Impeachment is not a criminal prosecution. One piece of evidence of this is that the impeachment clause expressly preserves the possibility of criminal proceedings for the same conduct for which a sitting President is impeached and removed; a President can be removed from office for a certain act and then immediately tried and convicted in criminal proceedings for the same act. That wouldn’t be possible if impeachment were criminal, because the Double Jeopardy clause prohibits retrial following a conviction in criminal cases.
I am a lawyer, but to be honest the average lawyer isn’t going to be much better at these analyses than the intelligent layperson. Constitutional law has a few quirks, but to a great extent it still relies on the plain language of the Constitution (there are exceptions, e.g. First Amendment law is complicated and often unintuitive, though the average lawyer doesn’t know a ton about that either). And especially in the case of Presidential impeachment, there’s not a lot of precedent interpreting the few Constitutional provisions about it, and not much time was spent on it in law school (though I’m sure it’s different for people in law school now!).
Implying that it’s even remotely possible to impeach and remove, forcibly, the duly and fairly elected President of the United States under the condition that he had committed no crime, in no violation of a US law, and in no violation of the US Constitution… gimme a break!
It goes without saying, you cannot be impeached, if you committed no crime. A US President cannot be impeached “because the House majority doesn’t like him”. Again, that is a violation of basic Democracy. The majority House cannot simply overrule the US public, which is exactly what is being attempted here.
Imagine it this way: Democrats held majority House and 66% of the Senate – the US population votes in a President, then House and Congress impeach that same President, even when no crime is committed?!? Ridiculous!!! Absurd, and insane!
There is no intent, whisper, hint of such radical behavior within the Constitution or Bill of Rights! The US President, perhaps more so than any single citizen, has full authority and protection of the US Constitution, including Due Process of Law! This means, facing accusations and allegations of wrongdoing.
The entire “Premise”, of this entire Impeachment, is based solely and exclusively on the “whistleblowing”. But there is no actual case for protection of anonymity, which threatens the First Amendment, as-if it were remotely reasonable, moral, ethical, to allege wrong-doing under conditions of Anonymity.
SHAME on you, Carleas, for defending this! This is a breach of the highest order of conduct, law, and moral fabric, of US history!
I guess, based on this precedent, the House, Senate, and Congress, can conjure any “Anonymous” source and run with it, with any allegation and accusation, without reproach!?!?
Absolute violation of the US Constitution. Congress is far out-of-bounds and should be penalized, censured, and rebuked. Way too far!
K: the problems with your rant begins with the notion that
impeachment is a civil legal matter… it isn’t… it is a political matter…
and political matters are different then civil matters… it isn’t directly tied
to what would ordinarily happen in a civil matter… we have very well written out
rules for a civil trial… but an impeachment is a political matter and as thus the
democrats are following two different set of rules, both written by the GOP…
one set was written in 1974 and the second set was written in 2015…
now a couple of other related issues is that the United States Supreme court has
ruled on the house impeachment inquires before…the first is McGrain v. Daugherty…
saying that the “congress power of inquiry is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to
the legislative function” also saying this “a legislative body cannot legislate wisely or
effectively in the absence of information respecting the conditions which the
legislation is intended to affect or change” the Supreme court was pretty clear here…
in Sinclair v. United States…“individuals right to be exempt from all unauthorized,
arbitrary or unreasonable inquires and disclosures in respect to their personal and
private matters” but that because “it was a matter of concern to the United States”
“the transaction purporting to lease to (Sinclair’s company) the lands within the reserve
cannot be said to be merely or principally personal.”
also see Barenblatt v. United States for confirmation as to allow congress to punish
those who are found in contempt, when a person refuses to answer questions while
under subpoena by the house committee on Un-Acctivities…. for further information see
wiki “impeachment in the United States”
it is not only the duty of congress to conduct an inquiry but a constitutional
requirement to conduct such an inquiry into the misdeed of judges and
presidents…….
as previously pointed out, the constitution expressly says in Article 1,
"the house of representatives… shall have the sole power of impeachment…
in article 2. it says, "that the president, vice president and “and all civil servants
officers of the United States…which includes judges can be impeached”
the constitution itself does not specify how impeachment is to be conducted…
the house of Representatives have “SOLE POWER” of impeachment…
that means the house is well within its right to engage in impeachment in
any way, shape or form that it decides upon… so basically you are dead wrong
that the house is acting illegally or unconstitutionally…… it is well within its
legal and constitutional rights to impeach as both the constitution and the supreme court
has decided…
Kropotkin
The impeachment power expressly applies to the President, so the fact that a President is “duly and fairly elected” clearly cannot remove the possibility of his being impeached and removed.
And, as I’ve pointed out to you repeatedly, we have a lot of evidence that “high crimes and misdemeanors” include conduct that does not violate any law. The people who wrote the Constitution made that clear in their arguments in favor of ratifying it. Here is a report prepared by congressional staffers during the Watergate procedings, which goes into some depth on the question of whether criminality is required for impeachment, and concludes:
This is absurd, I agree. But the alternative is that the President can use the powers of his office to undermine the Constitutional system, and so long as he acts within his vast power, he is untouchable. That too is absurd.
And your hypothetical relies on the people to vote for a supermajority in Congress and simultaneously for a President so despised by that supermajority that they would shirk their Constitutional duty to remove her from office at a whim and heedless of any electoral blowback that it would cause.
Where as my hypothetical is on display, right now, in the form of the sitting President.
Or a medal. Though I wouldn’t rule out his role as a message: we can read everything you write and listen to everything you say. Notice that the Snowdon leaks never really ended up hindering the public or private surveillance. This would be a very smart move, to attack people subliminally, and I must admit I hesitate to attribute smart moves to governments, but these do happen on occasion.
Yes, I got that. That’s why I said I agreed with you and Peter and thought it was not wrong to keep the whistleblower anonymous.
To be honest, I was reaching a bit more intuitivel than usual. My point was not about the impeachment per se. It’s about the way that principles and values are used conveniently, regularly, by both parties.
This is old news in the vague way people distrust government. But the incredibly critical role of whistleblowers in society and how they are treated is generally not focused on.
Since in this case the Left is the prime mover against Trump - though obviously many on the Right have problems with him - it seems like at the very time a whistleblower is used, protected and valued
the Left (and the Rigth) need to have it pointed out that they have no real respect for whistleblowers.
So, yes. You and Peter are right - as far as I, a non-lawyer, can tell.
But there is something disingenous about respecting a whistleblower so carefully and immediately going to the law and the constitution to show this is the case.
If the nation is actually going to have any long term health, I think, a simultaneous challenge has to be made regarding hypocrisy around whistleblowers. They are not just tools to use when it is convenient for one’s political party or personal aims. In fact
quite the opposite. The idea is that despite how embarrassing and problematic their revelations are, intranationally and internationally, they need to be treated as, metaphorically, sacred.
And that issue should be on the table just as loud as the specific case.
Otherwise the Left gets to pretend it is interested in the truth (and the Right also when it follows laws when it suits them).
You can have specific case justice and farce at the same time. And the long term not dealing with the farce is extremely problematic.
I also think in general it is getting more dangerous again for whistleblowers, often facing things like the Espionage Act when it is a real stretch, both in the private and public sectors.
Great this one is being protected, so far.
They managed to impeach Nixon. Great, and he resigned to save face and further revelations.
But whistleblowers continuously come out about more systematic abuses. Not individual admins, but ongoing, continuous illicit relations between the government and the private sector, or by the military industrial complex. Stuff that carries happily over between admins of supposedly opposed parties. Those whistleblowers get smacked down hard and we don’t generally hear about them. Snowdon being one exception.
So I am throwing up a flare in parallel. Not to stop the impeachment or say the whistleblower should be named and be confronted by Trumps lawyers and PR teams and worse.
In parallel, let’s not just whip out the letter of the law…not JUST do that. Let’s also point out that in this case those being so whistleblower friendly have not in general given a poop about whistleblowers and show no signs
of consistantly applying the laws, consequences be damned
like people with integrity should.
The Senate Lead already warned everybody that they will run the Senate Trial formally, so no Hearsay and the “Whistleblower” will be exposed there.
At least some sensibility, reason, and justice will be served in all this.
I hate Donald Trump, they’re welcome to remove him as far as I’m concerned and bring us closer to civil war or unrest.
Let’s get this party started while I’m still relatively young, I’ve been waiting nineteen years now and I’m not getting any younger. I have had to endure three political administrations or regimes, enough is enough already.
I would not go that far. There may be cases where the government needs to keep some things secret in order to perform its legitimate duties in good faith, e.g. undercover investigations of criminal activity, or various military maneuvers and strategies. I think secrecy is often over-broad, but nonetheless there are times when it is appropriate. And exactly which things should be kept secret, and to what extent, is a delicate decision that shouldn’t be left up to every person up and down the chain of command. That system doesn’t work, and it can put these legitimate activities in jeopardy.
So with Snowden, I think he did something wrong, in that he revealed secrets that he was not entitled to reveal, on his own prerogative. To my knowledge, he didn’t try to voice his concerns internally, and instead went straight to the press with unredacted internal documents.
I think that wrong is significantly mitigated by the good that those revelations did. I don’t get the impression that it was malicious, and I think the outcome was net positive, but I don’t think it was his call to make. He effectively acted as a vigilante, and we should discourage that for the same reason that we discourage all vigilantism: it undermines the system of law to have individuals taking the law into their own hands.
Federal Rules of Evidence on Hearsay (801-807):
Statements made by Trump, or made by people working for or with Trump, and being used against Trump, are not hearsay.
Sure, and thee were errors of redaction, but there was great effort made by the media involved, whom he specifically chose, to redact responsibly.
Again, sure, but then precisely along the lines of what is a war crime each person must be responsible when to decide to refuse or reveal. If he had gone through the chain of command, which would have been via private contractor with money to lose, it would not have been revealed.
To voice his concerns internally would likely have been a terrible choice and he was in a position to know that, certainly better than most of us.
That’s the whole point of the situation with many whisteblowers. yes, some make a choice to first reveal internally, but that may very well close doors. That choice to risk closing doors is also, one could argue not one for someone to make. His employers had a millions reasons to shut down any revelations. I think a good case could be made that giving them the choice is NOT taking responsibility for what he knew, and deciding to keep things secret. Yes, people can make mistakes.
To have dumped it all on the net would have been a huge problem. And I believe he still has information he never released.
I could see a post WW2 alternate universe German court, had they won, decding the same thing about people who resisted portions of the Holocaust. You should have expressed your concerns to your superiors, rather than hiding Jews, forging passports and so on.
That is the whole point with the idea that we cannot simply follow orders when faced with certain situations.
I think his assessment that his whistleblowing would have been shut down was accurate. He would have been choosing to not have the public be aware of an enormous crime.
Further a vigilante is not the correct analogy. This is generally when you act to punish the perpetrator of illegal or immoral acts instead of the proper legal authorities. Snowdon gave the proper legal authorities a chance to take action on illegal activities. The courts have even allowed certain kinds of vigilatiism, but generally not the kind where the person is punishing alleged perpetrators.
His employers were not law enforcement.
A vast crime was being committed. He revealed this. That’s not vigilantism. And he did it in a way that could not be hidden. If he had gone over his direct employers heads to the nsa, I think we can agree what they would have done.
I agree there are similarities to disobeying orders, hiding refugees, breaking laws for good, etc., and I think we should apply a similar standard to them. I think of them all as wrongs for which there is a positive defense: it was actually wrong to do what they did, but in context it was the least wrong. It’s almost like pleading self-defense or defense of others, where we acknowledge that killing is wrong but people can admit to killing and still be found not guilty where the circumstances showed that killing was the lesser harm. There’s also a defense in civil cases of ‘necessity’, which for example excuses civil torts like trespass to property where trespassing is necessary to save a life (I don’t recall what lesser harms can support the defense).
I think something like that would be appropriate and socially beneficial here: if a rational person in Snowden’s position would agree that there was no practical ability to raise the concerns internally, then raising them in a responsible way externally can be excusable.
But I still think we should be cautious. Are there additional facts we could assume that would justify what the government was doing? This will depend on how bad we judge the programs Snowden revealed to be, and what other values might outweigh them, but let me try to give an abstract account.
Suppose there’s some harm X that is greater than the harms Snowden exposed. We know the harm is looming, and we’ve known long enough that we’ve had time to put the programs Snowden exposed in place. And we know that those programs are very likely to be effective in preventing X. But X is a closely guarded secret, because we have good reason to believe that if knowledge of X gets out, it will either precipitate X or some other yet greater harm. And so we have the secret programs that Snowden sees, but also some greater secret that Snowden doesn’t see and which justifies the programs that Snowden sees and that, if we knew all the facts, we would agree justifies those programs.
This is part of my concern about being too celebratory of whistleblowers who go outside normal channels. We can almost always imagine that someone up the chain has additional knowledge that justifies the perceived harm. I still think where the outcome is good, we should show significant leniency, but I think we should acknowledge that these people are doing something very risky, and potentially risking the well-being of a lot of other people. And we can also support them by providing much more robust channels, like the one used by the whistleblower that set of the current inquiry. We should make these options available, make them safe and easy to use, independent and sufficiently empowered to thoroughly investigate the claims while mitigating the risks.
Separately from this, as a moral question, there is a point at which one needs to blow the whistle despite the costs. The Holocaust and war crime examples are such a cases: the right thing to do is to hide the Jews, or to disobey orders, even though it means you will go to prison after the war or be court-martialed. Part of what makes these people noble is that they take on personal risk to do the right thing.
How far does an argument like this, give the impression that necessity and expediency in the relative field of moral justifications of ethical considerations become mired in immeasurable depths of perceptive errors?
Let’s say, the whistle blower himself possesses some combination of attributes, which can be categorized somewhat as possession of the same kind of interior compass, wherein he himself begins to feel the necessity to reveal his own identity for some measure of the ‘greater good’?
What if, unilaterally, he tries to patch up the growing demands that begin to mask as his own parallel falsely attributed shadow of power hunger, that begins to grow in him, unbeknownst to him by a growing fear of the externally impunged dynamic that non revelation may destroy his moral compass?
What if that fear, becomes real, and gives the false impression that he himself can solve the partisan divide, by offering himself up in some act of self sacrafice, heeding the total alienation of a Snowden type escape from literal reality ?
Does the lack of adherence to an absolute standard here, not further degrade the sought after objectives, even if, facing the abyss of madness for willing the power anynomity?
Where the anynomous and the identifiable clash, the next stage may be described in either terms of internal cracking of authentic adherence for the truth, covering the ideals of a protected model of the model compass, OR, the uncovering of the inauthentic fears, which have resulted in fears of discovery.
The whistle blower is more of the kind, who bases his own decision on effects of extrinsic causation , where the agents of the opposing social norms should determine his decision to stay aninomous or not , any other impression will give credence to being viewed as an inauthentic agent, out of line with what he revealed.
The side he is not on, will demolish him, and place his head onto a skewer,
as a reminder to others of such folly.