Bridge to Far

Was sick all last week and this week kind of hammered so short thought today, responding to Scott Morefield's latest article.

Might there be some who want to see him impeached as a sort of punishment or check, but think tearing the country apart by removing a sitting president and essentially undoing the 2016 election is a bridge too far? It’s quite likely, but we won’t find out with any of these polling methods.

The thing is there's an element of truth in his contention.  If it really was a perfect call and there was no quid pro quo than yeah actually bringing Trump to the Senate floor to remove him from office is a bit too much.   But in the calculation of many, there is enough evidence there to justify further investigation, and everything we find out seems to paint the President as more and more guilty. 

Morefield's (and the President's) argument seems to be, if you don't have enough to get a conviction, end the investigation immediately.   Pretty good deal for the President, but let's recall the Starr investigation which started off looking Whitewater and ended up being about the President having sex - if the Morefield investigation policy had been in place then would Clinton have still been impeached? 

Well of course - Clinton's a democrat, and he's surely guilty of something, but Trump is a republican so any investigation is phony baloney.

The Bit You Don't Say

Scott Morefield's latest article is about how to prevent the loss of gun rights if Congress decides to limit them (in the case of a Democratic congress (and let me take a moment to smile at the thought of a Democratic congress)).   Anyway he outlines three strategies that might come into play.   One of them is Jury Nullification.

In truth, a jury can, in theory, declare someone innocent of a crime regardless of what the law says, regardless of actual guilt or innocence, but simply on the basis that a particular law is unjust.

The establishment doesn’t want you or anyone else to know that, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less true. When it comes down to brass tacks, how many small town red state juries will vote to convict, say, a mother who used her AR-15 to defend herself and her small children from a home invader, or an elderly man for keeping the gun his grandfather passed down to him?

It's a slippery argument - because how many small town red state juries would vote to convict if a white person shot a black man down because he or she was afraid. It is basically an argument in favor of letting people's initial prejudice set the terms for laws.  To take Morefield's own example if a black guy fired a weapon to defend himself from a white man, would red state juries be as likely to nullify as if a white guy fired a weapon to defend himself from a black man? 

Morefield argues that the 10th amendment and State's rights be invoked to protect the right of individual states to allow gun usage, which seems a risky proposition to me, depending on the law in question.  While I agree that allowing Tennessee to be Tennessee is fine; they have to understand that the firearm rights offered by Tennessee only apply to those in Tennessee.

Finally there's this nugget.

It’s easy to think that leftists, when and if they get total control, would resort to the practices of their 20th Century ideological forebears – leftist ‘heroes’ like Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao – and just start killing people willy-nilly, particularly those they disagree with. And don’t get me wrong, they likely would if they could.

This is why democracy doesn't work anymore.  If one side of the aisle believes the other side to be murderers in principle (even if current conditions preclude it) how can you make lasting agreements with them?  All agreements and compromises with the conservative part of our nation have to involve the knowledge that they believe us to be murdering monsters.  And there's no shame in breaking promises to murderous monsters. 

I don't think it's a good idea for us to look at them in the same light (for one thing, Morefield and his ilk aren't all conservatives or all inhabitants of a red state) - but it is worthwhile to remember that all compromises with them have to include the possibility of betrayal.