Isaac Laquedem

One of Donald Trump's upcoming trials commemorates Benjamin Harrison's "spectacularly corrupt administration"

Donald Trump will go to trial on March 4, 2024 in federal court in the District of Columbia on the charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.  Why March 4?  It's a Monday, and long trials often start on Mondays.  But Judge Tanya Chutkan, who chose the date, may have intended to make a sly historical reference.  Elected presidents are inaugurated on January 20 now, but before 1937 they were inaugurated on March 4.  March 4 is thus the anniversary of the inauguration of all the elected presidents from John Adams to Franklin Roosevelt in his first term (1933).  It was on March 4, 1889 that Benjamin Harrison (5'6", 160 pounds) was inaugurated.  Harrison's "spectacularly corrupt administration" (the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson) produced a collapse of the stock market and the Panic of 1893.

Celebrations of Benjamin Harrison are few and far between.  Judge Chutkan has figured out an appropriate commemoration, and Mr. Trump will get to play the leading part.

Fulton County's indictment of Donald Trump and friends, analyzed

            The 41-count indictment that a Fulton County grand jury handed down today is riveting in its narrative and notable in its detail.  Isaac has read it with great interest.  The grand jury’s accusations are not vague in time and place, nor are they more vague than necessary in describing the witnesses to the 161 numbered acts in furtherance of the election plot.  Those in Mr. Trump’s inner circle who are yet uncharged will read the indictment attentively to determine which of their friends are “Unindicted Conspirator One,” “Unindicted Conspirator Two,” and the other eighteen or so of the unnamed additional conspirators.

            All 19 defendants were charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act.  This charge is particularly ironic, or perhaps poetically just, when applied to Rudolph Giuliani, as he came to fame in the 1980s for using the federal RICO Act to dismantle the core of the New York mafia; as a federal prosecutor he obtained indictments against a long list of the mob’s leaders and lieutenants, convicting most of them.

            The indictment has some Easter eggs within its bulk.  I’ve alluded to one, which is the game of guessing the identities of the unindicted conspirators.  Another is to examine who got indicted with whom.

            The indictment has 41 counts and names 19 defendants.  Every defendant was charged with violating the Georgia RICO Act.  No defendant, however, was charged with violating even half of the 41 counts, and no count except the RICO charge names more than 7 defendants.  Messrs. Trump and Giuliani lead the pack with 13 charges each, sharing in 7 of them.  The runner-up in the indictment list is more obscure; he is Ray Stallings Smith III, a lawyer at a small firm in Atlanta whose practice includes election law.  He faces 12 charges, including all 7 of the charges that name both Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. 

            At the other end of the spectrum lie Jenna Ellis, Jeffrey Clark, and Mark Meadows, who face only one charge each in addition to the all-hands-on-deck RICO charge (Count 1). Ms. Smith’s [thank you, Kari Chisholm, for catching the error] Ellis's charge (Count 2), which she shares with attorneys Giuliani, Eastman, and Smith, is that she participated in inveigling members of the Georgia Senate to appoint impostor electors.  Mr. Clark’s charge (Count 22), which he faces alone, is that he criminally attempted to knowingly make the false statement that the Justice Department had ”identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia,” asking for permission from acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to send that message to Georgia’s governor, speaker of the house, and president of the senate.  Count 28 names only Mr. Trump and Mark Meadows and charges them with having unlawfully “solicited, requested, and importuned” Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to unlawfully alter the certified vote.

            So who did get indicted with whom?  (It sounds rather like high school gossip.)  Three of Georgia’s fake electors are among the indicted.  They are the only ones charged with Counts 8, 10, 12, and 14.  Two of them are the only ones charged with Counts 16 and 18.  Those six counts all relate to preparing and signing the false certifications.  They form a distinct group of charges and defendants. 

            A second group of defendants share Counts 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19.  They are Messrs. Trump, Giuliani, Eastman, Chesebro, Smith, and Cheeley, and those counts relate mainly to the attempts to file the false elector certifications. 

            A third group of defendants are Sidney Powell, Cathleen Latham, Scott Hall, and Misty Hampton, the only ones charged with Counts 33 to 38.  Those counts describe the efforts to obtain or break into the voting machines of Coffee County.  Ms. Powell was a visible advocate for Mr. Trump’s cause, but the indictment relegates her to a minor part in the Georgia portion of the broader conspiracy.  Based on the structure of the indictment, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani were at its center, and Mr. Smith wasn't far from the core.  The skills of high school gossip tell us not who's going out with whom, but who's going down with whom.

Chief Justice John Roberts indirectly alludes to Ambrose Bierce, lexicographer

John Roberts wrote today's Supreme Court opinion in which a 6-member majority struck down the Biden administration's forgiveness of most of the student loan debt in the country.  Whatever the merits of the court's decision, the Chief Justice included this allusive gem in his opinion:

From a few narrowly delineated situations specified by Congress, the Secretary [of Education] has expanded forgiveness to nearly every borrower in the country.  The Secretary's plan has 'modified' the cited provisions only in the same sense that 'the French Revolution 'modified' the status of the French nobility' - it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.

The Chief Justice is quoting from Antonin Scalia's opinion in MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. American Telephone & Telegraph Co., 512 US 128 (1994), which turned in part on the definition of "modify."  In that case Justice Scalia wrote, "It might be good English to say that the French Revolution 'modified' the status of the French nobility - but only because there is a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm." 

Justice Scalia did not credit any earlier source for his bon mot.  I suspect he was inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by Ambrose Bierce's work "The Devil's Dictionary," in which he defined "abridge" as "to shorten," attributing this fictive mashup of a sentence from the Declaration of Independence to Oliver Cromwell as an example of "abridge" in use: 

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The Laquedem Plan to Relieve Our Supreme Court Justices from the High Cost of Vacations

The recent scandalous disclosures that Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia vacation not only in their 40-foot motor home but on lavish trips financed by billionaire Harlan Crow that have included flights on Mr. Crow's private jet and cruises on his 161-foot yacht were followed by the equally scandalous revelations that Justice Samuel Alito did not report his 2008 trip by private jet as the guest of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, to an Alaskan fishing resort where he stayed as the guest of real estate and mortgage servicing billionaire Robin Arkley.  The two stories brought to mind the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016 at a resort in Texas.  "Resort" is a loose term for the 30,000 acre Cibolo Creek Ranch, owned by multimillionaire John B. Poindexter.  (We can't have our justices selecting their friends only from the billionaire class.)  You can book rooms there for $500 to $1200/night, or you can come as the guest of Mr. Poindexter, as Justice Scalia did.  

It's apparent from the examples of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Scalia that the justices of our Supreme Court cannot stretch their salaries, currently $274,200/year, to cover the cost of vacations that befit their status as the nation's senior interpreters of the Constitution and the law.  It's also abhorrent that owners of large corporations with business before the Supreme Court can give the justices over-the-top vacations without the justices thinking it improper to accept the gifts.  Hence the Laquedem Plan to Relieve Our Supreme Court Justices from the High Cost of Vacations.

The LPTROSCJFTHCOV is ridiculously simple, because the mechanism to remove the taint of impropriety already exists.  It's GoFundMe.com.  Let's start a GoFundMe to raise money that the justices and their families can use to pay for their own vacations.   If a million Americans will give just $1/year each, then each justice can spend more than $1 million/year on luxury travel without having to beg for hospitality from their billionaire friends.  If Justice Thomas had $1 million to spend on his vacations, would he still hang out with Harlan Crow?  Or would he and Virginia Thomas buy a larger motor home and hire a driver?  Either way, he could escape his ethical morass.

We already provide public funds to presidential candidates.  Let's offer our Supreme Court a way to escape from the convivial clutches of the kakistocrats.

The Laquedem Plan to Improve Continuing Legal Education and Honor a Legal Leader

The Oregon State Bar requires active lawyers to take a certain amount of coursework, called "continuing legal education" or "CLE," to renew their licenses.  Members report their education every three years.  New members must take nine hours of courses on practical skills, including at least four hours on Oregon practice and procedure.  After their first reporting period, Oregon lawyers must take 45 hours of accredited CLE every three years, including at least five hours on ethics, one hour on mandatory reporting of child abuse and elder abuse, and one hour on mental health and substance abuse.  In alternate reporting periods, Oregon lawyers must also take at least three hours on programs accredited for "access to justice."  The Bar's rules define "Access to justice" education as activities that are "designed to educate attorneys to identify and eliminate from the legal profession, from the provision of legal services, and from the practice of law barriers to access to justice arising from biases against persons because of age, culture, disability, ethnicity, gender and gender identity or expression, geographic location, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, immigration status, and socioeconomic status."

Recent news stories have given Isaac the idea that the Oregon State Bar should require providers of CLE to meld practical skills with access to justice, resulting in the Laquedem Plan to Improve Continuing Legal Education and Honor a Legal Leader.  Educators could teach lawyers how to organize luxurious hunting trips, expensive vacations, and cruises on private yachts, and then how to invite judges to be their guests.  Other material would cover how to establish political organizations under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code to funnel unreported money to a judge's spouse.  And somewhere in the mix would be how to ship rare wine across state lines to judicial incumbents.

The name of this hybrid CLE credit would honor one of its most ardent practitioners.  I suggest calling it "Access to Justice Thomas."

Shemia Fagan's resignation: the lettuce wins again

The recent scandal that ended the political career of Oregon's soon-to-be-former secretary of state Shemia Fagan and her lucrative consulting contract with a financially struggling leader in the cannabis industry, La Mota, is notable for its celerity. On April 27, Willamette Week published Sophie Peel's story that broke the news that Secretary Fagan was receiving $10,000/month - 55% more than her state salary - from La Mota for providing then-undescribed consulting services.  On April 28 the rest of the Democratic establishment moved quickly to distance themselves from Ms. Fagan, exemplified by Governor Kotek's pithy response to a reporter's question on April 29: "I don't have outside employment.  I only have one job."  On May 2, only five days after the story broke, Ms. Fagan announced her resignation.

Five days is unusually fast for a public official's scandal to go from unveiling to unspooling.  Liz Truss served only 44 days as Britain's prime minister, but she did survive in office for six days after the Daily Star set up a webcam on a head of lettuce to see whether the lettuce or the prime minister would wilt first. [The lettuce won.]

The speed with which Shemia Fagan was expelled from the machine reminds Isaac of the famous scene in A Night At The Opera, in which Otis P. Driftwood (played by Groucho Marx) is welcomed into the offices of the New York Opera, promptly fired, and then kicked down four flights of stairs and thrown out the door.

 

Isaac's 2023 Tax Day reading from A.P. Herbert

Each year at tax time we divert from our support of democratic socialism to think of Sir Alan Patrick Herbert (1890-1971), the British social reformer, member of Parliament from Oxford University (there really was such a post, elected by the alumni), lover of the Thames, playwright, and under the name of A.P. Herbert, a frequent perpetrator of light verse.  Some years, this one included, the tax bite is severe enough to quote from his work.  This month's assortment of impositions is painful not so much because of the amount but by the sheer number of the incoming mosquitos, each looking to take its little bite from the Laquedem thousands under the guise of making work for the post office and the Loyal Accountant.  The outgoing checks and the upcoming ballot measure to add another tax to the menagerie have put me in mind today of this early Herbert verse: 

Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they've no idea what money's for --
Ten to one they'll start another war.
I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'!
Fancy giving money to the Government!

Our genial support of the social welfare system will return on Tuesday.

Sometimes "20 to 30" is a phrase that describes an age bracket . . .

And sometimes it's a complete sentence.

Happy birthday, Professor Lehrer

Today is the 95th birthday of Tom Lehrer, who rose to fame as a singer and satirical songwriter in 1953, performed and toured for about 15 years, and then returned to academia.  Some of his songs are fossils of their era (we know what became of Hubert, and Wernher von Braun did in fact study Chinese).  Others that he wrote for the events of the 1950s and 1960s are painfully apposite to the fears of the present day, including the one linked here.  Happy birthday, sir!

 

Wendell Phillips reminds us that history sometimes rhymes

The recent stalemate among the House republicans over their choice of speaker and the current threats of Speaker McCarthy to refuse to raise the ceiling on the national debt so that the nation can pay its bills brought to mind this delightful observation from a while back:

"A few years ago * * * the Republican party dared to refuse the appropriations for support of government - the most daring act ever ventured in a land that holds Bunker Hill and Brandywine.  They dared to persevere some twenty or thirty days.  It seems a trifle; but it is a very significant straw.  Then for weeks when Banks was elected, and a year ago, again, the whole government was checked till the Republicans put their Speaker in the chair."

Does that bring to mind Newt Gingrich shutting down the government, or Lauren Boebert holding up the organization of the House in January?  The author of the quoted words was Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), the famous orator and abolitionist.  They're from a speech that he gave in Boston on February 17, 1861.  The four omitted words represented by the three asterisks give the joke away: they are "while Pierce was President."

The House Democrats should pick a republican for speaker, but not just any republican

About a year ago, a republican political strategist named Sarah Longwell wrote in The Bulwark that the republican party was facing an ‘extinction event’ that resulted from Donald Trump having converted it into the MAGA party. The flailing efforts of the republican House majority to elect a speaker yesterday and so far today also are another sign that the extinction event has descended on the party.

Its schism into the group of the shamed and silent and the smaller and louder Trump-MAGA group brings back memories of the 1854 fracturing of the Whig Party, with some important differences, the largest of which is that the Whig Party fell apart over an irresolvable policy dispute: should slavery expand, continue, or be eliminated?  No common ground among the factions was available, as the policy difference was over a stark yes-or-no question.

By contrast the modern republican party gave up any pretense of policy ambitions years ago under Newt Gingrich’s leadership.  It has no policy; its modest platform for the 2020 election could be described as “policy” only in the way that a fig leaf can be described as “clothing.”  But where can the remaining rational republicans find a home?  On philosophical grounds they can’t join the Democratic Party, and without a billionaire or two as a funding source and a media presence (their henhouse won’t stand without a Fox to advertise it) they can’t start a new national party.  The two-party system needs two strong and responsible parties, and the republican leadership is too frightened of its cohort of crazies to make the effort to return it to reason.  Maybe what saves the system is not right-wing repentance but a variant of the solution played out in the Utah senate race, where the Democrats tried to elect a rational conservative to replace Mike Lee, something like the plain-bellied Sneetches temporarily donning stars.  The Democrats could contribute to bringing the opposition toward reason by picking a few moderate republican representatives and then voting as a bloc for those representatives, one after another, until one of their candidates from across the aisle attracts the votes of 10 sane republicans.  Odd as it would be for the Democrats to vote for a republican for speaker, doing so is their one way to get a speaker of the House who won't have had to make promises to the Boeberts and Gosars of the republican caucus.

A PSU professor calls out the University of Oregon for turning Trumpist on the First Amendment

Maxine Bernstein reports in today's Oregonian that the University of Oregon banned Bruce Gilley, a Portland State University professor, from replying to a UO Twitter account for 60 days because of a comment that Professor Gilley made in reply to that account, which belongs to UO's Division of Equity and Inclusion.  He was one of three Twitter users that the Division's communications manager (now retired) blocked.

Professor Gilley sued.  He argues that UP violated his right to free speech and is asking for nominal damages of $17.91 (because the states ratified the First Amendment in 1791) and an acknowledgment that UO violated his First Amendment right of free speech.  (The university unblocked his account the day after he filed suit.)  A federal court heard argument on Professor Gilley's suit on Friday.

As the saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows.  UO turned to rising liberal icon Misha Isaak for its defense.  As reported by Ms. Bernstein, Mr. Isaak's defense of UO is mainly that the court should dismiss the suit because persons higher up in the university administration unblocked Professor Gilley when they learned that the Division had shut him out from commenting,  The administration has also reminded the Division of Equity and Inclusion that it cannot block speech based on the user's viewpoint.  I interpret Mr. Isaak's defense of UO as being mainly that because UO blocked his speech for only a short period, and because the UO official who blocked Professor Gilley didn't know about the First Amendment, the University didn't violate his constitutional rights in a big enough way to be worth the court's time.  Mr. Isaak also suggested that Professor Gilley "relished being canceled because it gives him a platform," a strange way to defend an apparent First Amendment violation.  But let's go back a few years to a similar story, still fresh in the minds of constitutional lawyers.

In 2017 President Trump blocked Twitter users with whom he disagreed from replying to tweets on his personal account.  Several of the blocked users sued, backed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.  They argued that the president conducted official business on his Twitter account and that it was effectively a government-sponsored platform from which he could not bar users based on the content of their comments.  Those plaintiffs attracted support from an institute at Georgetown University which filed a brief on behalf of an all-star cast of professors of constitutional law, including Erwin Chemerinsky, Geoffrey Stone, and Laurence Tribe. 

In 2019 the federal court for the Second Circuit ruled unanimously in favor of the Twitter users and against President Trump, and minced no words:  "Accordingly, we hold that the President violated the First Amendment when he used [Twitter's] blocking function to exclude the Individual Plaintiffs because of their protected free speech." Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 928 F3d 226 (2019).  You can read the entire opinion here.

It's embarrassing for a public university with a law school to be caught out taking a page from Donald Trump's playbook and suppressing protected free speech because it doesn't like the speaker's message.  It's more embarrassing, or should be, when the part of the university doing the suppressing is the division that's devoted to providing room for all voices to be heard.  At the very least, the president of the university should take a few minutes to write a note of apology and acknowledge to Professor Gilley and the court that its Division of Equity and Inclusion messed up bigly.