We Don't Need A New Bill Of Rights - We Need A Government Constrained And Bound By It - As Those Who Drafted The Bill Of Rights Intended
Their "democracy" isn't my democracy, or the democracy of half of the voting citizens of the United States, thus it isn't a democracy at all. And we no longer have a Republic under the rule of law...
I practiced criminal defense law for a bit more than 15 years, and defended those people who were in the process of involuntary commitment to state hospitals for the mentally ill. I have a keen appreciation for the defense of Constitutional rights and the zealous representation of my clients - and how the possibility of this has been degraded by the Federal Government and the Deep State over that time period. The Government seems to be bound by the Bill of Rights only when it feels it convenient for its purposes to do so - and it has created new mechanisms for the subversion of those rights. We have descended into a legal system equivalent to those in the so-called Banana Republics - those countries whose legal and governmental systems were run by United Fruit, a US corporation, and Wall Street, solely to protect the commercial interests of those entities.
The Trump Trial in New York City is an exemplar of this sort of corrupted legal system, with an obviously biased judge who committed numerous violations of the canon of judicial ethics, for one, donating to the Presidential campaign of the opponent of the person whose case he was hearing, and refusing to recuse himself from the case, to wit:
“Canon 5: A Judge Should Refrain From Political Activity A. General Prohibitions. A judge should not: (1) act as a leader or hold any office in a political organization; (2) make speeches for a political organization or candidate, or publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for public office; or (3) solicit funds for, pay an assessment to, or make a contribution to a political organization or candidate, or attend or purchase a ticket for a dinner or other event sponsored by a political organization or candidate.” https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/code_of_conduct_for_united_states_judges_effective_march_12_2019.pdf
There’s another example of the violation of the canons of judicial ethics, namely lack of impartiality, or the appearance thereof, by Judge Merchan, whose daughter is writing a book directly related to the trial proceedings and outcome, and who stands to gain a large sum of money thereby, in violation of the following:
“Disqualification. (1) A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which: (a) the judge has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party, or personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding; … (d) the judge or the judge’s spouse, or a person related to either within the third degree of relationship, or the spouse of such a person is: … (iii) known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding…” https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/code_of_conduct_for_united_states_judges_effective_march_12_2019.pdf
Trump’s attorneys’ motion for recusal should have been granted on the grounds above, by an impartial judge acting in the interests of fair and equal justice - and the recusal should have occurred with or without the motion. The judge’s failure to recuse himself is a violation of the judicial canons of ethics - and is a gross abuse of discretion which should be quickly corrected by a higher court.
It’s also puzzling why Trump’s attorneys did not include a Motion for Bill of Particulars during their pre-trial motions practice - and for subsequent Motions if needed to clarify the charges on which their client was being tried, instead of doing this in the course of the trial and letting the DA stall and delay the content of the actual charges and theory of the case until the jury instructions were given. It strikes me as particularly ineffective assistance of counsel, where defense counsel do not know the particulars of the exact crime alleged. Without this precise knowledge, it is impossible to formulate a defense - and letting the DA get away with this kind of trickery almost guarantees a guilty verdict. The DA’s conduct runs totally against the holding in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875):
”12. In criminal cases prosecuted under the laws of the United States, the accused has the constitutional right "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation." The indictment must set forth the offence with clearness and all necessary certainty, to apprise the accused of the crime with which he stands charged, and every ingredient of which the offence is composed must be accurately and clearly alleged. It is an elementary principle of criminal pleading that, where the definition of an offence, whether it be at common law or by statute, includes generic terms, it is not sufficient that the indictment shall charge the offence in the same generic terms as in the definition, but it must state the species -- it must descend to particulars. The object of the indictment is first, to furnish the accused with such a description of the charge against him as will enable him to make his defence, and avail himself of his conviction or acquittal for protection against a further prosecution for the same cause, and, second, to inform the court of the facts alleged, so that it may decide whether they are sufficient in law to support a conviction if one should be had. For this, facts are to be stated, not conclusions of law alone. A crime is made up of acts and intent, and these must be set forth in the indictment with reasonable particularity of time, place, and circumstances.” Ibid. at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/92/542/
But this is only one case in point of the subversion and degradation of the American system of laws, and the degradation and subversion of our Constitutional Republic.
“The regime has corrupted the legal system, a pillar of our former constitutional order. This is not the same thing as saying that the legal system does not function. It functions properly almost all the time, even though it is corrupt. This is so because the measure of its corruption is a function of how it operates when the courts are used to resolve political disputes. In that context, our legal system serves only the regime’s interests, not the interests of justice. … The regime interferes with the legal system’s operation to advance its political goals, corrupting the system in the process, even if the system functions normally when adjudicating non-political matters.
By analogy, the mainstream media is not always lying, but it is always advancing the regime’s interests. If ubiquitous propaganda is the consequence of the regime’s perversion of the media, lawfare is the consequence of its perversion of the legal system. Lawfare is the process by which the regime hijacks the legal system to win political struggles that it would lose in the political arena.
This is exactly what the current regime has done with Trump. The regime understands it will likely lose to Trump in the political arena, so it has recharacterized a political struggle in the political arena as a legal struggle in the legal arena—specifically, within the federal and state criminal justice systems. In other words, the regime has corrupted the criminal justice system by forcing it to resolve a non-criminal political dispute and to do so in a way that advances the regime’s political interests.
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Regime elites, conversely, don’t bother trying to earn your vote or persuade you of their innocence. Instead, they simply implement their will through the exercise of unrestrained power. Unrestrained power is, of course, lawless power.
They didn’t like the way voters were trending in 2020, so they hacked the election laws of various battleground states. Being indicted would have been inconvenient for Hillary Clinton in 2016, so the now-disgraced former FBI Director James Comey was ordered not to prosecute her. Same goes for Joe Biden, who simply instructed Merrick Garland to close Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s case. These are examples of raw power flaunting the law: the ability to do things like hack election laws and order your own non-prosecution. Trump can’t do these things, and so he doesn’t. The regime can, and so it does.
The regime uses its lawless power routinely. It sent dozens of FBI agents to raid the home of the former president of the United States, and the leading opposition candidate. It then indicted him four times, in four different jurisdictions, on charges that have no legal precedent and that violate two centuries of standing political norms. It also indicted dozens of his advisors and confidants while ruining them in the process. Next, it arraigned him, arrested him, and then booked him, capping it off with a mug shot intended to humiliate him in the process (unsuccessfully, thanks to Trump’s intuitive showmanship). Then, for roughly 18 months, the regime dragged him through the expense and psychological toll of pre-trial litigation. It forced him to attend the first of these show trials. And it obtained guilty verdicts from jurors who had made up their minds before the trial began.
Do not forget how unprecedented all this was. Since we’ve been subjected to 18 months of propaganda designed to normalize the regime’s lawlessness, it’s worth recalling that these events were the most stunning abuses of constitutional republican norms in the entire history of our country.
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There are now only two paths forward: either the regime will solidify its power in November or Trump will be elected. If the former, we will descend further into the regime’s totalitarian grip. If the latter, unpleasant things will have to be done to hold people to account—people who attacked our constitutional republic by refusing to recognize limits on their exercise of power over us. In this respect, Trump’s claim that the regime is really after you and he’s just “standing in their way” is correct.
The regime has breached so many norms so egregiously and for so long, that those norms have virtually disappeared from the public sphere. Respect for the legal system, as just one example, was earned only following a thousand years of rigorous testing. Generations witnessed its fair and impartial functioning in politically turbulent situations and slowly, reluctantly, came to trust it. Now, however, Americans have witnessed its catastrophic failure in the prosecution of the regime’s numerous political opponents. The hard-earned trust was obliterated in the blink of an eye, or, more appropriately, in a smirk from the man who encapsulates perfectly the regime’s demented nature and its unbridled power.
The regime has effectively destroyed the old American order [as a Constitutional Republic.] Restoring trust in American institutions will require a revolution in values and a massive political and spiritual upheaval among the people.” https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-post-constitutional-order/
An in-depth analysis from Jed Rubenfeld, professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University: