Category: United States Law and Policy

The illiberalism yet to come: two things not to do, and one thing to do – suggestions on how to avoid mental and emotional exhaustion

18th November 2024

The new Republican presidency-congress in the United States as well as developments in other countries mean that in addition to the illiberalism we have had so far, there is more – perhaps worse – to come.

So how should liberals respond?

Here are three suggestions, humbly put forward.

1. Do not respond, if you can, to catastrophism. You are going to think how bad things can be, and will project this on to the other side. You will then react to what your mind has conjured up. Even if those projections are plausible, this will exhaust you quickly. You will have little energy or focus left for what they do come up with.

2. Do not respond, if you can, to what the illiberals say they will do. They will goad you and frighten you, as they enjoy “owning the libs”. They like the sound it makes, the reactions they can get. Again, even if these threats are plausible, reacting to each bare threat will exhaust you quickly. You will again have little energy or focus left for what they do come up with.

3. Respond, if you can, to what they actually do – not what you fear they will do, or even what they say they will do. What they actually will do will be bad enough, and will need your energy and focus. The illiberals will hope – and expect – that all the noise and fears under (1) and (2) will mean that by the time they do put measures forward, they will have little opposition.

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As Margo Channing in All About Eve said, we are are in for a bumpy ride.

We don’t need to make it even bumpier for ourselves.

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New stories for old – making sense of a political-constitutional rupture

14th November 2024

The shapes of things to come – some thoughts and speculations on the possibilities of what can happen next

8th November 2024

The working assumption of many in reaction to the re-election of Trump as President is that he will serve a full term.

And that is the most likely outcome, as that is what presidents tend to do once elected: they serve out their term.

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But there are other possible outcomes.

Some outcomes are morbid, and they are possibilities for any president, especially for one advanced in years.

And there is the possibility he may step down mid-term – or be replaced mid-term.

If Trump stands down mid-term, the new President Vance could pardon him for all and any federal crimes (though not state crimes). This would meet one of Trump’s presumed objectives for having re-run for President.

And if the timing of the replacement is done just right then a President Vance has the prospect of up to (but not quite) ten years in office: here the Twenty-second amendment to the US constitution provides:

“Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. […]”

If the replacement is done on the day after the second anniversary of the start of the term, then there would seem nothing to prevent a President Vance from then running for election and then re-election as President.

[Edit – in other terms: (2 years minus one day) plus 4 years plus 4 years.]

It can also be noted that in a way Trump has done his job for his backers in getting re-elected and, accordingly, there is nothing more he can personally do for them which another friendly occupant of the Oval Office cannot also do. If their objective is dominance over the medium- to long-term then they will be already thinking about the approach to the 2028 election.

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And if there are doubts (real or otherwise) about the cognitive alertness of President Trump there is also the Twenty-fifth Amendment, where a President can be effectively removed against their will, on declaration of the (well) Vice-President and others.

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On the other hand, a President Trump serving a full term may suit his backers just fine.

Trump is not a President to personally drive legislation through Congress – he is not a Lyndon Johnson or a Franklin Roosevelt.

But with a Republican Senate he does not need to do so: they can drive through the legislation themselves, subject to the final composition of the House of Representatives.

What a lazy president enables is for those around him to dominate the judicial nominations and discretionary powers.

So we can expect a raft of conservative nominations for the judicial benches – and for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to stand down and be replaced by 40 or 50 year-old strong conservatives, nominated by Trump and approved by the Senate. That will secure the Supreme Court for the conservatives for at least another twenty years, if not more.

And we can expect a huge amount of Executive Orders and such like, which in turn will be upheld by conservative judges – for who needs congressional legislation when you can have the combination of executive rule-making and nod-along judges?

Those around Trump will not be the inexperienced incoming staffers of the 2017 presidency, but people who know what to do and how to do it, many with hard experience of the first Trump presidency.

They will know what to do so as to fit things around a golf-playing president.

Trump himself may not be busy, but those around him will be.

Brace, brace.

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A postcard from the day after an election: capturing a further political-constitutional moment

6th November 2024

Yesterday things were unclear, and today things are all too clear.

Yesterday it looked as if Harris could win. On the evidence available to someone watching from England, there seemed no great enthusiasm for Trump either at his flagging under-attended rallies or elsewhere. There seemed no reason to believe he would do better than four years ago (or two years ago with his endorsed candidates).

But against that view was a sense of apprehension, if not doom. For, as this blog also averred, one could also too easily imagine Trump winning. Not because one could point to ‘factors’ (as a certain type of historian would put it), but just because he could – especially in this age of extreme political volatility.

And he has.

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One trick of the human mind is to place shape and form onto events which at the time were uncertain, and so those who were themselves unclear as to what was about to happen tend to deftly switch to being very clear about what went wrong – and who was to blame.

From the perspective of this liberal constitutionalist blog the only points that seem worth making at this stage is about how the electoral system (at least in the United States but also elsewhere) is inefficient in certain respects.

Viz:

A candidate was a liar, known to be a liar and could easily be shown to be liar – but people voted for that candidate anyway.

A candidate was a convicted fraudster – but people voted for that candidate anyway.

A candidate was by any meaningful definition an insurrectionist – but people voted for that candidate anyway.

And a candidate was in the views of some serious people a fascist – but people voted for that candidate anyway.

This means that there is no point, in and of itself, showing a candidate to be a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist if people do not actually care if that candidate is a liar, fraudster, insurrectionist and/or a fascist.

And so if the outputs of a media-political system of accountability – such as that offered by the lengthy US presidential campaign – do not gain purchase or traction, then the question is what is the purpose of a system of accountability.

The view that once a candidate is shown to be [X] then that would be enough for voters to not support that candidate falls apart when voters, knowing the candidate is [X], do not care.

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What is the solution to this problem?

Perhaps there is no solution. As a Victorian politician once said to an earnest colleague: do you really believe there are solutions to political problems?

(One day I will track down that quotation.)

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But a step towards a solution is to understand the nature of the problem.

The old media-political model of accountability – the Woodward and Bernstein model, if you will – is not working when you have a shameless candidate clapped and cheered by nod-along supporters.

And it is not a problem that is going to go away.

Yes, Trump is exceptionally charismatic – it is difficult to image a DeSantis or a Vance carrying a campaign like Trump. As such it is tempting to see him as a one-off and to just wait for him to go and for normality to return.

But there will be other Trumps, especially as the old gatekeepers in political parties and mainstream media fall away, and as illiberals become more adept at exploiting mass social media.

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The one book which seems pertinent to all this originated in (of all years) 1984.

This was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – a book which should be better known.

His son wrote this brilliant short essay about that book and Trump in 2017, a lot which still stands today.

His son said:

“I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by “technopoly”. It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture.”

His son then put forward some possible solutions. You may think of others. I cannot think of any.

How do you have accountability when people care not for the accounts that they are given?

When people know they are being lied to, but do not care?

I have no idea.

The only conclusion I have is that it is time for a good cup of tea.

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A postcard from the day of an election – capturing a political-constitutional moment

5th November 2024

Today is the day of the American presidential election.

Sooner or later there should be a result – even if, like four years ago, there is drama (or worse) all the way into the new year. And when there is some sort of result then there will be those who will explain why that was always the most likely result. Such is the nature of punditry.

But today, all is uncertain.

On the face of it, it would seem that Harris should win. Trump does not seem stronger than he did four years ago – or two years ago when his endorsed candidates did badly. He is also a more divisive figure than he was when he won eight years ago, and he is against a less divisive candidate.

But, we are not in times where such a rational view has much purchase. We are in a period of populism and hyper-partisanship and disinformation, of joyful cruelty and illiberal frenzy. One can too easily imagine Trump winning. Less likely things have happened in the United States and around the world in recent years.

And if so, we will have an extraordinary situation of a president with criminal sanctions and facing criminal trials using the might of his office to reduce his exposure to any proceedings.

And we will have a president who boasts of wanting to also use the might of his office against political enemies, both personal and general.

The only liberal hope would be that, again, he is too lazy to follow-through on his threats, and that the swings he takes will be on the golf course, and not from the Oval Office.

In the days, weeks and months to come, things may be clearer – though even that cannot be said with absolute certainty – but as of today, things are unclear and they are worrying.

So it seemed to be a moment worth recording, using this blogpost as a postcard.

And to adapt the wording of a postcard: I wish we weren’t here.

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“…as a matter of law, the house is haunted” – a quick Hallowe’en post about law and lore

Hallowe’en 2024

As words ‘law’ and ‘lore’ can sound pretty much alike. And as things they are also very similar: that is a theme of this blog.

But from time to time the courts are asked to deal with (what we can call) capital-l Lore – that is (what we can call) Folklore.

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One of the greatest examples is the (ahem) hallowed 1991 New York case of Stambovsky v Ackley – the case that provides us with that priceless quote above.

Here is the quote in context (broken into one-sentence paragraphs):

“Plaintiff, to his horror, discovered that the house he had recently contracted to purchase was widely reputed to be possessed by poltergeists, reportedly seen by defendant seller and members of her family on numerous occasions over the last nine years.

“Plaintiff promptly commenced this action seeking rescission of the contract of sale.

“Supreme Court reluctantly dismissed the complaint, holding that plaintiff has no remedy at law in this jurisdiction.

“The unusual facts of this case, as disclosed by the record, clearly warrant a grant of equitable relief to the buyer who, as a resident of New York City, cannot be expected to have any familiarity with the folklore of the Village of Nyack.

“Not being a “local”, plaintiff could not readily learn that the home he had contracted to purchase is haunted.

“Whether the source of the spectral apparitions seen by defendant seller are parapsychic or psychogenic, having reported their presence in both a national publication (Readers’ Digest) and the local press (in 1977 and 1982, respectively), defendant is estopped to deny their existence and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

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I am not an American lawyer, but on the basis of the fuller quote above, one gets the sense that the judge is being playful. The rest of the judgment affirms this view.

There are many ways the judge could have worded the point without saying that “as a matter of law, the house is haunted”.

(And as an English lawyer, the true Hallowe’en horror of the passage is that estoppel is a matter of equity and not a matter of law, but we shall let that pass.)

The judge could have simply said that the defendant was “estopped from going back on previous statements” or something similarly bland.

But the judge saw their chance to end their point with that wonderful wording, and the judge took it, much to the amusement or puzzlement of many American law students since.

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For more on ghosts and the law, please see this absolutely superb paper by Canadian lawyer Michael Shortt – and a hat-tip to William Holmes at Legal Cheek for pointing to it.

(The Shortt paper is something I would love to have written, but I would not have done such a good job. It is brilliant.)

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Happy Hallowe’en to all my readers.

How Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris and Walz is a masterpiece of persuasive prose: a songwriter’s practical lesson in written advocacy

11th September 2024

Taylor Swift has endorsed the Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

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Politically and culturally the endorsement is significant, but this is not really a political or cultural blog.

This is, however, a blog that sometimes provides close readings of key documents, and there are things about the endorsement that are perhaps worth noticing and remarking upon.

In essence: this endorsement is a masterpiece of practical written advocacy, and many law schools would do well to put it before their students.

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Look carefully at the first three paragraphs – especially the use of the first person “I” and “me/my” and the second person “you” (emphasis added):

“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most. As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can about their proposed policies and plans for this country.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.

“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”

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In the first paragraph, she ensures that she identifies with you the reader – “Like many of you [comma]” and “As a voter [comma]”.

There are four “yous” in that first paragraph: you, you, you, you.

You are already half-nodding along. You and Swift have common ground.

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In the second paragraph, she then describes things of personal concern – but here she avoids putting “I” at the start of any sentence. This makes it look that she is describing the situation objectively.

She deftly – and convincingly – justifies making a political endorsement. The sentences “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.” are perfectly reasonable.

Two premises leading to a “conclusion”, and in just one paragraph.

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You will see that so far she has avoided starting any sentence with “I”.

And then, with the third paragraph, wham.

The first sentence beginning with “I” is the actual endorsement.

And then every sentence in the third paragraph begins with “I”: bam bam bam.

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Also, like any good advocate, Swift is careful to make the listener or reader feel that it is their own decision to make, and again this is skilfully done:

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.”

Note the rhythm: I, I, you, you, you.

The most effective persuasion is often to lead the listener or reader to making their own decision – and to make them feel they are making their own decision.

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Finally, the pay-off: the thing that will linger.

The reader is already half-aware of what is coming, because of the photograph.

A good pay-off is often a call-back – and here, cleverly, the call-back is to the visual clue the reader would have registered before even reading.

“With love and hope,

Taylor Swift
Childless Cat Lady”

This is, of course, a swipe and a blow against J. D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee.

And so Swift mocks the Lilliputian.

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Supporting Donald Trump is too much for Richard Cheney

7th September 2024

Donald Trump is convicted – but it is now the judicial system that may need a good defence strategy

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Trump’s case – a view from an English legal perspective

24th April 2024

I am not an American lawyer, but here are some thoughts from an English litigation perspective.

Trump is adept at what he calls (or his ghost writer called) ‘the art of the deal’ – that is a transactional approach based on exploiting leverage.

Such an approach is not unhelpful in pre-trial shenanigans, where it is one party dealing with another party.  Pre-trial litigation is often deal-making by another name.  But when a dispute gets to court (and most Trump-related litigation does not get to a courtroom) then such bilateral game-playing becomes far less important.  A third party – the judge (and sometimes jury) takes power.  Trump’s blustering and bargaining is not well suited for this.  Bullying will now not be enough.

And there will also be another thing he now cannot control: evidence. And this evidence will feed into the media mainstream, with the added credibility of being on oath.  For somebody who is a deft manipulator of the media and his public image this los of information control will also be painful for him.

I have no idea if Trump will be convicted.  I suspect it will be hard to get a conviction.

But he is now a fish out of water, at least for a while.

 

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