Due process is what distinguishes us as a people from the monsters who do commit heinous crimes. If there’s no due process, we’re a society that can just lynch people on an accusation, with no need to get it right.
-Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
“The choice is not between order and liberty.”
The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.
-Justice Robert Jackson
Music for Thursday Night
Music for Friday Night
On Patriotism
“Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now: that is, we have a government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”
– U.S. Grant (1861)
Thought for the Day – February 23, 2025
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Stand Up, Speak Out, and Defend Our Democracy
It is time for every American patriot to stand up, speak out, and defend our democratic processes because the moment we allow them to be eroded is the moment that we risk losing the freedoms and justice they were built to protect, and that countless Americans have fought and sacrificed to defend.
-AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes
Public Corruption – Thursday night edition
Steve Vladeck has a summary of DOJ corruption under Trump:
There isn’t enough electronic ink to fully summarize the background of the Eric Adams saga. To make a very long story short, the 110th Mayor of the City of New York was indicted last year by federal prosecutors on one count of conspiracy to receive campaign contributions from foreign nationals and commit wire fraud and bribery; two counts of soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals; and one count of soliciting and accepting a bribe. In essence, the indictment claimed that Adams received more than $100,000 worth of free plane tickets and luxury hotel stays from wealthy Turkish nationals and at least one government official over the course of a decade.
Trump’s AG, Pam Bondi, and one of here deputies, Emil Bove, are attempting to stop the prosecution. It’s a straight up quid pro quo to enlist Adams’ assistance with deportations. Towards that end, they directed the lead prosecutors in the NY US Attorney’s office – Trump appointees themselves! – to drop it. Their direction was so egregiously unlawful that the prosecutors quit:
What’s striking about this is not just how transparent what’s actually happening is; it’s Bove’s candid admission, in today’s letter, that “the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General” take precedence over a Justice Department lawyer’s oath … to the Constitution. It would be one thing if Bove argued that the President’s (or Attorney General’s) interpretation of the Constitution takes precedence over that of an Interim U.S. Attorney. But that’s not even his argument. Rather, it’s that Sassoon (who, although it shouldn’t matter, is a Republican who clerked for Justice Scalia) had no business raising to the Attorney General her view of what the law required in a case in which it conflicts with the political preferences of the President—indeed, that it was “insubordinate” for her to do so.
My original post follows below the break but Vladeck’s write-up is much better.
Music for the Cold & Dark
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law”.
“We have to get out of the mindset that these people are going to follow the law. Yes that’s how it’s supposed to work, but we are entering a different paradigm. They believe they are the law, not subject to it.”
Plan accordingly.