Leadership

‘Nah, Those Prosecutions of Trump Weren’t Political!’

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One inconvenient aspect of creeping senility is that the sufferers often say out loud what is normally filed in the brain file labeled “Never Speak of This, Ever.” And so it is that, as the Washington Post reports,

“In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to multiple people familiar with his comments. [….] Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election.’

Of course, we all knew that the plan was to burden Trump with dubious and politically motivated prosecutions in the year leading up to the election, and with a normal human being, it would have worked, or at least caused him to have a stroke or a breakdown. Instead, the Democratic Party’s “democratic norms”-wrecking strategy alienated Americans who don’t like to see their government acting like the Stasi. It showed a strength of character and fighting spirit that Americans still seek in their leaders. It proved how desperate and hypocritical Trumps foes and adversaries were. But the Axis denied it all—and now the intended beneficiary of the plot to make Donald Trump run for President as a “convicted felon” and “adjudicated rapist” has admitted that a better Attorney General would have nailed Trump before he could get elected.

And Donald Trump was the existential threat to the republic, this same man told us.

Has there ever been a time in our history when an entire political party and all of its voters and supporters so deserved to wear paper bags over their heads in disgrace?

Addendum To “Return of the Faithless Legislator”: What If…?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m hesitant to put this in print, but the idea has kept me awake much of the night. I meant to mention the idea in yesterday’s post about state legislators flipping their party affiliations after an election, but but, as too often happens, I was rushing because I had other responsibilities to fulfill and left it out.

I wouldn’t call this post an Ethics Quiz; I’d say it’s a thought experiment. Here it is:

What if Donald Trump either announced that he was no longer a Republican, or threatened to do so?

There is nothing stopping him from switching parties, or declaring that he is President under the banner of his own party, whether he called it “MAGA” or something else. The Constitution didn’t have a word about parties, and the Founders generally thought they were something to avoid. Trump could even cloak his radical decision in the spirit of the Founders. “I am not a President for Republicans or Democrats, but for all Americans!” he could say in the announcement, a national address. What would happen? The mind boggles, or at least mine does. Here are some thoughts and questions…

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Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As was anticipated after reports that were issued over the weekend, “President Joe Biden announced” today that he has commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers, thus taking them off federal death row. They will now serve out life sentences in prison, being housed, fed, given medical attention and more at taxpayer expense. This was done deliberately to foil the announced intention of President-elect Donald Trump to carry out the verdicts of juries and the courts.

“Biden’s statement”—this is in quotation marks because he didn’t write it, probably doesn’t understand it and quite possibly never read it or approved it—reads,

“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss. But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Ethics observations:

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Is The Worst President the One Who Was Never President at All, and Other Thoughts on Recent Biden White House Revelations

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

It’s no excuse and only moral luck, but I am now glad that I have waited so long to conclude the Ethics Alarms inquiry into who was the worst American President. (That final post on the topic is coming this weekend, I promise.)

For important new data is coming in: The Wall Street Journal issued a report based on extensive interviews with White House insiders and Biden aides that indicates there was a years-long cover-up of the degree of cognitive decline Biden had experienced since he was Vice-President. Both the Journal’s reporting and recent New York Times articles indicate what should be treated as a national scandal but probably won’t be.

His party knew that Biden was infirm mentally and physically before he was nominated to run against then-President Trump in 2020. Once he was nominated, Joe’ true condition was hidden from the inattentive public. I knew that Biden was sinking into dementia as early as 2019; it wasn’t hard to see, and I told many friends and associates that. The ones who hated Donald Trump didn’t car. Biden’s successful 2020 campaign was constrained by the (stupid) Wuhan virus lockdown and a complicit news media oddly incurious about a Constitutional crisis materializing right before their eyes.

Once Biden was elected, the cover-up continued. Top cabinet members were unable to meet with him or even speak with him. Biden held only nine Cabinet meetings in four years! Staff regularly stood in for him at official events. Other staff were assigned to keep him from wandering off. Biden couldn’t hold morning meetings because he was “not at his best” early in the day, and he seldom was up to working past 4pm unless he had spent the day gathering his strength and what was left of his wits. Biden cancelled important national security meetings, with his aides explaining to attendees that the President had “bad days and good days.”

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The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

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On Trump’s Fight Fight Fight Perfume

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

No doubt about it, one of the “norms” that President-Elect Donald Trump is shredding, stomping on and setting on fire is the tradition of Presidents not using their office, visibility, popularity and influence to sell products, with their names as brands. I’m not sure doing this had even occurred to previous White House residents; it certainly never occurred to the Founders…or me, to be honest.

Naturally, because it’s Trump, the usual Axis snipers are horrified. A particularly stinky response issued from New York Times Trump-hating columnist Frank Bruni‘s poison keyboard, titled “Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks.” [Gift link! Ho Ho Ho!]This is what the Axis propaganda machine is left with: playground-level insults for the elected President before he can even take the oath. Honeymoon? Respect? Good faith? Patriotism? Unity? Bi-Partisanship? Nah! What are they?

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The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

The last installment of the series and inquiry was posted over a year ago, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. At the end of Part 5, the field for consideration as the Worst President Ever stood at six: the field is now Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter.

I am glad, as it turns out, that I delayed posting the last chapter until now. A year ago, it would have been unfair and unwise to rank the current President (sort of) in the competition. Now, it is fair to say, a verdict on Joe Biden will not be premature.

Part 5 ended with Ronald Reagan, leaving #41, George H.W. Bush as the next contestant. Bush I, as I like to call him, is a member of a couple of Presidential clubs, none of them complimentary or prestigious.

Bush is in the small group of Presidents who never would have been elected to the top job if their predecessor had not ostentatiously designated them as a anointed successors to continue their policies. Only extremely popular and successful Chief Executives can do this. Before Bush, who was anointed as a worthy successor by Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson had pushed his protege and Vice-President, Martin Van Buren, into the White House, and nearly a century later Teddy Roosevelt did the same with his best friend, William Howard Taft. Franklin Roosevelt could have also done it, but he just kept running for office himself instead. Arguably President Eisenhower could have declared Richard Nixon as the one to carry out a third Eisenhower term, but he didn’t: his support for Nixon was tepid at best, and Ike’s popularity at the end of his administration was not in the Jackson-Teddy range. Like Van Buren and Taft, Papa Bush was a mediocre leader at best, and also like them, was a one-term President.

Bush is also a member of the “Vice-Presidents elected President without first becoming President upon the death of a President” club. It is not an impressive group: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Van Buren, Nixon, Bush I and Biden. If we were playing the “Sesame Street” game “One of these things is not like the other,” Jefferson would be the obvious answer.

The third club Bush belongs to is the “President by Default” club whose only other member is #15, James Buchanan. Like Buchanan, George H.W. Bush was a career government bureaucrat who jumped from one position to another, until he had nowhere to go but up. Call them Peter Principle Presidents: with the top job, both Bush and Buchanan reached their level of incompetence. Neither had any feel for leadership, in a job that requires that above all.

I don’t think anyone would argue that Bush I was the Worst President Ever, or even the worst President Bush, but he is one of my least favorite Presidents. After the successful first Iraq War, Bush’s popularity was nearly in the 90% range. In the American Presidency popularity is power: Bush had an opportunity to accomplish something grand and good that under normal political conditions would be unachievable. He could have addressed the national debt, the fiscal mess in Social Security, healthcare, immigration…the list is long. Instead, he did nothing. Bush just frittered away his moment of power, at one point even saying through his Chief of Staff, John Sununu, that everything was hunky-dory and no major initiatives were needed. This is the antithesis of leadership, also imagination, stewardship, and responsibility.

The present inquiry isn’t seeking to find the President who most spectacularly squandered his opportunities, or this Bush would be a leading contender. He was a weak President, but his lack of ambition or initiative stopped him from being a bad one just as it prevented him from being a good one.

Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.

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Former President Barack Obama Runs For 2024’s “Hypocrite Of The Year”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Oh, shut up, Barack!

In a speech yesterday at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, Barack Obama demonstrated his abundance of gall by calling for an end to “divisiveness” and for Americans to embrace compromise while building coalitions, something he refused to do as President.

Obama, after pledging to be a President of all the people, “bringing black and white together,”also exacerbated racial divisions like no President before him since Woodrow Wilson, a big Jim Crow fan. He chose to avoid political compromise during his entire term, laying the foundations of the gridlock we have seen since with the enthusiastic assistance of Nancy Pelosi in the House and the now thankfully dead Harry Reid Senate. As a former President, Obama did not extend his successor the same courtesy George W. Bush extended to him, which was to stay on the sidelines and withhold public criticism. He vividly illustrated why the unwritten rule and “democratic norm” in the U.S. has been that former Presidents, as the New York Times stated in 2007, “should speak respectfully of their successors, or at least with some measure of restraint.”

Did you know that Donald Trump doesn’t respect “democratic norms”?

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Unethical Tweet of the Week: “The View” DEI Hispanic, Ana Navarro-Cárdenas 

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Navarro, a fixture on ABC’s “The View,” has been an embarrassment to all of her media employers; they have just been too foolish to realize it. She’s a fake Republican/conservative, initially hired by CNN as a token so she could bash Donald Trump and claim objectivity. She isn’t witty, analytical or smart and has a speech impediment: if she were a white male, she would be defending DUI cases.

That tweet is special. She’s allegedly a lawyer, and she doesn’t know what a precedent is? The precedent is a President giving a suspiciously extensive pardon including crimes that haven’t been charged yet that the President might have directly benefited from to his son. That’s never happened before because it directly benefits the President and has the appearance of impropriety.

The whole tweet, moreover, is based on a passel of rationalizations falsely applied, like “Everybody does it” (#1) and “There are worse things” (#22). “Every President” doesn’t pardon their immediate family. The closest analog was Bill Clinton pardoning his half-brother for a cocaine conviction, but Roger’s crimes were neither as numerous nor as serious as Hunter’s, nor did anyone think Bill had any connection to them.

Saying that Trump also appointed his father-in-law as French ambassador is as relevant to Navarro’s argument as writing, “And he has bad breath, too!” That factoid has nothing to do with the pardon.

Additionally, citing Wilson, Clinton and Trump as Presidential role models in a matter of ethics is idiotic strategy. They are three of the most ethically-inert of all our Chief Executives, and those pardons match their proclivities. Defending Biden by comparing him to that trio is desperate.

I saved the best for last, though: Navarro-Cárdenas is making Americans dumber by spreading Presidential fiction. Woodrow Wilson had no brother-in-law named “Hunter DeButts,” so he couldn’t have pardoned him.

This pure fiction, the results of Navarro being hoaxed or the victim of an AI “hallucination”: either way, it’s irresponsible journalism. She obviously didn’t check her facts before making a false statement, one that impugned a President (though one who earned a lot of impugning).

Another Ethics Issue Highlighted By Biden’s Hunter Pardon [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

President Biden’s controversial and extreme pardon of his black sheep son did more than call into (further) question his honesty, integrity and trustworthiness. It also highlighted another ugly facet of his failed Presidency.

The power to grant clemency is enshrined in the Constitution is an important failsafe device against legal injustice.  When judges or juries convict an innocent person or impose an unjust sentence, often after unethical prosecutorial conduct, Presidents and governors, in the case of state crimes, possess the  irreversible power to either commute a sentence to issue a pardon, which wipes the slate clean and removes the conviction altogether. Sure the power, like all powers, can be abused, has been abused and will be abused, but it is still necessary. However, President Biden has used that power appropriately less frequently than any modern President, though our criminal laws have multiplied.

“Mr. Biden has granted 25 pardons and commuted the sentences of 131 other people, according to the most recent Justice Department data,” wrote law professors Rachel E. Barkow and Mark Osler in a September 2024 editorial in The New York Times. “That is a mere 1.4 percent of the petitions he has received, based on our analysis…Mr. Biden has issued fewer clemency grants so far than the 238—144 pardons and 94 commutations—issued by Mr. Trump during his first administration,” the Times’ Kenneth Vogel noted this week.

True, there is still time for Biden to do some good with his pardon and clemency powers, but he should have been using them all along. Biden is extending a pattern in which Presidents increasingly eschew the pardon power. “Between 1932 and 1988 the percentage of total cases acted on by the president that had been sent to him with the Justice Department’s blessing averaged around 30%,”  a 2015 piece by the Collateral Consequences Resource Center revealed. “The percentage of cases sent forward with a favorable recommendation dropped to single digits beginning with the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and it has dropped even lower in the past 15 years…The absolute numbers also tell a tale: President [Barack] Obama…granted more sentence commutations than any president since Richard Nixon, but fewer full pardons than any president since John Adams.”

Ah yes, Obama. He was a notable hypocrite on the matter of pardons. Continue reading →