Ethics Quote of the Month: D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“It would be a striking paradox if the President, who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’ were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity…We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, rejecting former President Donald Trump’s bonkers claim that Presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts committed while in office.

The ruling is here.

Seldom has any court appeal in a high profile case had a more obvious and virtually assured resolution. The ethics alarms analysis of this issue was discussed in “Ethics Zugzwang In Trump’s Immunity Appeal,” and in this subsequent post. I hope it’s unnecessary to say that I agree with the D.C. Circuit’s ruling.

I wonder if Trump considered that if he won the appeal, President Biden could order that he and his MAGA supporters could be summarily shot as “clear and present dangers to democracy.” He could order the execution of the Republican contingent in the House, too, to forestall an impeachment.

What a great theory.

It was unethical for Trump and his lawyers to make the argument. If I had been his attorney—and before all the dust settles, Trump might eventually have to retain lawyers as inexperienced in litigation I am, and maybe even me—I would have withdrawn before I’d file such an irresponsible appeal.

“Civility Update” Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The social media wag who posted this wrote, “And just like that, I’m a vegan!”

A true typo doesn’t count as incivility. This one just adds to the long indictments of our crumbling educational system and the cratering quality control in U.S. industries from aircraft manufacturing to health care services. It may well be that this label appeared because of a combination of both: someone in a position to prevent the label from being used thought the typo was funny, and let it go.

Civility Update

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Quick version: It’s getting worse.

You knew that, I assume. Just to pick one example, we heard a Presidential candidate in a debate call an opponent “scum”—and it was a female candidate. Remember when one of the arguments for putting women in office just because they were women was that they would civilize politics. Ah, those halcyon days of innocence!

The new year began with another one of those TV commercials that defines cleverness as “using language that is code for a vulgar phase or word.” Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about one of those, a tax refund service ad that used “What the buck?” and “Buck yeah!” This was even less clever than the still rampant “Let’s go Brandon!” coded insult to the President. (The coded use of “fuck” in that case is stillmore clever and slightly more civil than how Rep. Tlaib, one of the supposedly civilized female Congresswomen, referred to the previous President when she said for public consumption, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!”)

In the past, Ethics Alarms has noted low-life advertisers using code words for “ass” (Verizon), alluding to sexual intercourse (Reese’s), evoking the word “shit” (K-Mart and DraftKings), as well as Jackson Hewitt’s inspiration for “buck,” Booking.com. For some reason, the un-named pizza company (I don’t want to give them any publicity for being, in Nikki’s terms, “scum”) commercial, promoting a really good pizza- and-other-stuff deal, showing a young woman exclaiming, “Shut the back door!” upon learning the shockingly low price bothered me even more than the past examples. “Shut the back door'” and also “Shut the front door” are street-talk euphemisms for “Shut the fuck up!” This is pandering to Generation Z, of course, but it’s also obscenely gratuitous.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Killer Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Once again, Ethics Alarms visits the thorny issue of what kind of conduct permanently disqualifies someone from being a trusted lawyer—and in the law, if you can’t be trusted, you can’t be a lawyer. Last October, I wrote about “the rest of the story” concerning Shon Hopwood, who served more than a decade in federal prison for bank robbery, became a “jailhouse lawyer,” went to law school after his release, passed the D.C. bar exam, was admitted to practice, and became a professor at my old alma mater, Georgetown Law Center. In 2017, I had written that he should not have been trusted sufficiently to receive a law license, as such a serious felony committed as an adult is ominous signature significance for someone whom society may choose to trust as a citizen after serving his prison sentence, but not for one trusted to administer and advise regarding the law. The second post was prompted after Hopwood was arrested for multiple counts of domestic battery, and relieved of his teaching duties.

True, Hopwood didn’t steal a client’s money or commit a breach of the legal ethics rules (other than breaking the law, which is a breach of the ethics rules that doesn’t involve the unethical practice of law). I was sorely tempted to say “I told you so!” to the vast majority of my colleagues who disagree with my bias against bank-robbing lawyers, but I resisted the temptation.

As far as I can determine, Hopwood has not been tried or convicted, and maybe that explains why he is still listed among GULC’s faculty. His Wikipedia entry does not mention his latest arrest, but it does mention that he hired Tiffany Trump as a research assistant.

I’m sure this is all her father’s fault, somehow.

Continue reading →

The Drag Queen School Principal Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I was going to make this tale an ethics quiz, but decided that we’ve settled this issue before.

Dr. Shane Murnan had been the principal at John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City since June. After he was hired, The Libs of TikTok revealed last September that he was an extracurricular drag queen, and placed photos of him as “Shantel Mandalay” on social media. Predictably, conservatives pounced and demanded that he be fired, while the school defended him. The uproar intensified, however, and Shantel was eventually placed on administrative leave.

Now he has resigned, finding that the scrutiny and criticism from social media and elsewhere is too much to bear.

Continue reading →

The Deceitful January Jobs Report

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It seems increasingly apparent that the Democrats and Joe Biden’s election strategy, besides trying to convince the public that Donald Trump is the spawn of Hitler and Satan, is to lie, deceive and gaslight voters into believing that down is up, bad is good, and that Biden has done a wonderful job even though by all visible markers his administration has been a disastrous failure.

In the latest example, the January jobs report was hailed by Joe and his minions as more proof that the economy was not just good, but spectacular. Naturally, the news media carried the message. “January Jobs Report Was a Blowout. Disregard the Seasonal Noise” proclaimed Barrons. NPR, our Democratic Party mouthpiece, crowed, “The U.S. created an extraordinary number of jobs in January. Here’s a deeper look.” “U.S. employment soars by 353,000, stunning Wall Street,” said an obviously stunned MarketWatch. “Another shockingly good jobs report shows America’s economy is booming” said CNN. The New York Times joined the parade, as expected: “Blockbuster Jobs Report Backs Up Fed’s Patience as It Waits to Cut Rates.” NBC News was positively giddy: “The great American jobs machine keeps revving in an election year.”

My son, an auto mechanic who is, as far as I can tell, completely apolitical, had just recently conveyed a completely different picture. He says that everyone he knows is struggling financially, and that he personally had a disastrous month because he is largely paid by the hour. Few Northern Virginians were bringing their cars in to be serviced. “Nobody has any money,” he told me. He worked the fewest hours last month than any time since the pandemic lockdown. Apparently he wasn’t the only one.

Continue reading →

Worst Nobel Peace Prize Nomination Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Giving a Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama for doing nothing but existing looks increasingly reasonable. A member of the Norwegian Parliament just made a sufficiently outrageous nomination for the honor to topple the previous champion while making Obama look like the Dalai Lama.

The previous prize for a ridiculous nomination came in 2021, when a different member of the Norwegian Parliament, Petter Eide, formally nominated Black Lives Matter for the honor. “I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality,” Eide said. “Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice. They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness about racial injustice.” Riiight.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: George Stephanopoulos [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Wow. Didn’t see that Ethics Hero coming at all.

ABC’s ubiquitous news host George Stephanopoulos has a dreadful EA dossier, though it hasn’t filled up lately since I decided around 2016 that none of the Sunday Morning news shows were professional or ethical enough to take time away from my sock drawer. However, this morning he did something bold and necessary. When his guest, Super-Trumper Senator J.D. Vance, made a bonkers and irresponsible case that the President could be justified in defying the Supreme Court, George just cut him off and ended the interview.

Bravo.

Continue reading →

Unethical Headline of the Week: The LA Times

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“How throwing soup at the Mona Lisa can help fight climate change”

You can read this opinion piece if you want, but the headline accurately conveys all you need to know by itself, I hope. The author, an associate professor of environmental studies at USC (so you know the quality of critical thinking and ethical analysis they are teaching there), essentially is making an argument for terrorism, because sometimes it works.

“Objections to acts of climate activism such as the latest food fight at the Louvre are understandable but might miss the point. Protesters’ perceived madness is indeed method,” Shannon Gibson writes. And the method is attracting attention to a cause by disruptive, selfish and destructive acts having no relationship to the goals of the activists. In some respects, violent acts of terrorism are easier to rationalize: at least those seeking a Palestinian state are directing their “method” at those with some direct relationship to the entity the terrorist blame for their plight. Throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or the Mona Lisa has no such relevance.

Continue reading →

Nick Kristof’s Moral Preening Over Gaza

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems like a good man, a decent human being. He reminds me of many of the dedicated liberals I went to law school and college with, always gathering signatures to ban the bomb, end a war, fight pollution, cure cancer, save whales, get universal employment…you know the list. These are the people who tear up when they hear “Imagine.” They were classic liberals before the ethics rot of progressivism, and that’s Kristof too.

Today he issued a characteristic Kristof primal scream about the carnage in Gaza, and if there was ever a “Think of the children!” lament, this is it.

It is the fourth such column by Kristof since the Hamas attack, having earlier submitted “I’m Crying for All the Victims That Are Going to Suffer”, “We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit“, “We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children.” The beating and bleeding heart of “What Can We Possibly Say to the Children of Gaza?” or, in another format, We Can’t Justify This Much Suffering, is in these sentences…

Over the years, I’ve covered many bloody wars and written scathingly about how governments in Russia, Sudan and Syria recklessly bombed civilians. This time, it’s different… as a taxpayer, I’m helping to pay for the bombs.

Gaza is also different from Syria and Ukraine, of course, in that Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape. Any government would have struck back, and Hamas maximized the suffering of civilians by using them as human shields.

Yet military response is not a binary choice; it exists on a continuum. Israel, traumatized by the attack it suffered, elected to retaliate with 2,000-pound bombs, destroy entire neighborhoods and allow only a trickle of aid into the territory, which is now teetering on the brink of famine. The upshot is that this does not feel like a war on Hamas but rather a war on Gazans.

Continue reading →