Comments of the Day: Point/Counterpoint on “Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?”

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This post sparked several excellent comments, but the exchange between Holly A. and Cees Van Barnevelt was particularly outstanding. Holly’s comment was more political analysis than ethics (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but CVB’s response touched on two ethics issue that get short shrift today: 1) the fact that Donald Trump is indeed a patriot, is addressing matters as he promised to address them, 2) his popularity and power is mostly due to that, and not some kind of mindless cult of personality. (That was Obama.)

Here is Holly’s Comment of the Day on the post “Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?,” followed by CVB’s retort:

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CVB: “My first question is what you mean about the Republicans unraveling today? I see the Trump administration getting quite a lot of work done, and fulfilling the promises made during the election. Are you referring to Congress?”

ME: Good question. I see the Democrats as unraveling externally, the Republicans as unraveling internally. Hence the disintegration of the former is easily observable, while the latter still looks quite sound. Congress has managed to pass legislation in record time and with a slim majority, which is a considerable feat! And yes, the Trump administration has also been busily at work with some clear accomplishments in line with campaign promises. What I see as the structural unraveling at the core of the GOP is the transformation of what used to be a party with a reasonably coherent set of values (as articulated by JM) into a personality/strongman cult in which loyalty/submission to the leader trumps adherence to values and attention to the priorities of their constituents. While they are in power, this looks like unity and strength. But what will things look like in the post-Trump era? Succession issues are one of the ways empires fall apart and companies fail. However, whether this supposition is correct will await the next chapter.

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Ethics Quiz: Teaching Constitutional Law

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is a bit different from the usual Ethics Alarms quiz.

Over at Dorf on Law, a site I had forgotten about, Eric Segal poses twenty questions about how Constitutional Law should be taught from this point going forward. They are:

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Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

On Martha’s Vineyard, food store proprietor named Krem Miskevich has told lawyer and Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowitz that he can’t buy his delicious pierogis because the liberal Democrat has periodically defended Donald Trump in various columns and bad people (like Jeffrey Epstein) in criminal cases. Dershowitz has previously complained bitterly about how his progressive neighbors on the picturesque Massachusetts island community have excluded him from the social life there because he is regarded as a traitor to the cause of knee-jerk wokism.

In addition to being an illiberal bully and an American devoid of core American values like pluralism and respect for free expression, Miskevich is an ignorant idiot who doesn’t comprehend the role of lawyers in a democracy. Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Let me repeat that for any Miskeviches who might be drooling out there: Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Clarence Darrow didn’t approve of the character and conduct of child-killers Leopold and Loeb. John Adams did not endorse the conduct of the British soldiers who did the shooting in the Boston Massacre. This is enshrined in the lawyers’ Rules of Professional Conduct. It makes it possible for the 6th Amendment rights to a fair trial and legal representation to exist. Alan Dershowitz understands this. The pierogi-maker, a self-righteous fool, does not.

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Ethics Dunces: At Least Two Dozen Federal Judges Who Don’t Get That “Appearance of Impropriety” Thingy

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I don’t have to exert myself much for this one…

Paul Caron reveals on his excellent Tax Prof Blog that a new report released today by Fix the Court documents how two dozen federal judges who teach at law schools went ahead and ruled in cases involving their law schools’ parent universities. Conflict? What conflict?

Multiple circuits (p. 12 in the report) and Judicial Conference policy (p. 11) have held that just because a judge teaches in one part of a university doesn’t mean that he or she will be biased in adjudicating a case in which that university is a party. Funny—most people, including most lawyers, would call this a slam dunk “appearance of impropriety” situation…because it is.

“This has conflict written all over it,” Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth said. “If you teach at a law school, and especially if the law school is paying you, you shouldn’t be sitting on cases involving the university that the law school is a part of. Even if a judge-adjunct professes, as several have, that the law school at which they teach is but ‘one small and virtually autonomous part’ of the university, a neutral observer who sees ‘OSU Law’ on a judge’s disclosure would be correct in imputing bias any time that judge presides over a case involving Ohio State University.”

That seems pretty obvious to me, but then I’m just an ethicist and spend way to much time pondering such matters.

The recent attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court for not having an enforceable code of conduct and ethics neatly distracts from the widespread corruption in the rest of the judiciary, as highlighted by the recent wave of partisan judges working with the Axis of Unethical Conduct to hamstring Trump Administration policies. Judges are more poorly trained in judicial ethics than lawyers are in legal ethics. Elected judges are partisan by design; too many judges are well-past their shelf life, and DEI mania since 2020 has loaded the judiciary with too many robed ones whose primary qualifications for the bench are immutable biological features.

The judiciary is yet another rotting institution that needs serious reform and fast—as if we didn’t have enough to worry about already.

Well, Crap…Here’s Another Open Forum. I’m Sorry.

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

My Saturday mission is to get two posts up by 10:20 am, E.S.T. So much for that. I had a bad night with my leg, which is now sitting undressed with the 4″ X 2″ giant infected wound looking less inflamed but still feeling sore. I’m trying to type on a new laptop that is driving me crazy, while a traumatized pit bull lies happily snoring on my other leg. Everything is taking me five times longer than usual, and the usual WordPress quirks that are just irritating under normal conditions now prompt me to scream a versatile epithet so loudly that my house guest keeps running over to see if I’m all right.

I hate this.

EA is blessed to have so many sharp, erudite, informed an creative participants in the commentariate (Curmie, Curmie, wherefore art thou, Curmie?) that I know this space will be well used, so I know I’m leaving the blog in good hands, but still. There is so much I want to post about, and I expected to be much closer to normal by now.

Well, enough self-flagellation. Go do that voodoo that you do so well.

Worst Woke Position of Them All…

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Ethics Alarms conflict resolution guru Extradimensional Cephalopod purports to believe that that there really are two (or more) legitimate points of view on all policy and political disputes. He expounds on this utopian vision in a comment here. I am pretty confident that he knows otherwise, but that he thinks this fantasy is worth embracing in the interests of societal comity, which is another topic.

In reality, many political and social policy positions are indefensible. Such positions are typically supported entirely by appeals to emotion, deliberate distortion of reality, and dishonest use of “facts” and “statistics.” No dispute illustrates this better than illegal immigration. Pro-illegal immigration advocacy should be accorded no respect at all.

Fact: No nation in the 21st Century can survive with open borders, especially a wealthy, free, superior nation like the US. The Woke rebuttal to this is that open borders aren’t really open borders, or “It isn’t what it is.”

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WaPo “Factchecker” Glenn Kessler Is Out…Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Glenn Kessler, the biased “factchecker” who has a dossier on Ethics Alarms as long an your metaphorical arm, accepted a buy-out from the hopelessly unethical newspaper and then, after starting his substack (where disgraced pundits go to die), issued an article that proved, as if there was ever any doubt, what an utter hack he is.

Pompously titled ‘“Democracy Dies in Darkness’ — but what if the lights are going out from within?,” his screed whines that he had to leave the Post as a matter f principle because he was urged to do what he could so the Post would “appeal more to Fox News viewers.” Gee, tough one. What would that be? Maybe not beginning every inquiry with the assumption that the Axis narrative is the correct one? Not working so hard to appeal to the Post’s 90% Democratic readership’s biases? Actually checking facts rather than opinions?

To Kessler, of course, appealing to Fox viewers means tacking news analysis to appeal to racist, ignorant fascists—you know,

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Early Open Forum (Sorry)…and a Census Note

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m sorry to have to default to this format now; I’m really and truly feeling better, but getting posts up has been more laborious than I imagined. Up here in my office I can’t elevate my wounded leg, and I still haven’t mastered my new laptop sufficiently to where posting there isn’t frustrating. Everything, it seems, takes five times longer than it should right now.

Meanwhile, the ethics topics I should be writing about, like the sudden battles over gerrymandering with the Democrats being shocked—shocked!—that Republicans would consider such treachery, require the kind of nuance and detail I can’t muster for a while.

I will make an ethics observation about today’s Trump Deranged freakout over the President’s decision that we need a new census. Of course, like everything he has done or will ever do, this proves the President is an autocrat and violates the Constitution.

I very much doubt that the ultimate decision will be that the U.S. can’t have a census for good cause more frequently than every ten years. The Constitution’s requirement of one every ten years can be (and should be) read as a minimum. If I decide to have a physical six months after my last one, should my doctor forbid that, saying that the best practices limit me to only one a year?

Trump’s larger problem is the inclusion of illegal immigrants in the census. This is an anomaly ( there were no such things as illegal immigrants when the Constitution was written), but the courts have upheld the counting of illegals; it would take a Constitutional amendment to fix this, or maybe a law declaring that illegals do not “reside” in the U.S.

It is wrong that states and cities defying federal law by their “sanctuary” status should benefit from it, but that’s what the current system permits. If Trump thinks we can deport sufficient numbers of illegal immigrants to make a difference in the apportionment of House seats, ICE has got to get a lot bigger, and fast.

I swear, I’ll get back to the traditional 3-4 posts a day soon…

Two Quotes That No Member of Congress Should Utter, Ever.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Quote #1: “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.” Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL). She added to this declaration of disloyalty her assessment that the U.S. has been characterized by “imperialism, militarization, conquest, control, competition in its attempt at domination.”

Quote #2: “Listen, Donald Trump is a piece of shit, OK? We know that! Yes, he is! He is! He is!” You can guess this one, right? Yes, it’s Dunning-Kruger victim Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx), once again descending into vulgarity as a lazy substitute for reasoned discourse, of which she is incapable.

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Observations on the Cincinnati Beatdown

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

While languishing in the hospital, this was the story that I felt most frustrated about not being able to post. Not that I could get a single, clear, spin-free account of what happened. In the aftermath of some Cincinnati event or festival or something, a black man and a white one got into a verbal altercation. The white guy seems to have uttered a racial slur, precipitating a brawl that was quickly joined by a mob of black youths who beat up the white guy and then turned their anger on a white woman who tried to intervene, knocking her unconscious and kicking her as she lay helpless on the ground. An estimated hundred bystanders, most or all of them black, stood by taking videos, laughing, and cheering the mob violence on. There was only one call to 911.

1. Almost all of the national coverage of this incident has been on Fox News. The New York Times, interestingly, hasn’t reported the story at all. The natural question has been raised: If a black man and woman had been attacked and beaten by a mob of young whites as 100 white bystanders cheered them on, there would be protests in the streets and calls for “justice.” Why the double standard?

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