The law, Judge Sullivan, and Michael Flynn: what now?
You can find a really long article on the subject here. An excerpt:
So, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Rinaldi, it is impossible to know what was meant by “with leave of court” when it was inserted into the text of the rule proposal that became Rule 48(a) without explanation.
But the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit conclusively told us what it did NOT mean — it does not mean that Judge Sullivan has the power to go behind the reasons for the decision set forth in the DOJ Motion to Dismiss, and that he does not have the authority to substitute his view of the case for the Executive Branch’s view of the case based on four words in a procedural rule.
Here is my prediction for what Judge Sullivan will eventually do if he is forced to make a decision on the motion. He will write a long long opinion that is a one-sided work of historical revision that ignores nearly all the misconduct on the part of the investigators and prosecutors, and relies greatly on the proceedings by which Gen. Flynn was led to plead guilty. He will then comb through every scrap of paper he can find to denigrate and dismiss the rationale that has been offered by DOJ, and find that all the legal arguments offered are specious.
He will conclude by excoriating Gen. Flynn for the “conduct” underlying the charges that were brought against him — and likely for uncharged conduct involving the allegations of FARA violations (but he won’t make the mistake of referencing “treason” again), and explain why Gen. Flynn’s conduct, in Judge Sullivan’s view, was a threat to the Flag, Democracy, Apple Pie, and Hot Dogs.
But in the final paragraph he will say that, notwithstanding everything he has found to be true as reflected in his opinion, he has no choice under the law but to grant DOJ’s motion and dismiss the case.
He’ll order that his opinion be published in the Federal Supplement, with the goal being that his account will be the definitive historical account of the Gen. Flynn saga.
I don’t know what will happen next in the Flynn case. But I’m thinking perhaps a writ of mandamus:
To preserve the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers, the Department of Justice has no choice now but to seek a writ of mandamus from the D.C. Circuit Court ordering the criminal charge against Flynn dismissed and reassigning the case to another judge…
What was surprising—no, unbelievable—is what Judge Sullivan did on Wednesday: He entered an order “appoint[ing] The Honorable John Gleeson (Ret.) as amicus curiae to present arguments in opposition to the government’s Motion to Dismiss.”
This order was jaw-dropping for two reasons. First, the U.S. Constitution makes clear that the judiciary has no business second-guessing prosecutorial decisions. In fact, the very case Judge Sullivan cited for the proposition that he had the inherent authority to appoint an amicus curiae—United States v. Fokker—made clear Sullivan’s order was lawless…
The Fokker court explained that while mandamus is an extraordinary remedy, it is appropriate where the petitioner: (i) has “no other adequate means to attain the relief he desires”; (ii) “show[s] that his right to the writ is ‘clear and indisputable’”; and then “(iii) the court ‘in the exercise of its discretion, must be satisfied that the writ is appropriate under the circumstances.’”…
In analyzing the propriety of the district court’s refusal to approve the agreement, the appellate court summarized controlling principles of constitutional law: “The Executive’s primacy in criminal charging decisions is long settled. That authority stems from the Constitution’s delegation of ‘take Care’ duties, U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, and the pardon power, id. § 2, to the Executive Branch. Decisions to initiate charges, or to dismiss charges once brought, ‘lie[] at the core of the Executive’s duty to see to the faithful execution of the laws.’”…
The “leave of court” requirement, the court stressed, “has been understood to be a narrow one—’to protect a defendant against prosecutorial harassment . . . when the [g]overnment moves to dismiss an indictment over the defendant’s objection.’” Such review in that case is to guard against “a scheme of ‘prosecutorial harassment’ of the defendant through repeated efforts to bring—and then dismiss—charges.”
Fokker then concluded: “So understood, the ‘leave of court’ authority gives no power to a district court to deny a prosecutor’s Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss charges based on a disagreement with the prosecution’s exercise of charging authority…
The Fokker decision was a 2016 decision from the D.C. Circuit Court and, as such, establishes “mandatory precedent,” i.e., precedent that must be followed, by all D.C. district court judges—including Judge Sullivan…
The government should, as it did in Fokker, seek a writ of mandamus from the D.C. Circuit, directing the charge against Flynn be dismissed.
The government should also seek reassignment of the case on remand, meaning that when the case returns to the lower court for dismissal of the charge, it goes to a different judge. While “reassignment is warranted only in the ‘exceedingly rare circumstance,’” such as where a judge’s conduct is “so extreme as to display clear inability to render fair judgment,” Judge Sullivan’s selection of Judge Gleeson as his “friend of the court” reveals Judge Sullivan’s irretractable bias.
The same day Judge Sullivan named Judge Gleeson to serve in the amicus curiae role, the Washington Post ran an op-ed co-authored by Gleeson, entitled, “The Flynn case isn’t over until the judge says it’s over.”…
…[W]hat reeks is Judge Sullivan’s selection of a clearly biased “friend of the court” who appears to have already pre-judged the prosecutor’s motive and found it improper.
How can anyone defend Judge Sullivan’s action? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Just keep repeating “Flynn’s a traitor” and “he lied to the FBI, which is a crime” and “Putin’s puppet” over and over, and you’ll find a vast audience among those who hate Trump and could not care less about the rule of law, except as a potent phrase to use against their enemies.
This case is sickening. Obamagate is sickening. The entire episode is proof – as thought we needed any more – of how much power the left has gotten and how determined they are to exercise it to get more power. It’s also a demonstration of the fact that the Gramscian march through education, the press, entertainment, the arts, and other institutions of our social and cultural life has proceeded to the degree that way too many people in the US are now on board with this travesty of justice.
the Gramscian march through education, the press, entertainment, the arts, and other institutions of our social and cultural life has proceeded
The key institution captured by Dems is Higher Ed – most colleges have long been discriminating against hiring Reps. For decades they have allowed increasing demonization of Reps and Christians, while forbidding negative expressions about most other groups. “Republicans are evil” — that’s the message from most colleges.
Many go thru this indoctrination without accepting it – many do accept it. Most accept it. Because accepting it allows those expressing it to hate, and hate is fun. They can hate Reps, hate Christians, and hate normal America. Once the emotional hate is activated in the heart, the brain is engaged to justify it, to rationalize it.
The in-crowd, the college educated, hate Trump. Hate Kavanaugh. Hate Bush. Hated Reagan. Hate Palin. Hated both McCain & Romney while they were running as Reps, but half-supported them while they were criticizing other Reps. And it sure looks like Romney wants to be in with the in-crowd.
A huge important step is to make it illegal, and enforced, that colleges cannot discriminate against Republicans. Those that do, and have in the past, should lose their tax-exempt status, and their students should lose the ability to get Fed. Ed loans.
This needs to be done, and I’m almost “broken record” in support of stopping gov’t support for this indoctrination – but I’m not holding my breath. Shutting down campuses and going more to public on-line teaching would be a big step — with professors who hate Reps needing to hide it more.
This judge’s actions are in line with the in-crowd hating against Flynn, against Trump, against Republicans, by Democrats.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
I have never considered myself an alarmist; but, I have a very real sense that the country is teetering.
There are just so many threats at this point; and sadly nearly all of them are internal.
If the coup attempt against the President goes unpunished; it will truly open Pandora’s box by nulling the concept of peaceful transfer of power. This is Third World territory.
If the American people are not completely outraged by the persecution of Flynn, first through blatant abuse of their power by the very people entrusted with the law; and now by Sullivan’s outrageous performance, it signals a complete sublimation of the concept of individual protection under the law to political expediency, or to personal ennui.
All of this against a background of the greatest governmental power grab since the New Deal. With alarming ease, government functionaries, at all levels, have trampled individual liberties. They have also placed tens of millions of citizens in a position of dependence on government hand outs. This, while severely damaging, if not destroying , the private economy and creating an unprecedented public debt burden..
With our ongoing Dominant Media Propaganda providing pseudo credibility at every turn, we must envision a new query: Is Resistance to the Resistance FUTILE?
Neo’s next post links to a great The Atlantic article on spiders.
Another long article talks about QAnon and conspiracy theories and how crazy such conspiracy folk are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/
It’s a great example of how Dem elites equate all concern with the Dem deep state to crazy conspiracy theories. One section details how much hate mail HR Clinton gets, right after a couple of incidents are mentioned about gun-toting crazies. And along with violence is Evangelical Christianity.
Q followers agree that a Great Awakening lies ahead, and will bring salvation. They differ in their personal preoccupations with respect to the here and now. Some in the QAnon world are highly focused on what they perceive as degeneracy in the mainstream media, a perception fueled in equal measure by Q and by Trump. Others obsess over the intelligence community and the notion of a deep state. An active subsection of Q followers probes the Jeffrey Epstein case. There are those who claim knowledge of a 16-year plan by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to destroy the United States by means of mass drought, weaponized disease, food shortages, and nuclear war. During the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, some Q followers promoted the idea that Trump was secretly working with Robert Mueller, and that the special counsel’s report would both exonerate Trump and lead to mass arrests of members of the corrupt cabal. (The eventual Mueller report, released in April 2019, neither exonerated Trump nor led to mass arrests.)
Thus any of us who are concerned with the “degeneracy of the media” are easily dismissed by Dem elites as crazy.
There ARE crazies, and there are dangerous folk.
But the media, including The Atlantic, is somewhat to heavily degenerate.
Sometimes civil wars have to actually be fought, yielding a winner and a loser, or at least a separation, a bifurcation, a split. This long drawn-out build-up needs at some point to be resolved.
miklos000rosza, what happens the millisecond after the first shot is fired? Do we devolve into a multi-year bloodbath where millions are killed? Or do cooler heads prevail on the second day to prevent such? I am OK with a split of red and blue but the preliminary bloodletting frightens me to death. Now in my 60s I’ve had a hard enough time with the lockdowns but I don’t know if I can take neighbor killing neighbor. It’s a young man’s burden I suppose and the old folks can just root their team on. What a nightmare.
I fully endorse Oldflyer’s comment. I am also not an alarmist, but I agree that the country is, indeed, teetering. The rot is in deep. Perhaps deeper than we have realized.
Dershowitz has a good article here:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16025/judge-emmet-sullivan
He notes — and it was only a few days ago that this opinion came out —
“As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently wrote for a unanimous Court: ‘Courts are essentially passive instruments…’ It is not within their legitimate authority to ‘sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right.’ Their role is to ‘decide only questions presented by the parties.’ ”
J Sullivan needs to catch up on his opinion reading.
TWANLOC.
Michael Towns: “The rot is in deep” — I agree with you 100%.
Call me naive but I try to put dates on things, like “when did this begin happening?” Well, anecdotally I can point to a family member born in 1932 who to this day thinks that Bernie is a savior. Going back farther, the best I can personally do is Frank Norris’ “McTeague: A Story of San Francisco” published in 1899 on which I wrote a paper for undergraduate English Literature.
It’s called “Determinism”, the science of predicting your worth or harm to society based on the dimensions of your skull. This was “science” but it didn’t go away when we became “woke”. It is here each day as we are denigrated as “deplorables”.
So let’s put the timeline together:
* 1932 future Bernie Bro born to this world.
* 1899 “deplorables” as foreseen by author Frank Norris.
* 1883 the death of Karl Marx.
* 1882 the death of Charles Darwin.
* 1848 the Communist Manifesto.
* 1818 the birth of Karl Marx.
* 1809 the birth of Charles Darwin.
Mr. Leonard A. Lardy in 1959 did a far better assessment than I of Norris’ “McTeague”:
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3963&context=etd
Wikipedia as usual is useless in this regard.
In a just society Sullivan would be impeached. Alas we live in an utterly corrupt society, ruled by the corrupt. The tree of liberty is long overdue for a red watering.
I’m not at all sure that there is anything to be saved in the FBI or the DOJ – the whole lost of them in DC, at least, seem corrupt. I don’t know who is worse, the Democrats who engineered this or the Republicans who stood by and let it happen, specifically including the Senate Intelligence Committee ‘pubbies and people like Trey Gowdy and Lindsay Graham, who try to ‘talk the talk’ of stopping the coup while they let it happen in real time and are more concerned with preserving the institutions than with bringing the perpetrators to justice.
Tar. Feathers. All of them need to be in jail after they’ve literally been run out of the country on rails.
The establishment has no clue how very close they have brought us to a truly revolutionary situation.
There is no part of the justice system that can be trusted. If Emmet Sullivan is typical of the state of the Article III courts, then the whole edifice of inferior Federal courts have to go. We can’t cut their pay, but we can remove their jurisdiction and let them sit and stew until they die.
The bureaucracy is hopeless. Abolish both the unions and the civil service. Return to the spoils system – bad as it was, at least there was balance…there was no possibility of “resistance” if al the appointees from the prior administration were fired.
The intelligence agencies are all rogue. Abolish their authority to spy on Americans, even incidentally. Abolish the FIS court.
After long believing not only in the Constitutional order but the ‘consensus’ of government actually working (at least more or less), I’m finally at the point of a complete loss of faith.
Even Trump can’t break the deep state at this point.
I’m extremely pessimistic that the republic is over.
The republic is over, it been over for 150 years. The myth died long ago. There is only one way to reclaim it . Like the revelationary war it will be fought amongst us neighbor by neighborhood. Be ready to kill them, or stay home.
Exactly, Neo. I could never have said it better myself. This is what we are up against. If they can do it to Flynn, they can do it to any of us; anyone who is too much trouble or who they think can be intimidated to help them achieve their ends (destroying Trump and creating and maintaining a permanent hegemony).
What took everyone of you so long? You are but a peasant to be sacrificed for the collective to be ruled by the elite. Kow tow and hope to keep your head. Good luck in your groveling. I am long on water, food, and ammo. Yes, I’m a conspiracy nut.
Put me in the pessimistic group. I don’t agree (or, more accurately I don’t advocate) with parker’s suggestion for resolution, but I agree with his assessment that the Republic ended long ago. The 16th and 17th Amendments did incredible, irrevocable damage, along with a thousand other cuts.
We are subjected to tyrannies worse than anything King George and the Brits ever dreamed of imposing on the Colonists, yet as long as our Internet bandwidth is good no one seems to much care about outdated notions like inalienable rights.
The government forbids attendance at Easter services. Yawn.
The government takes 15% – 40% of your wages before you even touch the money. Yawn.
The government seizes property at will from people suspected of crimes and requires those people to prove their innocence to get their property back. Yawn.
The government spies on citizens. Yawn.
The government refuses to detain foreign nationals violating our laws. Yawn.
The government devalues every dollar we earn with budgets far exceeding tax revenues. Yawn.
My grandparents were willing to die to try to make America better for me. I’m not even willing to stand in a picket line when our legislators pass laws that burden my children and their children with tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
It’s not a bad place. There are some great people. But the Republic our Founders created died a long time ago.
My mother used to say about the television, you can always turn it off. She also used to say, in response to my childish, “I am bored”, (1) run around the house three times, (2) read a good book, or (3) go do something nice for someone else.
There is a lot of great music, literature, and art out there to be studied and appreciated. There are friends and family to love. In other words, there is a lot more to life than politics, and we should never forget that.
There is a lot of focus today on the state and its power. These awful shutdowns (we live in Chicago and have a second home in Michigan) show how arbitrary and harmful state action can be. Very few wanted to give state actors this much power for anything other than a short period of time. Now we can see what these characters do with it. Cuomo sends sick people to nursing homes and then is surprised that thousands die. Pritzker wants to keep Illinois closed until there are no more sick people. Whitmer wants to squelch a 77-year old barber who just wants to work. Lightfoot is determined to keep the lake front closed because…why? All are officials of large states with widely disparate needs. Why not do the minimum rather than one size fits all? Their answers when questioned are revealing–they usually come back with a version of, because I said so. I could take that from my parents when we were children. But Cuomo, Pritzker, Whitmer, and Lightfoot are not fit to clean my parents’ shoes.
Our goal should be to get through this, and then put these mediocrities out of our lives. There is always an election coming up.
This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
Ronald Reagan, 1964.
Since then, we’ve chosen Door #2, and provided the growth media for that “small intellectual elite” because we have been led to believe (in our worship of education as a virtue in-and-of-itself) that their credentials and position and appearance confer upon them omniscient wisdom … and that our common sense counts for nothing; we are incapable of getting through life without their continuous intervention.
The members of that (now, not-so) “small intellectual elite” have welcomed our deference, for it has enabled them to build careers and garner copious amount of societal respect – and in the process, come to believe that they are as omniscient and infallible and better than the rest of us as we seem to believe.
They are now all-in invested … financially, professionally, in their reputations, even in their own self-esteem … in this belief, even though they are still human and are afflicted with the same perceptual myopia and capacity for error/greed/mendacity/delusion as the “greedy rich” and the “deplorables” they seek to rule in arrogant condescension.
To them, the world is not Left vs. Right, but Normal vs. Ignorant/Evil … they see anyone who dissents from their One and Only True Way in Any Area as an inferior “other” who must be crushed to preserve the social order.
By any means necessary … intellectual honesty and respect for individual liberty be damned.
That’s how the 7th floor of the FBI Building turned into a rogues’ lounge … becoming what the “intellectual elite” has previously decried.
We gave them the rope, to hang us with.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/ritchie-the-riveter/the-seven-assumptions-of-the-comfortably-numb/1918369764876760/
As for Flynn, this analogy may be helpful:
What the FBI/DOJ did, by “process as punishment” and threatening Flynn’s son in prosecution, was throw the legal equivalent of a grenade into the midst of Flynn’s family.
Flynn’s guilty plea, was him throwing himself on that grenade to absorb the blast and save his family in the best way he saw at the time … like a committed soldier would do.
That grenade has not exploded yet, and it does not have to. Right now, Judge Sullivan could pull that grenade out from under Flynn and toss it back at his persecutors … or he can act as the fuse and explode it.
If he does the latter, either in a Pharisaical letter-of-the-law attempt to convict Flynn on the perjury of the made-under-duress guilty plea itself to preserve his judicial reputation … or in the thinking that the shrapnel will wound Orange Man Bad … he is as un-interested in justice as the prosecutors who threw that grenade into Flynn’s life were (and still are).
Many of us have sat down and literally gave 20+ governor’s the power to kill our economy over a flu. That is pusillanimous defined. ‘Man up’, grab some balls, and get back into the game of freedom! Quit giving your freedom to leftist assholes who have no other plan than making their misery yours.
Love ya Hoytie!
The Left has also captured the legal profession. The fact that 2000 former DOJ lawyers signed a letter supporting the continued railroading of Gen Flynn is jaw dropping. A Bar complaint should be filed against every signatory. Surely, railroading an innocent citizen is against the Canon of Ethics in every State.
Cheer up, Neo.
All it takes to thwart evil is a few good men with authority and the knowledge to use it. We have that in the form of Barr and Durham. If we retake the House, we’ll have Devin Nunes again. Grenell is also a rising star.
Thank you Watt. I was waiting for Dersh to weigh in.
Ambrose Bierce defined a lawyer as “One who is skilled in circumventing the law” well over a century ago. We forget that to a certain type of legal mind, the law is “whatever a lawyer can make it be.”
It seems to me one complicating factor here is the guilty plea. Once a guilty plea is entered and accepted the trial judge has discretion to allow that plea to be withdrawn, or not. That is why I thought all the champagne popping was premature when the DOJ filed its motion to dismiss the charges.
There is a finding of guilt entered on the record in this case that must be resolved, and that is still within the discretion of the trial judge.
It would seem Judge Sullivan has more than enough on this record to find there is a “fair and just” reason to allow the plea to be withdrawn. If he were to allow the plea withdrawal, then under Fokker he would have no choice but to grant the government’s motion to dismiss the charges, thus ending the case.
But Judge Sullivan is acting like an angry, old, corrupt partisan who has it in for Flynn. That seems to be the most significant complicating factor at play here.
Mattt_SE
“Grenell is a rising star.” — I think Grenell has been doing great and gutsy things, but I worry that he will not live until the election. The District of Columbia is enemy territory for people like him, and a shooter can probably be hired for the cost of a Super Bowl ticket.
And that “cost of a Super Bowl ticket” is probably what keeps Sullivan on the Deep State team.
Neo,
The posting lines develop and expand so quickly that I think I will place my suggestion to you here, rather than in your ” Ask a liberal friend” thread, which has already receded in the wake of surging developments.
My second suggestion – the first being the hypothetical agreement scenario followed by disconfirming information- is that we try and tease out from our liberal friends, in as offhand a way as possible, the answer to the duplex question as to whether: a, it bothers them if any man is sent to jail for an act he is not guilty of; and b, whether it still bothers them if it happens to political opponents.
The first element will certainly be answered in the affirmative and be considered almost insulting by any self-regarding “liberal”.
Thus it might have to be phrased in terms of presumptive agreement … “You agree I know, that xyz is?”
You might even pause there and wait for them to ask, “Why do you ask?”
Their answer to the second part could develop along a couple of lines; depending on how abstractly the 2nd question was presented.
My operating assumption here is that the less abstract the second element is, and the closer it comes to referring to an actual Republican person, the more psychological resistance there will be to the possibility that any such subject could be innocent of a crime.
Thus I would expect the question to show that almost anyone asked would – perhaps even indignantly – affirm that no man should be jailed for a specific crime he did not commit. But, that when it comes to more or less concrete instances of Republicans, ( say, the class of Republicans active in politics or government) the progressive, and probably the liberal as well, will find it almost impossible to grant that such a person or persons as alluded to could be innocent, given that they were Republicans.
In fact based on what I have read them to announce, I would assume the progressive would probably go further and suggest that as all Republicans are to their minds per definition guilty of moral crimes, that any punishment they receive on whatever legal pretext, is deserved.
And I would expect these reactions to apply to progressives and liberals across the board regardless of the level or degree of academic credentials they have obtained.
What this will show, I expect, is that for the most part, excepting Stalinist progressives, liberals can be counted on to recite rule of law platitudes. But that when it comes to an entire class of certain citizens, they will find it almost impossible to entertain that such a person has been denied either procedural or substantive due process and been railroaded into jail and ruination.
And if that is true, it will say much about why it’s so difficult to reason unemotionally with a liberal. They are thinking in terms of good people, and bad people, as so many others have asserted here before, including in several different formulae
But with this duplex question we could do a little informal research of our own.
If it turns out to be true, then as far as they are concerned, there is nothing to discuss or to do, but to point out, and fight by any means necessary, the bad people.
And as definitions of good and bad are in these circumstances interwoven with life-way choices and fundamental questions of liberty and security, not to mention human anthropology, moral obligations, and metaphysical assumptions which cannot be compatibaly expressed in a shared space, I’m not sure what could be done about it if you wanted to do something.
How does the progressive who demands unlimited access to your life in the name of solidarity and supposed social good, respond to your refusal to yield everything, with “tolerance and compromise”?
And how do you compromise with someone who wants to swarm your kid with drag queens in order to try and convince the child that being sodomized is a good thing?
Occurred to me this morning that Sullivan is auditioning for the AG post in a Biden administration.
The key institution captured by Dems is Higher Ed – most colleges have long been discriminating against hiring Reps. For decades they have allowed increasing demonization of Reps and Christians, while forbidding negative expressions about most other groups. “Republicans are evil” — that’s the message from most colleges.
I think this began in the Viet Nam War when leftist students stayed in college to avoid the draft. They became the professors who have created another generation of leftist faculty. The original group were the children of parents who could afford to keep them in college, so they were not the poor they purport to represent.
We now see the latest generation of phonies like AOC who purport to represent poor neighborhoods but, in fact, were raised in upper middle class areas.
Fred Siegel explaions it pretty well.
Neo’s final paragraph for the win. Spot on.
These people make me physically ill, and the worst part is the smugness and obvious impunity — they feel no fear and think they are so in control of the levers of power that there are no more rules.
And until someone somewhere goes to f@%king prison, they’ll be right.
Sydney Powell takes Obama to school on his latest remarks about Flynn case and it is brutal!
https://sidneypowell.com/media/open-memorandum-to-barack-obama/
it does not mean that Judge Sullivan has the power to go behind the reasons for the decision set forth in the DOJ Motion to Dismiss, and that he does not have the authority to substitute his view of the case for the Executive Branch’s view of the case based on four words in a procedural rule. Remember the Muslim Ban? Same thing.
A judge decided that a perfectly legal Executive Order issued by the President under powers granted by Congress was illegal because the President had an improper motive. Eventually reversed, this decision was astonishing when it was issued.
Same here.
US “rule of law” started seriously failing with HR Clinton’s highly illegal email server being unpunished. Those covering up Clinton’s crimes were a big part of the anti-Flynn folk, anti-Trump cabal of Dem deep state criminals. Dems, not leftists.
Voters cannot vote against “the Left” — but they can, and should, vote against “Democrats”.
how much power the left has gotten
No. It’s not the “left” that has power – it is Democrats. Not even Bernie Sanders is “left”, he was a self-identified socialist “Independent”.
It might be convenient to talk about the left & right, and Democrats are very happy to encourage that; or liberal & conservative.
As long as we have voting that matters between two parties, the people are either Dems, Reps, or it mostly doesn’t matter. Yes, in Bernie’s case it sort of mattered. Also with H. Ross Perot (who helped get Clinton elected in ’92).
With a two-party system, de facto, it’s the Democrats, not the “left”, who are against Flynn. Against the US Constitution in many ways that it is written. Against Christians, against capitalists; and willing and able to call Republicans evil while also claiming to be scientific atheists. (Evil is against God; no god, no evil)
We won’t win ‘the fight”, nor the elections, if we target the left instead of targeting Democrats. The left is right, correct, that language matters.
MikeK–During the Vietnam War era, when my enlistment was up, I returned home and enrolled in a newly formed Community College.
Well, when I was eating lunch in the courtyard with my fellow students–who were all younger than I was at this point–the chief topic of conversation among the male students wasn’t about a variety of intellectual topics–about the subjects they were presumably studying in class, and you’d think they would be interested in–but was, instead, pretty usually about how they had to try mightily to “keep up their grades up” to avoid the draft.
DNW — your Socratic questions should allow anyone to determine if their friends are really liberals, or just partisans with a liberal front.
Some cautions for the judge.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/judge_sullivan_should_be_careful_what_he_asks_for.html
Of the five things to be considered, this was my favorite:
“If Sullivan were to hold Flynn in contempt for pleading guilty and for testifying in court that the plea was voluntary, an inescapable corollary is that the prosecutors are guilty of suborning perjury.”
The most serious possible development was this, however:
And here we thought Sidney had already done that!
Matt Taibbi has been a relatively sane voice on the left, although mostly, like Dershowitz and Turley, in trying to pull them back from the brink.
This piece rolls several issues into one theme.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/democrats-have-abandoned-civil-liberties
I was with him until that final phrase — Taibbi is not stupid: if he can’t understand why Democrats refuse to discuss anything outside of their Declared Truths, there is no hope for anyone on the Left.
As Justice Kavanaugh warned, “You sowed the wind. For decades to come, I fear the whole country will reap the whirlwind,” — and that is what the Democrats have been doing long before they attacked him or even Donald Trump.
We have only now been able to see them do it.