Prosecuting Political Fraud

There are lots of things democracy can't survive, not all of them enumerated as illegal. Some used to be protected by just shame. But Donald Trump has shown evil politicians everywhere that shame can be shrugged off, and this has emboldened a new crop of worse evil.

That George Santos could lie freely and still be elected is a direct consequence of the shift Trump created. It cannot be allowed to stand, to be normal.

Democracy requires more than just voting. It requires information. If you have a right to vote, but you don't have a right to know what's true, then you won't be voting in ways that react to the past and plan for the future. You'll just be playing Russian roulette.

So what's to be done? Do we have a law against politicians lying? No, not exactly. But these guys are selling their services to us. And let's just say it. It's not pretty, but it's true. Politics is a business. People profit from it. I wish it were not so, but let's at least apply the laws that apply to commerce.

George Santos profited by selling the public something that wasn't what it seemed. It'd be nice if we had a law against politicians lying to us to get into office, but let's just charge him with commercial fraud.

And let's not hear that this is a radical proposal. I'm tired of hearing radical thrown in to dampen common sense action. What's radical is that he did what he did. The response I'm proposing is “merely proportionate.”

I see prosecutors delaying where I think no delay should be needed. I guess they want to make sure they've gotten all their ducks in a row, but taking more than just a few minutes to do that sends the message that this is somehow more complicated than it is, that there are hidden factors that might excuse him. There are no such factors.

It is simply bad when someone lies to get into office. (The Supreme Court would tell us this if more than one of them had not lied to get appointed. Alas.)

Santos sold voters snake oil to get a job he didn't merit. If left to stand, it makes a mockery of democratic process. We must address this and soon before it becomes the norm.

Every bit of delay suggests there is some other rational point of view, in which he should be allowed to lie to get into office, in which we should have no recourse if someone successfully tricks us into letting them into office on false pretenses.

We must not accept that. It must not be the case that someone can lie to get into office. It must not be the case that if someone is found to have lied to get in, we no longer have recourse.

This is not complicated. He cheated. There is law that makes sense to apply.
Prosecute him. Now.

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Author‘s Notes:

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The Legal and Ethical Issues in Suspending Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann's suspension from MSNBC on Friday brought 250,000 people out of the woodwork over this one weekend to sign a petition asking that he be reinstated.

Yesterday in my blog at Open Salon I did an analysis (On the Privacy of Political Campaign Contributions) making the claim that because human contributions are limited to a modest amount ($2400), it’s not realistically possible to unduly influence an election by making them and so they ought to be a private matter, out of the reach of employers to control. I also made the claim that because corporate contributions are potentially unlimited, that disclosure is quite important. It’s not the kind of simple rule people like, but then it comes because of that stupid legal person fiction.

Today I also did a big run-down on the grab bag of other issues I thought this suspension (MSNBC Ethical Theatre 2010). This basically takes the position that MSNBC is using the situation to try to appear more ethical than Fox (who gave $1M to the Republican Governors Association), saying they are strict with their employees about what can and cannot be given. But since the contribution is legal, I assert they’re just creating theatre that makes them look ethical. Which is a little weird since I think they are pretty ethical and have nothing to prove. Commenters on my blog post seem to think there's an internal feud at MSNBC.

Oddly, in a Google search for the Olbermann petition, this shows up alongside another petition that wants him fired for being a "maniac" and has 1316 signatures. See my article The Freedom to Hear if you want a guess on where I come down on that.

Limiting Term Frequency

The notion of term limits comes up and people never seem to know what to do about that. On the one hand, having the same person in office for a long time risks that there's never a general housecleaning. It also may mean they have unfair power to abuse their office during the campaign. On the other hand, if there's a good person it's a shame to just tell them they can't contribute.

The idea I'm pondering is to split the difference: Limit term frequency rather than the number of terms. That is, prohibit incumbents from running for office—require them to “sit one out” before they run again. So people would be able to run for office a maximum of every other term.

The thought is that everyone should govern as if it might be their last chance. That is, not worry about re-election. Or, if you insist on thinking four years out, at least you're worrying about doing long-term good that would make voters, not next year, but down the road, think you've done well enough to bring back.

It would also mean you couldn't use the power of public office to directly assure your own re-election. Often, the person in power can call press conferences, can affect the focus of the public through attention to specific policies (snooping in files [Nixon/Watergate] [Clinton/Filegate (alleged)], changing the threat level [Bush/Cheney (Ridge allegations)] or even invading other countries [Clinton/Afghanistan/Sudan (alleged)] are examples some have alleged politicians to have done).

It would also mean that if people liked your party and wanted to re-elect it, they wouldn't have the very same people in. So at least some abuses of power, those that are not shared and adopted as party policy anyway, have a routine chance of being exposed on a regular basis, rather than having these things grow unchecked over longer spans of time as one set of office holders continues in office too long without oversight.

It might be that political parties would find creative techniques to get around this kind of rule. For example, they become suddenly very fond of having husband/wife teams alternate time in office, even taking advantage of spousal privileges not to incriminate their partner to assure procedural continuity of shakey practices. I could see that specific configuration needing to be prohibited. But I think these details could be worked out.

Something to ponder anyway.

Author's Note: Originally published November 3, 2008 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, elections, policy, election policy, term limits, reelection, term frequency, free speech

The “Two Unprincipled Parties” System

A lot of noise is made from time about how our so-called two-party system is what makes America strong. That might be so. But I wonder if it works the way people think.

The first thing I notice as I think about this issue is that we don't have two parties. We have a number of them. But it's true that there aren't a lot of people voting for these other parties, and voters pretty quickly learn that under the present rules (I'll blog about the virtues of preference-order voting another day), a vote for a third-party candidate is just a wasted vote. If you do vote for such a third-party candidate, you'd better be happy with the most popular of the big two candidates because you're throwing away your right to vote for the other of those two.

But my personal theory is that what's really useful about our system is not that it's about two parties, but that it's two unprincipled parties. Ok, perhaps I'm slightly stretching the meaning of the term “unprincipled” because I really don't mean “without any principles” and I'm not even meaning to say they're “hypocrites.” But I do mean “without specific and unchanging principles.”

I hear murmuring out there in the audience, but you can spare me. The Republicans are not the party of fiscal conservatism, small non-invasive government, patriotism, etc. I might have been a Republican myself long ago if something as simplistic and reliable as that described that crowd.

And before you get too comfortable, because I know this forum is mostly full of Democrats, the Democrats have their share of deviations from alleged principle, too. I don't see Obama talking about how he wants to give all gays the right to marry, for example.

What people will say or refuse to say is market driven on both sides. At any given time, both parties usually have an articulated platform, but over long periods of time, that platform shifts. And I claim that's mostly a good thing.

In fact, the opinion of Rush Limbaugh and the Rightwing Talk Media to the contrary, changing one's mind as one gains experience can be good. It's called learning, and it's good for us.

So I think it's no accident that the two parties enjoy almost exactly the same coverage and that some elections are right around 50%. I think what happens in many elections is that the party that perceives itself as being behind gives up just enough ground in terms of its' alleged principles in order to get people to cross the aisles. They don't want to give up more than they have to because they each perceive themselves as principled and they perceive shifts like this as being done somewhat under duress, in order to save the party from being permanently locked out.

I used to listen to Rush until I decided I was just tired of him and couldn't bear it any more. It wasn't his ideology that drove me away—I enjoy hearing people who think differently than me. It was his attitude and tactics that drove me away. The same with O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, and the rest of the Fox line-up. It's just re-runs after a while, with nothing new to learn, so I gave up.

One thing I remember Rush saying was that people who are middle of the road in their politics are without principle—in effect, that “moderate” is not a substantively meaningful description of a political position, that it represents unprincipled compromises between legitimate political positions. Cynically, I think he said this because he wants to drive his opposition to the far Left, or even just wants to pretend his opposition is already to the far Left, because it's just easier to make a case against extremists than against moderates. So it serves him to believe that that's all there are in the world: extremists, who are either himself (on the correct end), bad guys (on the wrong end), and people who have no legitimate positino at all.

I don't buy that there aren't legitimate positions in the middle; I think they're just not well characterized. It's more like the question asked Dorothy early in the Wizard of Oz, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” It may indeed be that there is no legitimate other kind of witch, but that fact doesn't mean there isn't some third position for Dorothy to take, it just means the choices are not offered in a very useful way.

One of the reasons I think Nature has been so successful with Evolution over so many years is that I don't think it worries a lot about labeling itself. It just goes with what's working and doesn't fuss about how an animal or whole species is named. Survival is what counts, not labeling. And I think that while the Democrats and Republicans try to impose a lot of naming as a matter of tactic, the engine driving the political system as a whole, and the two major parties in particular, is more organic than is commonly acknowledged, and is interested more in surviving than in adhering to any fixed set of principles.

In fact, if you look around the globe at other countries that have more parties, you'll see there are serious obstacles to any of those parties growing substantially. The problem isn't the number of parties, it's the principled nature of the parties. Being principled holds them back. Because to change parties, the people within them have to give up their principles! And who wants to do that? Whereas since being Republican or Democrat really doesn't mean anything, it may be difficult but it's not impossible for at least those people who view themselves as living comfortably in the middle to wander back and forth, creating the market stresses that force the parties to change from time to time.

The situation right now is a perfect example. A lot of people who thought themselves Republicans realize they are not well-served so have crossed the line. For someone who grew up self-identifying as a Republican, it may be weird or annoying to be called a Democrat. But it doesn't mean saying “Ok, I'll be a liar.” or “Ok, I'll stop caring about fiscal responsibility.” Indeed, part of what they're doing is realizing these parties are capable of shifting and that theirs has shifted out from underneath them. But things will shift back toward the middle, or even sharply back to the Republican field, if the Republican party changes to be more like what is needed to woo voters back or if the Democratic party fails to offer what people are seeking. Each party represents room for change, and a vacuum won't last long there.

So three cheers for people having the principles and political parties not having them. It's what keeps things working.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published October 28, 2008 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. You can find additional discussion by other Open Salon members there.

My notes from that time...

These ideas are something I've thought about for quite some time. The decision to write about this today was by a desire to respond to Greg Randolph's article The Implosion of the Republican Party. Thanks, Greg.

The public domain graphic came from freeclipartnow.com.

Tags (from Open Salon): planks, plank, platform, unprincipled, principled, principles, third-party, political parties, two political parties, two-party system, 2008 election, politics