No, actually, we don’t need to agree on a system that will bind us even if we disagree with the conclusion, because WE’RE NOT IN A COURTROOM WE’RE ON A FLIPPIN MESSAGEBOARD.
The system we can agree on when asking a question of justice, then, is TO DISCUSS IT AND MARSHALL ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF OUR VIEWPOINT.
It really chaps my ass that you persist in treating a messageboard discussion as though it’s a courtroom. Elucidator’s question is wholly valid for a messageboard discussion.
No, she doesn’t.
She does think it’s a Bill of Attainder, but she agrees with me insofar as “…at least as the term was used in any caselaw predating this,” is a true statement.
Did you read her opinion?
She goes on to note that a non-precedential prior opinion relating to a similar dispute about state funds was decided similarly. But she admits, as she must, that this is an issue of first impression.
By the way – I don’t know how I got it in my head that this was the DC federal courts. This was the Eastern District of New York, so I’ll withdraw that portion of my commentary, Diogenes. You’re right – this won’t be “settled” until SCOTUS hears it or denies cert.
Oh, I very much doubt that. While you may not wish to be seen agreeing with a radical hippy/lefty such as myself, you could not have looked upon the subversion of Federal attorneys to purposes of Rovian rat-fuck without alarm. You are pretending that this can be reduced to some arcane principle of abstract jurisprudence, but you ain’t that dumb. You don’t mind pretending to be dumb to escape embarrassment, but you know as well as I that this stinks to high heaven.
The Pubbies hadn’t the slightest compunction about using the machinery of law to protect their political power, save for those few Federal attorneys who would not whore themselves, may the Goddess bless them and hold them close to Her bountiful bosom.
I have every confidence that before you would cooperate with such a foul scheme, you would burn your law degree and take up bicycle messenger,“gigolo” not being available due to the constraints of matrimony.
See, when the MESSAGE BOARD DISCUSSION asks a question like, “What does the law say?” then, I don’t know, perhaps it needs to be settled by examining what the law says, not what a bunch of message board participants wish it would say.
Because it’s relevant, you see, to the answer. If it’s legal, but not right, the recourse is in the legislature – to undo their unwise but perfectly legal act. If it’s illegal and not right, then the recourse is to the courts, to undo the illegal act of the lawmakers.
It’s useless in the extreme for the hive-minded SDMB members to gather around these threads and solemnly agree that this law is Wrong. I have no doubt that the majority here will reach that conclusion. But who cares?
You.
Agreed.
Except that wasn’t what the MESSAGE BOARD DISCUSSION asked you, and that wasn’t what you responded to:
The question there isn’t what the law says; it’s about whether the actions taken were morally just and were morally right.
Again: MESSAGE BOARD DISCUSSION. This whole thing is practically by definition useless in the extreme. If you don’t like it, go do something useful: telling us that discussing the morality of a law is useless is even more useless than a discussion of the morality of the law, innit?
And a Part II response to this comment:
Even if our aims are simply to discuss abstract principles of justice, it appears to be the nature of the beast that we find injustice quite readily when our own pet oxen are so much as scratched, but peer mypoically at the sight of the enemy oxen being gored without so much as a blush of discontent. We might discuss the injustice of the cloture rule, for example, but I have seen with my own eyes that the cloture rule is felt to be a manifestation of injustice by the majority party when it’s used by the minority party… and that those when those roles switch, so do the feelings about the cloture rule.
We could discuss the mechanics of nominating a replacement senator. But I have seen that changing the rule from “governor appoints” to “special election” is widely felt to be justice, when the governor is of your party. When he isn’t, “governor appoints” is an affront to democracy, and must be replaced with “special election.” And then when the governor is once again of your party, “Governor appoints,” is once again the very close friend of justice, and to be implemented without delay.
In short: abstract notions of “justice” vary widely by the parties involved. That is why I strive to enunciate principles that should apply, regardless of the players.
This approach is the correct one in court AND on the messageboard.
Wrongo. Review the discussion:
The discussion was about the factual assertion. elucidator was the one that tried to make it about the intangible.
But if the question is specifically aimed at discovering and finding out what a person’s abstract notion of justice is, it seems perfectly pertinent to ask and answer such a question in those terms. Surely there are times in court when the question of a person’s feelings and thoughts come into question, and these are looked into in whatever appropriate manner? If we’re interested in whether a person has killed another, it is very useful to look at the law and the facts avaliable to discover whether the actions that fit the crime have taken place. But finding a diary in which the possible killer confesses his enjoyment of the idea of killing and spells out his plan in intimate detail would also be a useful point.
Too, abstract notions of justice may well vary widely - but precisely because of that, it is worthwhile to discover what someone’s personal feelings are, because if justice is so fluid and yet affects lawmakers, then it’s very much helpful to find out what those personal feelings are, or even attempt to change them. I’m not sure if you’d agree, but it seems a much more likely proposition that you could change someone’s mind, or change lawmakers, or change government, than it is to ensure that all those involved with the law act entirely neutrally and textually.
Well, there are other key salient facts as well.
You characterize ACORN as a good organization - but it is clear from the evidence that they had some issues. The voter fraud cases were a pretty recent phenomenon, leading to consent decrees in places like Seattle and a ton of bad publicity. Rather than beef up procedures, by all accounts ACORN proceeded with their old vote strategies and pissed off a new crop of opponents. Las Vegas prosecutors filed charges in 2009 - that office is headed by elected Democrats.
There was also that matter of Dale Rathke stealing close to a million bucks from the organization - when this was discovered his brother Dale, the organization’s founder, covered up the crime and concealed it even from ACORN’s board. This was absolutely the wrong way to go - it just fed the perception that the organization had things to hide and was not transparent.
Recent stories about ACORN have noted that private donations have dried up along with the government funds. This seems intuitively true - and might have been harder to bounce back from than a grant drought. There are tons of organizations that I don’t contribute to since I don’t trust them, even if I am in agreement with their overall goals or in sympathy with their political position.
With all that happened with ACORN, lots of people felt they didn’t trust them anymore. And frankly that trust can’t be broken with a single video or even a couple of them. Hit videos have been made of Planned Parenthood offices lately - how are they doing as an organization?
Simple question - if ACORN were still around, would you trust them with a donation? Will you contribute to any of their successor groups? How much does trustworthiness matter to your decision? Keep in mind that for several years I have donated money to Republican candidates directly but not to the RNC.
How about you review the discussion:
In short, you offered to give your opinion of what the wisest move would have been. Then you continued with the discussion of courtroom moves. Elucidator asked you a specific question trying to get you back to what most of us think is relevant here, and you responded still with courtroom talk.
All of your nonsense about gored oxen is irrelevant. We can discuss issues of justice and its underlying principles, and morality and its underlying principles, without discussing precedent and case law. If you are unable to do that, that’s fine, but don’t project your limitations on other people, please.
For me, I’m ready for your happily-given opinion on what the wisest move would have been. At this point, I’d appreciate a clarification of what you mean by “wisest,” however: are we talking wisdom like that of a great person, or wisdom like what a lawful evil cleric has?
This is a good question, actually. My experience with ACORN is pretty limited: I worked a bit alongside them in 1999, but have very little experience since then with them. From what I knew of them then, they were highly decentralized, and talk of ACORN as a whole wouldn’t make much sense.
I wouldn’t give money to the national organization, I don’t think. Asking me whether I’d give money to a local chapter is a little bit like asking whether I’d give money to the campaign of a local Democratic candidate for office. I’d need to know more about the particular local.
I do find Congress’s reaction to the con artist video guy to be reprehensible and wildly inconsistent with their reaction to Blackwater. In the latter’s case, there were laws passed to exempt them from criminal responsibility. In the former’s case, there were laws passed to punish them for noncriminal acts by low-level employees.
Had ACORN lost funding because of the acts of Dale Rathke, I might understand (I know very little about that case). But for them to lose funding because of this con job is just ridiculous.
“Is that what we’re discussing now?” is clearly meant to note that that WASN’T what we were discussing up until now. It signals a change in subject, a departure from what came before.
I don’t really know what a lawful evil cleric would do.
I meant that phrase to say, what would be the best social and governmental policy for the Congress to follow?
And the answer is: make future funding for ACORN, and all similar organizations, contingent on better internal control practices. Not for this pseudo-pimp business, but for the multitude of other management problems it has had. When the taxpayers are funding an organization, and a million-dollar theft from it can go unreported for a significant length of time, then there are internal control problems, business processes which must be fixed. ACORN itself prepared a document outlining some of those fixes, and I can’t imagine anyone would seriously contend that ACORN’s own judgment about its needed fixes was too harsh.
So what Congress did was too reactionary. But for Congress to take no action would have been foolish, too.
I have lots of good questions. Answers, not so much. 
Fair enough. Thanks once again for a thoughtful reply.
There weren’t any voter fraud cases. You are misinformed. A few registration frauds were perpertated against ACORN, but ACORN flagged those suspicious forms themselves, which is all they were allowed to do. You cannot point to a single instance of voter or registration fraud against ACORN itself. Nothing.
Yes, ACORN was a victim of embezzlemnt. A VICTIM. ACORN was stolen from. Are you starting to recognize a pattern here? You’re trying to characterize crimes aginst ACORN as crimes committed by ACORN. You should make the effort to learn the difference between a perp and a victim.
Due to slanders like the ones you’re perpetuating right now.
Can you provide a single piece of evdience to show that ACORN was untrustworthy? No you can’t. The only reason not trust them is because you believe everything you hear on Fox News. You can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of malfeasance. You just mistrust whoever Sean Hannity tells you to mistrust.
If that were the case, this consent decree would have been totally unnecessary, right?
It required that ACORN improve its training and procedures, or face prosecution.
I think you need to do the same, since the coverup was perpetrated by the organization’s founder and then-chief organizer, and the original theft was committed by his brother, who headed up an ACORN-affiliated group at the time.
Crimes committed by an organizations leaders hurt an organization’s reputation, whether they are committed against the organization or not. This was pointed out by Scott Harshbarger in his investigation of ACORN:
Answered.
Well, to be fair, ACORN ended up the victim an awful lot, didn’t it? Victim of embezzlement, which they failed to catch on to. Victim of voter registration fraud, which they caught onto only sometimes (other times it was prosecutors who uncovered it). Victim of a con artist. Only the last time were they victims of a right-wing conspiracy.
I think it’s fair to suggest that they needed to improve their internal controls and training, so that they weren’t so easy to victimize.
Bricker, thanks for your reply regarding the wisdom of Congress’s actions. I think we’re in substantial agreement. The last few paragraphs of your last post are the sort that I consider worth discussing on a messageboard. A discussion here is absolutely useless in terms of affecting judicial matters (assuming that judges aren’t reading these boards for advice), but it’s useful in terms of citizens discussing what they want their representatives to do, inasmuch as that discussion might eventually turn into votes.
Nothing in there accuses ACORN of voter fraud. It pertains about complaints that ACORN was getting too many phony registration forms. As I said, those were cases where ACORN itself was being scammed. You clearly haven’t bothered to inform yourself very well, so I’ll help you. ACORN hires people to gather registrations. Some of those people fill out bogus forms to get paid. When that happens, ACORN is required by law to still submit them anyway. They do not have the legal right or ability to discard them, no matter how obviously fake they are. All they can do is flag them, which is what they did. All of these forms were found because ACORN itself flagged them as suspicious. ACORN itself did not commit any voter registration fraud and was never charged with any. Furthermore, voter registration fraud and voter fraud are two different things. ACORN was never even suspected of any voter fraud. There were no “cases of voter fraud.” That is a flat falsehood on your part. If you’re going to keep making that allegation then cite it.
The crimes were committed against ACORN, not by ACORN.
You clearly have nothing if this is the best that you can do.
I would really like to see a cite for ACORN committing voter fraud. Cough it up or retract it.
Does anyone doubt that the single most salient feature that led to ACORN’s public execution is that it was effectively registering people to vote? People who, due to their circumstances, were more likely to vote Dem?
We are about voting rights, are we not? The whole “one person, one vote” thingy? Well, goodness gracious, who could oppose such efforts? Reaching out to the powerless and disenfranchised, what we’re all about, isn’t it? Well, gosh, who wouldn’t want that to happen, what American would oppose such efforts?
Is there really any doubt, here? Is there really any question but that the effort to destroy ACORN was one hundred percent political, nothing more and nothing less than the Republican Party using the instruments of government to secure its own power?
Who’s oxen is gored, Bricker? Yours. Mine. Ours, in the collective sense. ACORN wasn’t shafted because of faulty or lax personnel policy, nor were they screwed over because of accounting shenanigans. They were boned because they were effectively hurting Republican chances for electoral victory.
It is stark, it is simple, there is no subtlety here to shelter under. If I’m wrong, correct me. Double dog dare. Bring it.
On a less important note: personnel policy. I think I know. I’ve had some experience with ACORN, the foundation I worked for gave them buttloads of bucks. They are the archetype of the second-hand car, threadbare suit, and dollar store socks liberal idealist. They are so sincere, they make my teeth hurt, so earnest, they make me want to drink. I wholly support their efforts and solidly back their approach, and I can’t stand them. But that’s not their fault, its mine!
How do they get in personnel trouble? They trust. They hire people who could not get jobs elsewhere: recovering people, people who have had trouble with the law. They see such people as victims, in this they are right. But they see such people as inherently good, they accord victimization as an experience that brings out the better nature of people. In this they are wrong, when good people suffer injustice, they usually get stronger, but when bad people suffer, they get much, much worse. They are, to put it bluntly, naive.
Karl Rove and his minions are probably smarter than ACORN. Let us take the lesson to heart, that intelligence is a characteristic, and not a virtue.