Watching the Clinton e-mail scandal unfold, I can’t help but think about the old Southern Methodist football scandal. For my non-American readers, this was a scandal surrounding the football (American football) program at Southern Methodist University in 70’s and 80’s. The people running the program broke every rule on the books at least once and most several times. They seemed to relish their outlaw status so no amount of warnings deterred them.
Finally, the governing body of college sports, along with their envious competitors brought the hammer down on them. For the first and only time, the “death penalty” was handed down and the program was shuttered for two years. The program never recovered and has been an afterthought ever since. A UK analog would be Chelsea being shutdown for two years and then relegated to second division permanently.
The intent of the punishment was to stand as a warning to others. If you did not respect the rules, the punishments would be severe. If you kept breaking the rules, the punishments would be draconian. The funny thing is, the results were something entirely different than expected. The fallout so frightened all of the other football playing universities, they decided that punishment should never again be used.
The result over the last thirty years is a decreasing ability of the sports playing universities to police themselves. The punishments have become ornamental and the investigations take so long no one remembers why they are on-going most of the time. The University of North Carolina, for example, was found to be faking classes and grades to keep players eligible. That was five years ago and nothing has come of it. the investigation is “on-going.”
Now, what does this have to do with the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics?
In the American system, impeachment and removal from office is the political death penalty. A judge, Secretary or executive that is deemed unacceptable by the legislature can be removed from office. In the 1970’s, the Liberal Democrats were prepared to use impeachment to remove Nixon. He resigned before it got to that point, but only because he knew he could not win at trial. The die was cast so he resigned.
The fallout was not what was expected. The Liberal Democrats were sure the Republican party would collapse. Instead, the party surged to majority status over the next two decades and the Liberal Democrats have never fully recovered. The Republicans, for their part, discovered a similar lesson twenty years later when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. They stopped short, claiming to have made their point.
The point, however, was that the death penalty, so to speak, was forever off the table. By refusing to resign, Clinton exposed what everyone suspected, but preferred not to admit. That is, the American Congress no longer had the will or ability to enforce the rules on the executive. In one of life’s great ironies, the Nixon impeachment was about reigning in the imperial president. That led to the Clinton impeachment, which solidified the imperial presidency.
Like the SMU scandal I started with, attempts to enforce the rules ended up exposing the deep rot within the system those rules were supposed to protect. The greatest irony of all is that Hillary Clinton worked on the House Watergate committee as a young attorney and was fired for unethical behavior. What she learned, it seems, is that Nixon should have fought a little harder as there was simply no stomach in the ruling class for enforcing their rules.
The 1990’s will be looked upon as a seminal period in American history. The Clinton’s willingness and ability to corrupt the political system and their brazen disregard of the rules set a dangerous precedent. Obama is now issuing edicts as if he is emperor. Meanwhile, the Congress cowers in fear. This e-mail scandal shows quite clearly that the political class is broken.
If you doubt it, look at the facts. Clinton had this private e-mail system setup. It is against the law to mishandle government documents and the mere existence of this private e-mail system is more than enough to suggest that happened and happened deliberately and with malice of forethought.
The Congress can issue a subpoena for the physical server, all written documents related to it or having originated from it, all of the people who had access to it, etc. E-mail is a two-way street so all they need is one e-mail from the government to this domain to justify their actions. That would take a competent tech about an hour to find. The claim of destroyed hard drives could easily be proof of improper use of confidential information.
In other words, the Congress has a lot of power and they could come down on Clinton if they are inclined to do so. If Clinton refuses to comply, the Constitution gives Congress the power to arrest her and bring her in to testify. If she refuses, she can be imprisoned in the Capitol jail. In other words, this whole charade could be settled by the middle of summer and it would be the last time someone tried a similar stunt.
Of course, that’s not possible. The political class is paralyzed, incapable of enforcing its own rules. That leaves the field open for rogues and criminals. In another time, Congress would have been shuttered and its members executed as the most powerful political clans closed ranks. Today, we just have the current chaos.
There is a Faulkner quality to this. The grubby, grasping Clintons are the Snopes clan, slowly subverting the Compsons, in this case the American Republic. I would like to say that Obama is Benji, but the analogy really does not work, even though it makes me laugh.
It all ends when we end it.
Harry’s racket is much sweeter than 6.8 million. He has son’s and they are in the rackets back home in Nevada.
Yep. The threat of impeachment is far more frightening than the reality. Obama really does think he was elected king. Why shouldn’t he?
We have a saying in the UK that when the US catches a cold, we sneeze. What is happening in the States is sure to happen here sooner or later. Oh, sure, there are occasional hiccups in the smooth running of a ‘democracy’ like the recent kerfuffle over long-standing MPs Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind being in trouble regarding a ‘cash for questions’ scandal (you pay me, I ask a loaded question aimed at the right minister on your behalf in the Commons) but the penalties are ineffective because such antics keep re-appearing. There is an ongoing dismay over MPs expenses here (highlighted when one MP put in expenses for the purchase of a chocolate bar) but they still keep doing it.
Parliament here is a gravy train that never runs dry. No wonder people are so eager to be elected to ‘serve the people’ when money and chocolate is so easily available.
If the likes of Cameron or whoever Labour can dredge up courtesy of the Union block vote or even the feeble Clegg hear of what the Clintons are doing I imagine they will try it too at some point. After all, who’s going to say anything? The lefty press? Al-Beeb? They will fear far more the EU dictators than the British public.
We have the same things here. Congress is exempt from insider trader laws. So, they get to cash in on their legislation by having their financial managers direct their money and their family’s money into investments that will prosper from pending legislation. Of course, those seeking to buy favors will pass along information, rather than cash, as that would be bribery.
Harry Reid, the man formerly head of the Senate, has never had a job in the private sector. He has cashed a government check his whole life. He was born into extreme poverty. He has a net worth of $6.8 million.
As to where it starts. on this side we tend to think the crackpot ideas start in Europe and come our way. But, the only thing we are good at exporting is culture so I’m sure we give you guys plenty of crackpot ideas along with it. We gave the Nazis eugenics, for example.
The elites still rely on the legislative process to get money and disburse it. They are still investing enormous amounts in harvesting votes, both through subsidies and campaign spending. Once they figure a way to game or bypass the legislatively regulated revenue gathering and distribution system, the game shifts along the Clausewitzian spectrum from non-violent to violent politics. Google Tax anyone?
They rely on the old customs as a legitimizing act. Congress has not had a serious budget debate in ten years, maybe longer. They simply increase everything by 7% and add on whatever goodies they need to keep their patronage operations going.
But, Team Obama is hard at work to get around this. They are casting about for some ways to “close loopholes” in the tax code without having to go to Congress. http://tinyurl.com/o6ko543
The magic 7%. I still remember back in 95-96 when the huge battle between the Repubs and Dems was going on over Medicare. When all of the “the republicans are cutting Medicare and killing grandpa” BS was stripped away, it turned out the the debate was really over whether to increase spending 7% or 10% per year. Put in language that intelligent people would understand, whether to double spending every eleven years or every seven and a half years. The political debate was like a debate between morons and imbeciles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_%28psychology%29). What’s amazing is that the bankers and fixers have been able to keep it going for this long. The canny few who get all of this have all asked me some variant on “when does someone reach for the reset button?” in other words, when does someone or some group decide that the risk of abolishing the present order is less than the cost of continuing on with it. My gut tells me that would be around the time that three or four doubling cycles have passed (absolutely nothing historical or in economics to support this… I just figure that when you approach 16x, even imbeciles start to catch on). If 1995 is our start time, then sometime between 2025 and 2035.
The clintons are merely the stain left on the under ware of the American political system. Hope for our once great country is dwindling rapidly. Consider a ruling class that will not enforce our borders and redistributes the hard earned income of it diminishing working class to illegals in the form of free education, anchor babies, welfare, food stamps and the list goes on and on. Consider a ruling class that does not think it is important to have voter ID to cast a ballot in our elections. Consider a ruling class that flaunts the Constitution at every opportunity, conducts the nations business in secrecy, rails against racism to a white country that elected a “black” man president. Universities, courtrooms denying the flag, the military paying for sex change operations for traitors in uniform, homosexual marriage, a treasury secretary that doesn’t pay taxes, and attorney general who only represents his “own people”, a press that is so in the tank for the ruling party that true journalism is all but dead, an education system crumbling due to pie-in-the sky programs intended to make up for the fact that blacks cannot and will not behave and learn , a president who releases foreign combatants so they may rejoin the battle against America, is all hope lost? — sorry, rant off.