Denny Hastert "was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch..."

"... anyone who disturbed Congress�s usual way of doing business," writes John Fund "How Did Denny Hastert Get Rich Enough to Pay Millions to an Accuser?"

I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks � the special projects such as Alaska�s �Bridge to Nowhere� that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them....

The [Sunlight Foundation] found that Hastert had used a secret trust to join with others and invest in farm land near the proposed route of a new road called the Prairie Parkway. He then helped secure a $207 million earmark for the road. The land, approximately 138 acres, was bought for about $2.1 million in 2004 and later sold for almost $5 million, or a profit of 140 percent. Local land records and congressional disclosure forms never identified Hastert as the co-owner of any of the land in the trust. Hastert turned a $1.3 million investment (his portion of the land holdings) into a $1.8 million profit in less than two years. Hastert claimed at the time that the land deals had nothing to do with the federal earmark he had secured. �I owned land and I sold it, like millions of people do every day,� he told the Washington Post. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt, the former Tammany Hall leader in New York, once said of someone who made a killing in local land that later became part of a lucrative subway development: �He saw his opportunities and he took �em.� Plunkitt called such �opportunities� a form of �honest graft.�...

ADDED: But getting that money isn't the crime Hastert is charged with. Nor is conveying that money to a person who accused him of wrongdoing. Lawprof Noah Feldman describes the conduct the government cites in its charges (I've added some boldface):

First, [Hastert] made 15 withdrawals of $50,000 each from his own accounts. The withdrawals were not criminal, but they did trigger a federal law that requires a bank to report any transaction or series of transactions of more than $10,000. In April 2012, according to the indictment, bank officials questioned Hastert about the withdrawals.

Presumably, in those conversations or in conjunction with them, Hastert realized for the first time that he shouldn't be making withdrawals of more than $10,000 if he didn't want to trigger scrutiny. Beginning in July 2012, Hastert switched his withdrawals so that they were less than $10,000 each -- to a total of $952,000. That was a crime under the law that prohibits knowingly structuring transactions to avoid reporting. And it's a crime that seems easy to prove, given Hastert�s change in his withdrawal practices.

Unfortunately for Hastert, when the FBI and IRS questioned him about the structure of the transactions in December 2014, he lied to them, insisting that he �did not feel safe in the banking system.� When asked directly what he did with the money, he said, �Yeah, I kept the cash. ... That's what I'm doing.� The lie to federal officials was a crime, too.

All of that is easy to prove, but we might nevertheless wonder whether the choice to prosecute is really based on the alleged wrong that Hastert spent so much money to hush up. Feldman asks why the government keeping things hushed up too and observes that if the underlying accusation is false and Hastert "was being blackmailed unjustly, then the government's prosecution seems heartless to the point of being abusive." Feldman concludes: "we should know what happened or Hastert shouldn't be charged."

But that assumes that the crimes Hastert seems to have committed should go unprosecuted unless there's something else that that makes us want to convict him of something. I think what is abusive is to have crimes that we don't believe in enforcing that are sitting around only to be used on occasions when we have some other problem with a person!

"Who Is This Objectively Badass Attorney Running The Freddie Gray Investigation?"

Headline at a Huffpo article that's teased on the Huffpro front page with "BALTIMORE BADASS":



If the question is the abuse of government power in the form of the police, the answer is not mindless cheerleading for another form of government power, a prosecutor.

Objectively Badass...

Yeah, let's be objective. Let's be level-headed and demand that all government power � police, prosecutors, the lot � operate within the bounds of the law.

My criticism is of the headline and the front-page teaser. The article doesn't contain the word "badass" or present Marilyn Mosby as anything that warrants the use of the word "badass." She herself is saying appropriate things like "I uphold the law" and "At the end of the day I�m here to do my job. It�s about applying justice fairly and equally to those with and without a badge. Did I treat this case any different in the pursuit of justice? No, I didn�t."

I wonder what pushed Huffpo to use that word "badass." I doubt if the word would have been chosen if Mosby were a white male.

"She gave us her word. I said, 'How will you handle police brutality?'"

"She said: �If you put me in this chair, I don�t care if they are in uniform or not. I come from a family of officers. Some are good, some are bad. I will hold everybody accountable to the law.� And thank you, Jesus, she lived it out."

From a NYT article about Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore prosecutor who has charged 6 police officers with homicide for the death of Freddie Gray. The quote is from a woman whose brother was killed by police and who strongly supported Mosby's campaign to oust the incumbent state's attorney for Baltimore City.

And here's a quote from  Lester Spence, an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University: "Black power is about taking the office and using it to make government more humane for black people, and that�s what we see in her. She�s supposed to treat me, the corner boy in the Western District and the police officer exactly the same way when it comes to the law. Historically, because of racism, her predecessors have not effectively done that."

"The only witness was an 86-year-old roommate, Polly Schoneman, who was on the other side of the curtain..."

"... and who agitatedly told nursing home staff members that she had heard noises that made her uncomfortable. Ms. Schoneman testified that she was not certain the noises had been sexual."

Mr. Rayhons testified that he recalled brief instructions to limit �sexual activity� with his wife made during a conference at the nursing home on May 15. At the trial, Mr. Rayhons testified that he considered �sexual activity� to be intercourse.

Henry Rayhons is the 78-year-old man who was acquitted of sexually assaulting his wife � who had Alzheimer's disease but was always happy to see him and would initiate sexual play � "She would reach in my pants and fondle me sometimes.�

He told the prosecutor, �I always assumed that if somebody asks for something, they have the capacity� to consent.

The link goes to the NYT. One of the comments:

People should choose very carefully who they want as their health proxies or legal guardians. It seems that the husband in this case had very little control regarding his wife's care. It's disturbing to read that even the nursing home had more control and could mandate where the husband could take his wife outside of the nursing home.

The woman had chosen one of her daughters as her health proxy.

The Wall Street Journal urges the U.S. Supreme Court to take the free-speech case arising out of Wisconsin's John Doe investigation.

You can get to the editorial here:

On Friday the Justices will consider whether to hear O�Keefe v. Chisholm, a Section 1983 civil-rights lawsuit brought by Wisconsin Club for Growth director Eric O�Keefe against Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and other prosecutors. The suit charges the prosecutors with a multi-year campaign to silence and intimidate conservative groups whose political speech they don�t like....

The 7th Circuit's decision was based not on the merits but on deference to the ongoing proceedings in state court, which theoretically could have responded to the federal constitutional questions. That is: the Younger abstention doctrine. I discussed the 7th Circuit opinion when it came out last September, saying:

There is an exception to the Younger doctrine, which the plaintiffs tried to use here, that applies when the federal rights claimants show that the prosecutors in state court are proceeding in "bad faith." The question is whether the prosecutors are really attempting to secure a valid conviction or whether they are simply using the legal process to harass the federal court plaintiffs. The 7th Circuit panel found some perplexity in the free speech issues about campaign coordination:

The Supreme Court has yet to determine what �coordination� means. Is the scope of permissible regulation limited to groups that advocate the election of particular candidates, or can government also regulate coordination of contributions and speech about political issues, when the speakers do not expressly advocate any person�s election? What if the speech implies, rather than expresses, a preference for a particular candidate�s election? If regulation of coordination about pure issue advocacy is permissible, how tight must the link be between the politician�s committee and the advocacy group? Uncertainty is a powerful reason to leave this litigation in state court, where it may meet its end as a matter of state law without any need to resolve these constitutional questions.

This is a nudge to the state judge to shut down the investigation, and yet there is something very disturbing about this ambiguity in free speech law and the leeway it gives prosecutors to stall a political group throughout a campaign season. I'd like to see the Supreme Court make this clear....

Back to the WSJ editorial:

Specific injustices aside, the U.S. Justices should also hear the case because it is part of a larger legal effort to subvert their 2010 Citizens United ruling. The game is to use the theory of �coordination,� which allows vast investigations to be instigated on the thinnest evidence, to sweep issue speech back into the regulatory umbrella of campaign-finance law.

The liberal Brennan Center for Justice is pushing regulations coast to coast that would reduce protections for issue speakers and encourage �coordination� probes. The Wisconsin case is an opening for the Court to tell prosecutors and regulators they must tread carefully when rights of free association are involved.

Wisconsin�s prosecutorial machinery has abused the law to silence disfavored political speech. This one is made to order for Supreme Court review.

I agree. The Court needs to take this case. Quite aside from all the substantive problems, the idea of deferring to the state courts is supposed to be based on the ability of the state courts to step up and deal with the substantive problems themselves. The 7th Circuit decision came out 7 months ago. Where's the action from the state courts? If there are indeed free-speech violations, they've been going on for 3 years. It's one thing for federal courts to refrain from jumping into state court proceedings that might do a decent-enough job of enforcing federal rights. But here, these proceedings have worked to suppress political speech for 2 election cycles and beyond. It's quite shocking.