The Law Should Be Different For the Rich and Powerful

Tom Campbell, a Texas lawyer who once tried to unseat Tom DeLay in a Republican primary, engages in an interesting thought experiment, arguing that President Obama should pardon Tom DeLay. I have to assume that Campbell recognizes that there is no chance that DeLay will receive a pardon - a remedy normally not granted before a convicted criminal has completed his sentence and a subsequent five year waiting period, let alone where the offender displays no remorse and is openly contemptuous of the court and jury that convicted him. (Campbell argues that some of that scorn is deserved, but that's hardly the point.) Also, not even Lewis "Scooter" Libby received a pardon. It would take the right-wing noise machine all of two seconds to start bleating about how "Even President Obama understands that DeLay was railroaded by evil Democratic Party operatives."

Campbell attempts to draw a parallel between the odious Charles Rangel (or was I supposed to say "Charlie Rangel isn't a bad person?"), whose various ethical breaches earned him a stern, "You shouldn'ta oughta done that" from his colleagues in the House. A better comparison is to Dan Rostenkowski, who served time in prison and eventually got a pardon a few years before his waiting period would have been up. Or, if you're more charitable, to Scooter Libby whose commutation allowed him to avoid any chance of incarceration as he appealed his conviction.

Some of what Campbell writes is pretty typical of calls for leniency against middle class and white collar criminals - their peers often close circle. Campbell argues, "DeLay is not a bad man", which may be true but does not provide a basis for excusing somebody from a jail or prison sentence. It may not be fair to define a person by his worst acts and conduct, but that's what happens when you're tried for and convicted of a crime - your good acts are, at most, relevant to your sentence. I don't think Wesley Snipes is a "bad man", but off he went.

Another reason that people who are financially successful should avoid prison? Because "they've suffered enough" from their loss of prestige and position:

He has been punished enough. He lost his position as majority leader and his congressional seat. He lost his place on the national stage.

You think he deserves prison time? That's because only prison will "satisfy [your] vindictive desires". Never mind legislatively defined penalties, minimum sentences, sentencing guidelines, and how they impact others - if you argue that DeLay should be treated equally with other convicted offenders, and thus should be punished under laws and policies he helped fashion, it can only be because you're a big fat meanie. Meanwhile, the impact of incarceration on a "blue collar" criminal, or the ripple effects on his family? Who cares, right? DeLay is "one of us".

But really, a big part of the arguments in favor of people like Tom DeLay and Conrad Black is that they had teams of lawyers analyzing their moves and advising them how they could ostensibly push their conduct right up to the line of criminality without crossing it. I'm reminded of this every time we get a new essay from Conrad Black and his defenders - "Black looted his companies, fair and square." Yes, being rich and powerful enough to have your lawyers advise you as to how to legally siphon hundreds of millions or billions of dollars out of your company - and away from its shareholders - will make it much more difficult to identify a crime and to prosecute you. After all, if that weren't the case would you be spending millions of shareholder dollars on that advice in the first place? But at the end of the day what we're really talking about is a system in which the rich and powerful can game the system, loot their companies or the taxpayer, and walk away with billions - but if an ordinary person tries the same thing on a smaller scale, he'll probably be looking at jail or prison time. (But that's okay because he's probably a "bad person", right?)

Campbell offers an additional reason to pardon DeLay - he has powerful friends who might otherwise take revenge - "Prison will satisfy the vindictive desires of some but will trigger in others a desire for revenge". Aw heck, by that standard, let's just pardon everybody held at Guantanamo Bay.

Two Accounts?

I know he's playing to the media, so we can assume he's oversimplifying his argument, but Tom Delay's lawyer doesn't convince me with this:

Mr. DeGuerin said Mr. DeLay would try to convince an appeals court that the money-laundering statute should never had been applied to the money swap — because the original donations were legal and also because the donations to the state candidates came out of a different account than the one in which the corporate donations were deposited.

After all, how could it possibly be money laundering if the people accused are using more than one bank account.

We Knew He Was Unethical....

Now Tom DeLay's trying to redeem himself by establishing himself as an idiot.

Two years ago this week, Nancy Pelosi – as part of a concerted campaign of opportunistic mendacity – said she and her party had a “commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices.” Their "plan" conveniently came to fruition after Democrats voted against a comprehensive energy plan that would increase fuel production and open up untapped oil reserves.

Now, you ask yourself, what party controlled Congress during the preceding six year period, and what was their track record for opening up every inch of U.S. soil to oil exploration and drilling? But that's just standard DeLay-type politics - covering up for his own ineptitude and failures (by his own measure) by pointing the finger at others.

So why do I say he's trying to prove himself an idiot?

• He seems to think that exploration for oil involves sticking a straw into the ground and sucking it out. Even if we started exploring for oil in ANWR two years ago, it won't be until the next President is leaving office that there will be significant oil production. And yes, I'm assuming a two term President. Granted the picture would be a bit different if DeLay hadn't been such a complete failure (again, by his own measure) as a Congressional leader, but that only brings us to our second point of idiocy....
• Cars don't run on crude. Cars run on gasoline. Even if Congress found a way to magically teleport crude oil out of the ground, it wouldn't increase the amount of gasoline available during peak season because the refineries are already operating at maximum capacity.
• In what is probably the least idiotic of his idiotic assumptions, DeLay also assumes that other oil producing countries won't react to an increase in oil supply by reducing their own production in order to keep their profits up. Has he never heard of OPEC?

You know, George Bush and Dick Cheney engaged the energy industry in a series of secret meetings, and came up with a secret energy policy that... well, I'm not sure what it was supposed to do, but the only visible outcome was a huge increase in profits for the energy industry. To this day, we're still not allowed to know who Cheney met with while planning out this energy policy - the truth is that embarrassing. DeLay and his ilk went along for the ride.

So it sure is convincing to hear the disgraced Tom Delay squawk, "It's all the Democrats' fault."

Ethics, By The Book

Tom DeLay, defending his years of finding ways he believed to be legal to, well, allow people to purchase influence in Washington, asserts,

During my time in Congress, I have always acted in an ethical manner within the rules of our body and the laws of our land. I am fully confident time will bear this out.

Doesn't it give you a warm, fuzzy feeling that Tom DeLay has no sense of ethics other than those which are explicitly imposed upon him by committee rules or legislation? If it's not clearly codified as unethical or if you can find wiggle room in the language of the rule or statute, it must be ethical. Right?

So His Silence Means... Guilt?

President Bush is famously tight-lipped about the criminal acts of his underlings. Even when it seems obvious that he knows or could easily determine the culprit's identity, has promised to take strong action against the culprit, and an inictment has been issued, he insists that we must reserve judgment.

Except, as it seems, where he believes the suspect is innocent.

Compare:

On Wednesday, Bush was asked on Fox News Channel whether he believed DeLay was innocent, and he replied, "Yes, I do."

Spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday that Bush was exercising his "presidential prerogative" in commenting on the case.

Contrast:

Yesterday, Wilson delivered a speech in which he said Rove should lose his job regardless of whether he knowingly used Plame's name or revealed her CIA connection. "This is a firing offense," he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected that idea and said Rove was at work, engaged in meetings and enjoying Bush's full confidence. McClellan said the White House will not comment on the leak because the investigation is ongoing and it does not want to prejudice the Libby case.

Oh, no... They certainly wouldn't want to do that....

Bad Logic and... Lies by Omission?

Not that I would expect more from Tom DeLay, but shouldn't I have a right to expect more?

Our current tax system has been written by and for special interests and is, by design, dizzyingly complicated. It kills jobs, and it simply does not efficiently accomplish the tasks for which it is designed.

The American people are ready for this debate. They are ready for a debate about a flat tax that would gut the Internal Revenue Service and allow almost every American to file his or her tax return on a simple form the size of a postcard.

DeLay isn't a stupid man. He is fully aware that the issues of tax fairness and tax simplification are entirely separate - that you can have an unfair, simple tax code, and a complex but fair tax code. While he is correct that much of the complexity in the present tax code comes from catering to special interests, he is being intentionally deceptive in failing to mention that "flat tax" proposals are backed primarily by wealthy special interests seeking to lower their tax burden.

They are ready, I believe, to learn more about replacing the income-based tax system altogether with a national sales tax, as in the FairTax proposal I have co-sponsored in the House. This plan would allow Americans to choose, based on their spending decisions, how much tax they would pay every year.

Are you sufficiently deluded to believe that the average American could "choose" to avoid paying sales tax? People living paycheck-to-paycheck can suddenly curb their spending in order to "choose" to avoid taxes? If there were an honest bone in DeLay's body, he would devote at least a sentence fragment to the fact that replacing income taxes with national sales taxes would inure almost exclusively to the benefit of the wealthy, and would be exceptionally regressive. (And where is the evidence that in nations which presently employ national sales taxes and "value added taxes" that "planning and budgeting [is] easier for families and businesses"? In which of those nations is economic growth outstripping that of the United States?

Meanwhile, reforming the individual tax system would also provide a long-overdue opportunity to drain the corporate welfare, special-interest morass of our current corporate tax structure.

It would? Please, Tom - tell us how. Oh, I see... out of space.

If a flat tax is so fair, so cheap and easy to administer, and provides massive cost savings and so many efficiencies, why aren't any of the wealthy advocates of a "flat tax" for wage earners (including, of course, Tom DeLay) advocating a "flat tax" for corporate profits?

DeLay Battles Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Details here... sort of.

A Plea In the Works, or Delay Tactics?

Over at Volokh, Orin Kerr tentatively disagrees with Norm Pattis on the DeLay indictment.

It seems more likely to me that DeLay knew the indictment was coming one way or another, and he figured that he was better off politically if he could put off the indictment for as long as possible.

A comment back at Crime and Federalism suggests something similar, that the statute of limitations may have been waived "in order to gain more time to try to convince the prosecutor not to file charges". But if you read the indictment (PDF Format), you find the following:

* The statute of limitations is three years;
* The date of the alleged offense was September 13, 2002;
* The time stamp on the indictment is September 28, 2005.

Did DeLay really waive the statute of limitations to buy himself a whopping two weeks? Let's take a look at what Tom DeLay has to say about the status of the prosecution as of two weeks ago:

Despite his longstanding animosity toward me and the abusive investigation that animosity has, unfortunately, rendered, as recently as two weeks ago, Mr. Earle himself publicly admitted I had never been a focus or target of his inquiry.

That statement appears to leave open three possibilities:

1. Tom DeLay is engaged in flagrant misrepresentation - that is, he was in active negotiations with Mr. Earle and very much knew himself to be a target of the inquiry, even as Earle suggested otherwise in public;

2. Tom DeLay was approached within the past two weeks with news of a pending indictment on more serious charges and, despite the expiration of the statute of limitations on the conspiracy charge, cut the deal Norm suggests; or

3. Tom DeLay was approached within the past two weeks with news of a pending indictment on more serious charges, cut a deal with the prosecutor to waive the already-expired limitations period on the conspiracy charge in order to buy time to try to avoid indictment, and the prosecutor immediately sought an indictment for conspiracy.

If we were in fact seeing scenario #3, I would expect DeLay to be complaining bitterly about the prosecutor's actual treachery, rather than whinging about what seems to be imagined treachery. Also, the indictment reflects that two alleged co-conspirators (James Walter Ellis and John Dominick Colyandro) were indicted on September 13, 2005, raising the possibility that one or both have agreed to testify against DeLay.

Thus, assuming that DeLay is telling the truth in his public statement, the stronger theory appears to be the one advanced by Norm Pattis.

Delay to Plead Guilty?

Norm Pattis says yes.

What A Maroon

Apparently, Tom Delay has taken to attacking Justice Kennedy for using electronic research services?

We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio on Tuesday. "And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous."

Sure... Absolutely outrageous....