BUT THAT WAS YESTERDAY, AND YESTERDAY'S GONE

A distinguished conservative jurist lays out the case for impeachment.  Some excerpts.

"[The president’s] defenders describe the unthinkable disaster of impeachment. But it should not be unthinkable. The framers of the Constitution did not see impeachment as a doomsday scenario; they thought it necessary to remove bad men from the offices they were subverting.

“The president’s defenders, experts at changing the subject, prefer to debate whether [he] committed a felony …. [but] ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ are not limited to actions that are crimes under federal law."  “It becomes clear that the White House has never before been occupied by such a reckless and narcissistic adventurer. Sociopath is not too strong a word.”

“We are regularly lectured about a constitutional crisis if the House goes forward with hearings and ultimately votes a bill of impeachment for trial in the Senate. Consider the alternative. Perhaps American presidents, by and large, have not been a distinguished lot…  But if we ratify [his] behavior in office, we may expect not just lack of distinction in the future but aggressively dishonest, even criminal, conduct. The real calamity will not be that we removed a president from office but that we did not."

I heard John Nichols, who writes for The Nation and supports Bernie Sanders, say basically the same thing at the Tucson Festival of the Book last March.

But the passages above were written by one-time U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork, praising a book by Ann Coulter, back in 1998.  Of course, the president he wanted impeached was Bill Clinton.  Since Judge Bork passed away in 2012, we can’t expect him to weigh in on our current impeachment case.  If you assume that Republican jurists hold fast to their principles through thick and thin, though, you’d expect Bork to be all in for impeachment.  I do not make that assumption.  Republicans hold fast to their principles until there’s money to be made and power to be seized.  Then it’s “consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”  (Ralph Waldo Emerson said that.  He wrote “a foolish consistency,” but never got around to explaining the difference between wise and foolish consistency, so many people drop his qualifier when they quote him.)

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has decided to pull up stakes in New York and move to Florida.  Perhaps he saw all those “Florida Man” stories and recognized kindred spirits.  Or maybe he had so much fun draining the swamp in Washington, D.C. that he decided that Florida should be his next big swamp draining challenge.  I don’t subscribe to those assumptions either. 

My guess is that the move is related to the difference in asset forfeiture laws between New York and Florida.  Florida protects one home per criminal from forfeiture, no matter how expensive the property might be.  New York doesn’t. 

This is pure speculation, but something tells me that Trump got word that the Southern District of New York is about to open a can of whoop ass in his general direction, and he wants to move as many assets out of that jurisdiction as possible.

Hat tip to Yoni Appelbaum of The Atlantic for finding and sharing (via Twitter) Bork’s Wall Street Journal book review.