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Dennis Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a lobbyist trading on contacts he gained in office, his leadership coincided with Congress's abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and now Hastert stands accused of improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet. If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.
Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn’t charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him.” It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. “In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers,” says Greenwald. “What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that.”
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:31PM
> As Ayn Rand pointed out
She also pointed out that a child-murderer was actually a great guy with a 'beautiful soul' and only despised for his independence. [freeservers.com]
So, maybe Ayn isn't the best person to cite when it comes to issues of independence.
(Score: 2) by Anne Nonymous on Wednesday June 03 2015, @09:10PM
Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder, so let's discount everything he ever wrote, said, or did "when it comes to issues of independence".
Hey, I think I finally figured out how to suspend the Constitution. Yay! Martial law for everyone!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @02:50AM
And Washington was the first and only president to actively march at the head of militia or army against the American Citizenry.
Having read up on the post-Revolutionary activities of our so-called 'Founding Fathers' I have come to conclusion WWAFFD is not the question to ask, but rather 'If I wanted to follow the ideals laid out in the infrequently followed founding documents of the United States of America, how could I best do so?' Followed by: 'If it wasn't practical for them then, is it practical for 'us' now?'
One of the key reasons to read American history is to see how quickly ideals fall by the wayside and whether it is greed, necessity, current social trends, war, or debt that causes it. America had a great deal of debt after the revolutionary war, which is what lead to the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution and 'Federalized Power' of the Union.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:15AM
> Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder, so let's discount everything he ever wrote, said, or did "when it comes to issues of independence".
As distasteful as it is today, at the time his behavior was within societal norms, a century later half the country still thought it was OK.
Child murder, not so much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @10:27AM
It's still just an ad hominem fallacy, no matter what the person did or supported.
Also, you can't just handwave the slavery problem away just because it was 'normal' back then; it was still absolutely wrong. Society is often wrong, and obviously was then. Failing to go against evil societal norms is a failure in its own right.