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Don't forget the whole "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal". One of the most guano-crazy things he ever said. Any leader who claims th
by daveguy 10y ago
Don't forget the whole "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal". One of the most guano-crazy things he ever said. Any leader who claims that being in that position of leadership exempts them for moral or legal standards is plain delusional.
- pfortuny 10y agoWell, that is the definition of dictatorship, in a nutshell.
- anigbrowl 10y agoI don't agree; he was just stating a fact about power. When you get down to it, moral and legal codes aren't real, they're just arbitrary concepts people agree to abide by. Classical Greeks thought it was pointless to attempt to legislate for all situations and had a notion of 'virtue ethics' - that what a sufficiently virtuous person does must of necessity be virtuous/ In our own time, it's plain that sufficient power does in fact put people above the law and that's a reality we have to deal with whether we want to or not. Rule of law is only as good as the amount of respect people have for the law, and law as an institution has been on a decline in the west and in the US in particular, because so much of it is so obviously for sale to the highest bidder.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pvg 10y agoThe line is from the Nixon/Frost interviews, you can look up the context. Nixon is definitely not musing about the nature of power or making a philosophical point about the reality of the rule of law.
- mhneu 10y agoDon't forget the whole "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal". One of the most guano-crazy things he ever said. Sounds like you already know this, but the current president-elect just said the same thing: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/When-the-president-does-it-that-means-it-is-not-illegal.html http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/When-the-preside... “The law’s totally on my side," the president-elect told the Times. "The president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Translation: When this president does it, that means it is not illegal. Unlike Nixon, however, I'm starting to worry that Trump's going to get away with this.
- gizmo686 10y agoTrump's claim is not that anything the president does is legal; but much more specifically, that none of it is a conflict of interest. Since that is clearly an absurd statement, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant that nothing the president does is legally considered a conflict of interest. In otherwords, the specific laws against conflicts of interest do not apply to the president. This turns out to be a suprisingly true statement. The only conflict of interest law I could find (after an admitadly brief search) is [0]. I have not thourally reviewed it, but found the following snippet in the definitions section: "Except as otherwise provided in such sections, the terms “officer” and “employee” in sections 203, 205, 207 through 209, and 218 of this title shall not include the President, the Vice President, a Member of Congress, or a Federal judge." [1]. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11 [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202
- mhneu 10y agoDon't forget the whole "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal". One of the most guano-crazy things he ever said. Sounds like you already know this, but the current president-elect just said the same thing: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/When-the-president-does-it-that-means-it-is-not-illegal.html http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/When-the-preside... “The law’s totally on my side," the president-elect told the Times. "The president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Translation: When this president does it, that means it is not illegal. Unlike Nixon, however, I'm starting to worry that Trump's going to get away with this.