Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I mourned the death of Bob Newhart. I had enjoyed him in his eponymous sit-coms, his appearances on The Big Bang Theory, and his banter with Johnny Carson, but I most admired his innovative telephone calls where he presented a new kind of comedy. The routines were funny but, in an indefinable way, subversive. Perhaps as a result, I am the only person that I know of to have cited Bob Newhart in a law review article.

The Supreme Court was in the midst of a series of cases interpreting the right of confrontation in the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” The meaning is not clear from this text and almost nothing in the constitutional debates illuminates them.

Courts and legal academics, including me, weighed in with many people saying that the right could be traced back to the 1603 trial of the cloak-spreader, Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was convicted of treason after the prosecution used affidavits in his trial instead of witnesses who Raleigh could cross-examine. Without going through the legal disputes, I had doubts about the overly confident assertions of judges and academics, such as this one by Justice Scalia: “Raleigh’s infamous 17th-century treason trial remains the canonical example of a Confrontation Clause violation.” And thus, my Newhart reference. After criticizing the views of others, I wrote, “At this point, however, the vision becomes obscured, perhaps by the smoke from the tobacco that the sometime-historian Bob Newhart suggests Raleigh brought back to Europe.” (You can, and should, look up Newhart’s version of the Raleigh telephone call. When you are through with that, look up the Abe Lincoln call.)

R.I.P. Bob Newhart

My Newhart citation was in an article titled, Confrontation Clause Curiosities: When Logic and Proportion Have Fallen Sloppy Dead. Extra points if you get that reference.

Few may know about the constitutional right of confrontation, but almost everyone has heard about the Second Amendment, although discussion of it has been largely absent in the wake of Trump’s shooting. When he carried the gun to the rooftop in the attempted assassination of Trump, wasn’t the young man just exercising his Second Amendment rights? In the shooting’s aftermath, I have not heard the NRA mantra: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.” However, I believe that to go to Trump’s rally, you had to surrender your firearms. Don’t the Second Amendment fanatics believe that they should be able to carry guns to a political event? Don’t they believe that they are good people who would have stopped the bad guy? Why should there be a Second Amendment right to carry a gun in Times Square but not to a presidential rally?

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” John Stuart Mill.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The first anniversary of the American withdrawal from Kabul occurred recently. That withdrawal was not a pretty sight. We are supposed to learn from experience, and we should want to learn about what went right and wrong in that operation. It is an appropriate subject for congressional hearings, but we have not had meaningful ones. The Democrats control Congress, and such hearings might further tarnish Biden. So no hearings now, but Republicans vow to hold hearings if they gain control of the House of Representatives next year. Of course, the goal of these efforts will not be learning. It will be to attack Biden. And, thus, partisanship stands in the way of gaining knowledge so that this might be a better country.

We could learn something useful about the withdrawal, but even more is to be gained by learning about our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the first place. This was the longest of our many, many wars. It cost a lot of our money. Someone could look it up for me. Was it $1 trillion, $10 trillion, $100 trillion, or more? Some say that the recent U.S.-based stimulus packages were too large and helped fuel deficits which helped fuel inflation. The Afghan war did a whole lot more of such fueling, and, unlike the recent stimulus, much of the money was spent abroad without recirculation in our economy. We spent real money, folks, and real lives were lost…for what purpose? Do you see any useful results that would justify twenty years of war, carloads of money, and devastating loss of life? We should, of course, examine our Afghanistan efforts to learn about the limits of our military prowess and democracy-building efforts, for certainly this adventure had very few positive results . But I doubt that we will get any meaningful congressional investigation. The war was started by a Republican president, was continued by a Democrat, and carried along further by a Republican president, and embarrassedly ended under a Democrat. You might think that with both parties having been involved in a failed policy, we would have informative hearings about this war. But we won’t. Since both parties were up to their eyeballs in the invasion and occupation, there is no perceived partisan advantage in considering this issue, which is one of utmost importance for our foreign policy.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” John Stuart Mill.

The spouse said that she no longer puts ice in her water glass so that she will drink more water. I started to say, “Ice melts. It is not always solid.” I caught myself and then thought steam is always a gas. Ice is “ice,” and steam is “steam”; Why is it that what I drink from the tap does not have its own name?

The good old days: A Gallup Poll in 1945 reported that 90% of New Yorkers considered themselves happy.

In the old days, including during my career in criminal defense, when a person informed the police about a miscreant (i.e., ratted someone out), it was said that the informant had “dropped a dime” on the other one. No one calls a cop on a pay phone with a dime anymore. So today, what is the informant doing?