In my last post, I gave a preview (courtesy of Harvard Law Prof. Mark Tushnet) of how dreadful a Clinton-appointed Supreme Court would be.
I am unhappy to report that that's not the principal reason Sec. Clinton should be denied the keys to the White House. The principal reason is that, as she has already made clear, she will use the awesome power to prosecute as a political tool If that is not the road to tyranny, what is?
That's a bold proposition, sure. I invite readers to draw any other conclusion after reading the following account by Stephen F. Hayes in the Weekly Standard.
Hayes starts by discussing a series of Clinton's lies, to wit, "that she and Bill Clinton were 'dead broke' when they left the White House;
that she set up her private email server for mere 'convenience'; that she
neither sent nor received anything classified; that everything she did was in
accordance with government rules; that Sidney Blumenthal was never an adviser of
any kind."
All that is serious, and would, in a normal year, be disqualifying in my view (seeing, for one thing, that those lies came just in the relatively brief time since she began her campaign). But here's what's worse (emphasis added):
And then there is her most morally offensive lie. Clinton looked Charles Woods in the eye and lied about his son's death. We spoke to him shortly before Clinton's appearance before the Benghazi Select Committee last fall. He pulled a black leather datebook so that he could read her words as he recorded them immediately after she spoke them on September 15, 2012--four days after his son, Ty Woods, was killed in the attack on U.S. facilities in Libya. "We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son," he read aloud....There is little reason to doubt Woods's account. Relatives of others killed in the attacks have said Clinton told them the same thing, and Clinton's story was consistent with the Obama administration's public account at the time. But at that hearing the world learned that before Clinton blamed the film in her conversation with Woods and other relatives of the fallen, she had told the truth to others. "We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film," Clinton told Egyptian prime minister Hesham Kandil on September 12, 2012, according to a State Department memo that transcribed important parts of their conversation. "It was a planned attack--not a protest."
That Ms. Clinton lied to the father of a man killed guarding an American embassy on her watch as Secretary of State is, amazingly, not the problem for present purposes. She already has a copious history as a liar to go with her blase' attitude toward national security.
The problem is that she would use the government's power to arrest to punish a film producer for making an offensive movie.
Did this country used to have a First Amendment?
In all the furor about Benghazi, this has gone virtually unnoticed. But in a blog about the uses and abuses of criminal law, it's the elephant, or more correctly the Tyrannosaurus, in the room.
The idea that a potential President -- someone who would appoint the Attorney General and all 94 US Attorneys -- thinks arresting the maker of an offensive video is a proper use of sovereign power is astounding.
Where's the outrage?
Where, in particular, is any of the anguished protest we see when, for example, someone gets a $100 ticket for smoking a joint? Assuming arguendo that this is bad policy, at least it doesn't aim to extinguish free speech. Sec. Clinton's view, by contrast, would be the effective end of the First Amendment: Whatever the government finds "offensive," by its (made-up-as-you-go) standards, or even by the (also-made-up-as-you-go) standards of the governing party's sacred cow constituency groups, will land you in jail.
Trump's America might well be appalling. But Clinton's would be unrecognizable.
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