Texas School Policies Violently Enforced: Police in Schools

An organizational policy, whether in an educational, religious, or business organization, is not law. Accordingly, “police tactics” are inappropriately used on people who violate policies. The proliferation of off-duty police officers in retail in more than one of the U.S. states (and perhaps in the E.U. as well), complete with lethal weapons, renders the distinction between policy and law especially relevant and even pressing. To be sure, trespassing is indeed a crime, even though some municipal police departments in Florida have refused to recognize it as such, as, for example, when a property owner illegally enters a rented apartment, but in a store, absent a decision by a manager to have a person removed from the premises, store “police” cannot legally act violently against the public as long as no crime is being committed—even if a store policy is being violated.

Since the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, school districts in Texas “spent billions of dollars to station police officers” in every school.”[1] Crucially, the intent was “to protect students from similar tragedies.”[2] It is therefore more than unfortunate that school administrations, including local school boards, have allowed even elementary-school aged children to be subjected “to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office.”[3] A principal is the head of a school. “Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they would up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which [were at the time] prohibited in [Texas] juvenile detention facilities but allowed in public schools.”[4] Under those circumstances, parents could hardly be blamed for yanking their kids out of public schools, preferring private schools, religious or secular, instead. In one public school, a student caught with a vape at school was “smashed into a wall” by an “officer,” another kneed a student in the face for fighting with a classmate, and still another animal (i.e., “officer”) slammed a student “into a metal cart” intentionally.[5] Admittedly, the student kneed and the one slammed were in the midst of physically fighting with other students, so some physicality was justified in order to break up the respective fights; it is the excessive violence that calls into question to motives of the police in the school hallways. For instance, the intent to severely harm out of sheer anger and even the intent to instill a sense of guilt in the respective students can both be subjected to harsh critique.

In his text, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that punishment originally arose in ancient (and prehistoric) times so the punisher could feel pleasure from inflicting pain in another person, rather than to instill a sense of moral responsibility or deter bad behavior in the future. Nietzsche argues that this original intent, or purpose, was still in force among European parents in his own adult lifetime in the mid-to-late 1800s (before he went mad in 1890).  Kneeing a student in the face and slamming a student into a metal cart are so extreme that it can indeed be wondered whether the culprits (i.e., the “officers”) were not at least partially motivated by such pleasure. Nietzsche goes on to point out that if political, economic or any other kind of elite are getting away with the exact behavior that is subject to punishment if done by other people, no sense of guilt arises from such dogmatic inflictions of pain otherwise known as punishments. Nietzsche argues that if a criminal “sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, . . . all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends” then no sense of guilt will arise when those actions are punished.[6] The violence of the police in the schools in Texas de facto nullifies any intended message sent by that violence qua “punishment” that violence is wrong. In fact, it might even be that the students in physical fights at school may grow up to be hired by cities as police! As such, those kids, as police “officers,” could be expected to be unnecessarily violent precisely because the use of violence in school beyond the authority of the police stationed there nullified any “lesson” that violence is wrong and therefore violent people should feel guilty, for presumably none of the police in the schools felt ashamed of themselves, and punishment inflicted on them would not have had such an effect if those police could in turn remember violence having been orchestrated by their bosses and even the impunity that those officials received from political or judicial officers of government.

What then can we expect as to how the kids in the schools were affected by the police brutality? According to Nietzsche, “Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.”[7] None of those can be favorable to being open to learning, so the activity of the police inside the schools beyond stopping mass shootings is contrary and thus detrimental to the mission of a school, which is to educate by imparting knowledge from teacher to student. Incidentally, it can’t be that the teachers feel comfortable being in the schools in which police are body-slamming students for carrying vaping equipment (perhaps a student is having trouble quitting smoking cigarettes, in which case vaping should be encouraged when the student feels very tempted to smoke). The result of such violent over-reaches on kids in Texas can be expected to include no longer feeling safe in their respective school hallways—not just because mass-killings have occurred in American schools, but also, and perhaps even more so, because the police installed in hallways have over-reached so from their purpose being to guard and protect students from external physical threats.

That school principals and even school boards have either given their consent or ignored the over-reaches renders those officials culpable as well. Prudent parents who love their children would be justified in voting to replace entire boards, which in turn would presumably be disposed to fire school principals who would rather than their respective students beaten up by police even for vaping than have teachers send students to the principal’s office. Police have no business enforcing school policies because policy is not law, and human beings with the means of greater power over other humans are too inclined to use it.

As Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For an organization’s management to place police rather than unarmed security guards in a position of enforcing policies is to inappropriately tempt abuses of power that cannot be said to come rightly under authority. For power sans authority can be understood to be in line with Hobbes’ description of the state of nature prior to any social contract historically. As another saying goes, give a human being an inch and a mile will be taken. Or, give someone a few centimeters and a kilometer will be taken. Take your pick, but don’t over-reach even though doing so seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, which, after all, can be said to be human, all too human. Such an innate proclivity should not be tempted whether in a managerial decision or in institutional arrangements that allow for the exploitation of an institutional or personal conflict of interest.

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1. Claire Amari, Kristian Hernandez, and Asher Lehrer-Small, “At Texas Schools, Pepper Spray and Tasers,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Second Essay, sec. 14, p. 518.
7. Ibid, p. 517.

Behind Political Culture: U.S. President Clinton’s Lying under Oath

The stature that comes with occupying (and even having occupied) public office, whether elected or appointed and especially if high office, combined with the ability to attract the attention of the media such that the (former) official’s statements have the credibility of pronouncements, and thus of being true rather than false statements, is rarely examined for what the stature and societal “mouth-piece” imply (i.e., veracity). A very high former elected representative who has even admitted lying under oath in a court proceeding back while in office can very easily be assumed decades later to be making a true statement by the public even though that statement is practically identical to the statement known (and admitted) to have been false. Even published photos that are strong evidence that the second statement is false can be dismissed by a public too liable to being beguiled by clever political birds of prey. I have in mind here the twin statements of Bill Clinton, who was the U.S. President for two terms in the 1990s and went on to associate with Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous head of the child-prostitute sex-ring, and at least one of his paid girls.

At least three compromising photos of Clinton with girls in close proximity were released by the FBI to my knowledge in 2026. In one photo, Clinton is situated between Maxwell, who was Epstein’s accomplice, and an under-aged girl in an indoor pool at a resort (not in the U.S.). Maxwell would later be convicted (and imprisoned) for her role in arranging girls for Epstein’s clients. In another photo, Clinton is sitting in a hot-tub with an underaged girl. In a third photo, he is seated with one arm (and hand) low around the waist of a girl in what appears to be Epstein’s private jet. To be sure, even though the positioning of Clinton’s arm (and his hand) low around the girl’s waist connotes sexual rather than paternal interest, and that a girl is with Clinton in the hot-tub photo (and the pool photo) are together highly suggestive, none of those photos is evidence that Clinton raped (i.e., had sex with) one or more of Epstein’s girls. Moreover, anyone accused of a crime is assumed to be innocent in any of the United States unless or until the accused is convicted in a court of law of having broken a law.

Even though the arm being around a girl’s waist and being in a pool with an under-aged girl and an adult whom we can now say definitely arranged Epstein’s girls for sex may bring to mind the old phrase, “where there is smoke, there is fire,” I bring up the matter of the photos merely as context to show just how misguided it was for the American public to assume that Clinton was testifying honestly before a Congressional committee in 2026 on his relationships with Epstein and the child-prostitutes. That Clinton was recognizable (i.e., fame) and had political stature as a former U.S. president are not sufficient for the default-assumption to be that even what he has said under oath is truthful rather than mendacious. This is the idea.

Asked under oath while testifying before a Congressional committee if he had had “sexual relations” with the woman in the hot-tub photo, Clinton answered, “No.”[1] Even if the photos make his answer difficult to believe, that he also “denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes” may be so incredulous that a person could reasonably toss out all of Clinton’s testimony for being deceitful throughout.[2] It is possible that he rationalized lying because, as he had claimed, he believed that the Congressional subpoena, which he had unlawfully ignored, had been politically motivated.  Because Clinton claimed to have been unaware of Epstein’s business (i.e., prostituting girls to the rich and/or famous) in spite of spending leisure time with the criminal and his accomplice, and because Clinton knowingly violated the law by ignoring a Congressional subpoena, a rational basis can be laid for leaning at the very least toward concluding that Clinton lied under oath about having committed statutory rape.

Clinton being asked whether he had had sexual relations with a child-prostitute ought to ring a bell for anyone who was following U.S. politics toward the end of Clinton’s time in the White House. Back in January, 2001, the media reported that in “an 11-hour deal to avoid criminal charges over his sex-and-lies fling with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton . . . admitted ‘knowingly’ lying under oath.”[3] Clinton had to surrender his Arkansas law license and pay a $25,000 fine. Stating, “certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false,” on his last day in office, Clinton was referring to his responses made under oath in a deposition to questions including, “Did you have sexual relations” with Lewinsky? His answer under oath was a perjurious “No.” Sound familiar? Why would anyone lend any credence to Clinton’s answer to the same question decades later in regard to a child-prostitute? Why would his answer be reported as though his earlier answer to the same question in regard to another woman were truthful?

I contend that a person who has admitted to having lied, under oath, in answering a question of having had inappropriate sexual relations (with an intern) and is asked the same exact question (regarding a child-prostitute) should at the very least be viewed as questionable in terms of whether his second answer can be believed to be true. At the very least, the media should have inserted a footnote to remind readers that Clinton had lied, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” in speaking to the American people about Lewinsky’s “oral” contact with Clinton in the Oval Office. To the extent that the American public’s reaction to reports of Clinton’s Congressional testimony in 2026 was muted rather than publicly raising the obvious point that especially on the matter of sexual relations, Clinton was not to be believed, the undue credit that is implied or inherent in holding (or having held) public office and having a mouthpiece in the established, “main-stream” media can be surmised and judged to be problematic in themselves.

Societal credibility enjoys a certain default that, even if dislodged once as in the case of Clinton, can exist without any real foundation based in the character of the office-holder celebrities.  This is not to say that if they are caught “red-handed,” such as U.S. President Nixon was, and members of Congress have been more commonly, societal credibility can be difficult to regain. My point is that the public tends to swallow too easily that which should at the very least be held as suspect in terms of veracity. That Clinton lied under oath and to the American people about having had sexual relations with Lewinsky in the 1990s should have registered on the media’s radar screen and in popular reaction to Clinton’s answer, again under oath, to the same question, to Congress in 2026. An old dog can indeed learn new tricks, but personal ethical development should not be assumed as if the proverbial dog had not done the old, sordid deed once already.

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1. Leo Briceno, “WATCH: Bill Clinton Grilled on Shirtless Hot Tub Photo amid Swirling Questions on Epstein Relationship,” Foxnews.com, March 2, 2026.
2. Ibid (on the quoted material).
3. Marilyn Rauber, “Finally Admits He Lied under Oath: Dodges Criminal Charges with a Last-Minute Deal,” California Post, January 19, 2001.

Congressional Subpoenas: The Case of the Clintons

The rule of law is absolutely essential to a representative democracy being able to endure even as strong personalities in public office may seek to bend or even dismiss law for their own purposes. The notion that anyone subject to law gets a pass according to one’s own discretion and power is toxic to a republic being regarded as fair. Just as everyone has a right to due process in legal proceedings in the U.S., no one is above the law there. This applies to former presidents and secretaries of state, and thus to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Their written statement in refusing to recognize a Congressional subpoena as valid—a presumptuous stunt to be sure—reveals that they held the presumption of being able to decide whether a law to which they were subject was valid. This presumption could also be seen when Bill Clinton occupied the White House, for he deliberately lied under oath, “I did not have sexual relations with” Monika Lewinski even though she had performed oral sex with him in the Oval Office when she was a White House intern. My point is that the underlying pattern is clear with respect to a lack of regard for law itself (even though both Clintons went to Yale’s law school) and the presumption of setting oneself in the position of invalidating law to which one is subject. That Bill Clinton was no punished with incarceration in the 1990s was unfortunate even for him and his wife as they were not afforded the opportunity to learn a lesson.

On January 21, 2026, members of the Republican group in the U.S. House of Representatives began the process “to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary in contempt of Congress” because the couple had repeatedly refused to honor a Congressional subpoena to testify on the Epstein sex-girls racket.[1] Photographic evidence that Bill had been in contact with Epstein had been made public, and members of the House had questions for the Clintons regarding what they may have known of Epstein’s crimes. Even though the demand for testimony sounds reasonable enough, Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the relevant committee, had said at the start of a hearing in which the Clinton’s attendance was required that the Clintons had responded not with “cooperation but defiance.”[2] Such a blatant response to a Congressional subpoena is astonishing because, as Comer said, “Subpoenas are not mere suggestions, they carry the force of law and require compliance.”[3] The Clintons contended that the subpoenas were “invalid because they do not serve any legislative purpose.”[4] But it is not for subpoenaed people called to testify to assess whether any such purpose is being served, for otherwise anyone could disregard a Congressional subpoena simply by declaring there to be no legislative purpose.

In his ethical theory, Kant argues that if universalizing a maxim results in a contradiction, such a maxim is unethical.  For example, if no one were to tell the truth, no one would believe anyone else’s truth-claims and so making such claims would not make any sense. Universalizing the maxim that it is ok to lie would result in no claims being made. Similarly, were everyone to act on the maxim, a person subject to a Congressional subpoena can determine the validity of said subpoena and act on that determination, it would not make sense for Congress to issue subpoenas because none would be honored. Universalizing that maxim results in the absurd, so that maxim is unethical.

Another formulation of Kant’s ethical theory holds that rational beings should be treated not merely as one’s means, but also as ends in themselves. In presuming that the committee members were merely playing political games in issuing the subpoenas and dismissing them, the Clintons were treating the members as means only (to the Clinton’s own ends) rather than as ends in themselves worthy of respect by virtue of being rational beings. Why worthy of respect?  Because to Kant, it is by the use of reason that we assign value in the world, so reason itself must have absolute value and thus be worthy of respect. To Kant, the formulations of his Categorical Imperative have the necessity that law does.

It is such necessity, both in law itself and in ethical principles, according to Kant, that the Clintons repeatedly and conveniently overlooked or dismissed outright, and with impunity. It is significant, therefore, that being in contempt of a Congressional subpoena can carry time in prison. There is a good reason for that, so I submit that the criminal charges should be automatic rather than depend on a majority-vote in the House chamber. Obviating accountability by means of political deals does no favor to the guilty in terms of lessons learned, and no favor to an institution that looks weak if its subpoenas can be ignored with impunity. Impunity for some and jail for the rest is no way to run a republic that is based on the rule of law.

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1. Stephen Groves and Matt Brown, “House Republicans Begin Push to Hold the Clintons in Contempt of Congress Over the Epstein Probe,” APnews.com, January 21, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Police Ignoring Laws in Florida: A Case of Systemic Corruption

Systemic corruption means not only that a department or agency has an organizational culture that allows for and may even laud corruption, but also that a city hall, as well as larger jurisdictions such as member-states and even federal agencies may be enabling the corruption by looking the other way and even lying to cover-up the lower-level corruption. A study at Florida Atlantic University published in the Journal of Criminal Justice identifies 24 categories of police misconduct in Florida from 2012 to 2023. Even though it is tempting to highlight violent illegal acts by police employees, lying regarding criminal law and refusing to take reports of criminal activity may be more detrimental because such misconduct is probably more common than is the violent sort. If so, the extent of corruption and the underlying false sense of entitlement by police patrol-employees and even their supervisors may be vastly understated in the United States.

The “24 categories of police misconduct” in Florida range “from assault/battery to weapons offenses, manslaughter, homicide, extortion and false statements/perjury (lying under oath).”[1] The results of the study state that “the most considerable incidence of police misconduct offenses was related to officer failure to report and perjury.”[2] The incidence of this type of corruption was higher than “sexual-related crimes” and “(d)rug and alcohol-related offenses.”[3] The serial lying to citizens and refusing their requests for police reports reflects back on the faulty use of psychological screening on police applicants. The propensity to bully too is indicative that such screening has been substandard and therefore should be drastically fortified.

The police department in Largo, Florida, which is located just north of St Petersburg and west of Tampa, is a case in point. As of 2025 at least, police personnel who have taken oaths to enforce (and thus acknowledge) Florid law were to take reports of fraud. “It takes several people to have reported a case of fraud for us to make a report,” one police employee told me when I called to confirm the wayward policy. The statement demonstrates not only corruption, but also a sordid breach of rationality, for if no initial reports of fraud by a person against another are allowed, then it would be impossible to make a complaint after several other people have done so regarding the same culprit. Incredibly, that same police employee nevertheless maintained that in Florida, reports of fraud are made to the police local departments.

That same squalid department also has a policy that landlords, including local individuals and property-management company employees, can enter rented residential space at any time for any reason because, as I heard when I called to confirm, “there is no such thing as trespassing on a person’s own property.” The department even lies to residents by claiming that neither the town nor Florida has any laws protecting tenants from what is in fact trespassing. The Largo police department took the decision to ignore section 82 of the Florida statutes, which stipulates the conditions under which a property-owner can enter leased premises. The sheer extraordinariness of the lie should not be overlooked, for a brazen, hardened corrupt mentality can be inferred, especially when wielded like a club by police employees who have sworn an oath to uphold rather than ignore and lie about the law.

As for Florida’s Law Enforcement Agency, the official line is that there is no state-level agency in Florida that oversees local police departments; the internal affairs offices of local police departments are the only avenue for complaints. That such a pertainent agency can so easily be coopted by their “brothers in arms” opens up the ethical problem of a conflict of interest. The office of Lori Berman (D), Minority Leader of the Florida Senate, also insists that no state-level avenue for complaints by residents of local police corruption exists; only the towns and counties could take such complaints. In investigating this problem by speaking with one of Berman’s employees, I suggested that federal oversight of corrupt local police departments is also possible. The result was a patronizing, “Now let’s slow down,” reply. I had heard enough, so I called Congresswoman Anna Luna’s office, whose district includes corrupt Largo. I asked which office in the U.S. Department of Justice I could contact regarding a corrupt police department, but was told by one of Luna’s enabling employees, “We have nothing to do with the U.S. Department of Justice.” Enabling the corruption of a local police department is itself a corruption, as is lying about the oversight of federal agencies by the U.S. House of Representatives. 

There is a saying in philosophy, “turtles all the way down.” A thread of corruption extending from local fraud, a lying local police department unwilling to uphold (or even acknowledge) the law, the state of Florida that is presumably unconnected from local agencies or departments, and federal office-holders from Florida for whom federal oversight does not exist either in the Congress or the U.S. Department of Justice qualifies as the epitome of systemic corruption. Just as an unethically dysfunctional culture of a company like Arthur Anderson, Wells Fargo, and Enron is notoriously difficult to dislodge or cure with disinfectant, a corrupt local police department encased and enabled at the state and Congressional level is as intractable as they come, utterly impervious to correction and reform. Translucent sunlight may be in short supply in the sunshine state.

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1. Gisele Galoustian, “Study Finds Police Misconduct ‘Hotspots’ Across Florida,” News Desk, Florida Atlantic University, July 30, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Corruption at the Top in France and Illinois

An important implication of the saying, a fish rots from the head down, is that it is important that corrupt heads be swiftly punished so underlings get the message that crime in public office carries considerable risk. In the matter of Ukraine’s possible accession (not merger!) into the E.U. as a new state, the old, deeply entrenched, culture of corruption in the potential state has been of particular concern in the E.U.’s executive branch, the European Commission. In both the E.U. and U.S., it’s worth asking whether some states are more corrupt than others. It is a mistake to treat all states alike in terms of where to direct federal resources and how much of a given state’s resources should be devoted to investigations of state officials. At least in 2025, Illinois and France could be said to have been “problem children” in this regard, and this doesn’t mean that Hawaii and Sweden, for example, also had as sordid corrupt cultures.

In September 2025, a state court in Paris “found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy in connection with the alleged Libyan financing of his victorious 2007 presidential campaign . . . and sentenced him to five years in prison.”[1] A day before going to prison in mid-October, Sarkozy said he would be taking a biography of Jesus and The Count of Monte Christo with him to prison, so it seems that he was continuing with his innocent-victim role in spite of the conviction and sentencing. Short of any contrition or even public recognition by Sarkozy of his own corruption, it fell on Hollande of the Socialist group to praise “the independence of the judiciary,” especially given that the incumbent, Macron, spent an hour with the convicted ex-president on the day before the Sarkozy, of the same political group, was to show up at a prison.[2] In a corrupt culture, it is natural to worry about whether judges might be persuaded that it is in their interests to reduce or rescind the sentence of a powerful political figure.

Admittedly, in notoriously corrupt Illinois, by 2025 four former heads of state had spent substantial time in prison. Otto Kerner, for example, was convicted in 1973 on 17 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy, perjury, and other charges related to a bribery scheme and was sentenced to three years. Dan Walker was convicted in 1987 of bank fraud and perjury related to fraudulent loans that he had obtained after leaving the high office. George Ryan was convicted in 2006 on fraud and racketeering charges related to bribes; he served five and a half years. Last but hardly least, Rod Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office in 2009, and convicted in 2011 on 18 counts of corruption. Whereas the president of the E.U. cannot pardon state officials, the president of the U.S. can, and U.S. President Trump pardoned “Blago’s” sentence in 2020 after the former head of Illinois had served eight years; the former head of France could only hope in vain for a pardon from E.U. President Von der Leyen, but corruption at the state level could end up appreciably shortening Sarkozy’s sentence, and the meeting with Macron could be a sign that their shared political group might work behind the scenes to free the convicted former leader.

Once begun and allowed to spread throughout a state, whether Illinois or France, political corruption involving money is much more difficult than a fire to put out. Companies such as Enron, Wells Fargo Bank, Arthur Andersen, and even Uber came to be known for their deeply dysfunctional organizational cultures. This does not mean that manager-groups at every or even most companies are that unethical.

It is fortunate that not every company is corrupt mentally, for changing an entrenched sordid organizational culture is very difficult at best, with plenty of strategic firings being just one part of the cure. A so-called “coach” hired by Starbucks, for example, to change the attitudes of the executives towards the employees (especially those who try to unionize) would have a full plate. Such a “coach” would find it very frustrating to “drive” talking-points; the obscenely stretched use of jargon wouldn’t get the consultant very far up against the entrenched acerbic attitudes that had come to dominate the organizational culture. Let’s just say the Pike’s Peak blend of coffee was hardly the only thing that was known for being bitter at Starbucks by 2025.

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1. Euronews, “Sarkozy Received by Macron at Elysée Palace before Five-Year Prison Term States on Tuesday,” Euronews.com, 20 October, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Texas Overreaching

With enough Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives staying in Illinois and New York as of August 3, 2025 that the legislative chamber could not reach a quorum and thus be able to hold a vote on a Congressional redistricting plan that could gain the Republic Party five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Greg Abbott, who at the time was Texas’ head of state and head of the executive branch, was considering various options to bring the lawmakers back. That only one of those options was legal points to the importance of the rule of law being applied to government officials.

The most egregious option, legally speaking, had been proposed by the Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who wrote, the “cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.”[1] In other words, police whose jurisdiction is limited to Texas would be able to have the jurisdiction expanded by Abbot. “He has no legal mechanism,” Rep. Jolando Jones, one of the departed Texas lawmakers said; “Subpoenas from Texas don’t work in New York, so he can’t come and get us. Subpoenas in Texas don’t work in [Illinois].”[2] The Texas Supreme Court had ruled in 2021 that leaders of the House of Representatives had the authority to “physically compel the attendance” of missing representatives, but not even a decision by Texas’s Supreme Court can reach into Illinois or New York; only the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction throughout the bloc.[3] Hyperextending police-power in Texas beyond even the jurisdiction of the Texas Supreme Court would set a bad precedent that could be used even to cover police brutality. That the Attorney General of Texas suggested the blatantly illegal usurping of Illinois’s retained sovereignty by extending that of Texas is itself troubling. In a federal system, it is necessary that everyone colors within the lines.

Abbott was also considering what was only “a nonbinding legal opinion issued by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton that suggested a court could determine that a legislator had forfeited {one’s] office.”[4] Based only on Paxton’s legal opinion, Abbott said he would “begin trying to remove Democratic lawmakers from office.”[5] Presumably he would make the request to a judge rather than remove the lawmakers by his own authority, which again would be illegal even by Paxton’s reasoning.

The only option backed up by extant law that Abbott was considering is fining the absent lawmakers $500 a day, though even that option was being twisted by Ken Paxton, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time. He “suggested that lawmakers may have committed felonies by raising money to help pay for fines they could face.”[6] So it was apparently illegal to have someone one pay one’s fine. Be careful in Texas if a friend or relative, or even a charity organization, is willing to pay your traffic ticket; you may be committing a felony, which, by the way, is a type of federal law. Perhaps Paxton was actually positioning himself for, or worse, already saw himself, as the U.S. Attorney General rather than a U.S. senator.

That the options that Greg Abbott, the figure-head and chief executive of the Texas government, was considering tended to push beyond what was legal at the time is itself worthy of noticing, for such power-aggrandizement by a member-state in a federal system can, if it were to spread, doom that system as state governments turn on each other and the U.S. president takes sides, thus undercutting that presiding role.

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1. Joey Cappelletti and Andrew DeMillo, “Texas Governor Threatens to Remove Democrats Who Left State over Trump-backed Redistricting,” The Associated Press, August 4, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. I am using a word that is popular in the E.U. for a federal system in which governmental sovereignty is split between a union and states. In truth rather than ideology, “bloc” applies neither to the E.U. or U.S.
4. Joey Cappelletti and Andrew DeMillo, “Texas Governor Threatens to Remove Democrats Who Left State over Trump-backed Redistricting,” italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

A U.S. Senator Thrown to the Ground: Security on Steroids

A U.S. Senator being thrown to the ground and handcuffed rather than escorted out of the building because he asked a difficult question for the speaker holding a news conference illustrates not only the bias towards using excessive force that having police power lavishes on human nature, but also a proclivity toward excessiveness without any internal mental check that is entwined in virtually any human brain. That the primary arresting FBI employee was the only person in the room wearing a bulletproof vest inside the federal (government) building may also reveal his penchant for exaggeration—or, going too far without realizing it. The prescription in terms of public policy is a strengthening of checks on law-enforcement employees even, if possible, by embedding other municipal (or federal) employees whose sole function it is to evaluate police conduct either by listening in or observing even in real time. A U.S. senator being thrown to the ground and handcuffed in a federal building in California rather than escorted out of the building evinces a power-trip more base, violent, and primitive than the typical power-trips that occur on the “floor” of the U.S. Senate. It must have been a shock to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla on June 12, 2025 to be physically shoved to the ground, especially if the rationale for his removal from the press conference was itself an exaggeration.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was holding a news conference in early June, 2025 as protests against the arrests of illegal aliens were going on outside in downtown Los Angeles in California, when U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla said, “I have questions for the secretary!”[1] Even if the senator was trying to visibly score political points with his constituents by interjecting, which, by the way, would be in the realm of the sort of power-trip that is quite common in politics, the reaction of the Trump Administration may point to a trumped up political reason for the violent way in which the senator was manhandled by Secret Service employees and then the FBI agent. The White House accused Padilla of “disrespectful political theatre” and Noem herself accused the senator of having ‘made a scene.”[2] If these opinions were behind the manhandling of the senator, then “criminalizing politics” steeped to a new low: instant violence against the elected representative for being political. The violence itself is much worse than merely charging someone for being political in a way that offends someone else in power.

For its part, the Secret Service lied that Padilla had “lunged at Secretary Noem,” and furthermore that the agents there “thought he was an attacker.”[3] Reviewing the video of the event shows the willingness of people with guns to lie to protect themselves, which I contend is reason enough for additional checks on law-enforcement employees, whether federal or state. That the senator, the most senior Democrat on the U.S. Senate’s Border Security and Immigration subcommittee, announced repeatedly that he was a U.S. Senator belies the credibility of the claim that he was thought to be an attacker.

California’s Gavin Newsom, head of state, chief executive, and commander-in-chief of California’s National Guard (i.e., army) wrote online a poignant point worthy of our consideration: “If they can handcuff a US Senator for asking a question, imagine what they will do to you.”[4] Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much imagining to consider the actuality of employees of a government in law enforcement presuming that the law is theirs to make in real time—casting a blind eye intentionally on the actual law—and lying and threatening even victims of a crime with arrest should they object. Enforcing existing law does not give a government employee the discretion with which to ignore the law and even come up with one’s own law and yet how easy it is simply to ignore this vital point in the carrying out of one’s “duties.” I have witnessed this mentality enough to know that it is too common to ignore, and thus I contend that more checks are needed on law-enforcement employees on the non-supervisory level locally, at the member-state level, and at the federal level in the United States. The problem is worse “on the ground” than has reached the public air-waves.

Even if Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, was right in opining, “Padilla embarrassed himself and his constituents with this immature, theatre-kid stunt” because “he wanted attention,”[5] treating the senator as if he were an attacker rather than simply escorting him out of the building—or even letting him remain and treat the altercation between him and Noem as political—reveals an emotionally jejune, hyper-“trigger-happy” mentality among the Secret Service and FBI employees in that federal building. Such a mentality among government employees who have been given the legal right to use force is, I submit, dangerous, and thus should be exculpated from the ranks of law enforcement in any jurisdiction, lest the trend eventuate in people being surrounded by security simply for being angry and even raising one’s voice at a political event. Treating such as a threat is itself passive-aggressive, which as we have seen can turn outright aggressive given the human, all too human proclivity to go to far. 

Put more plainly, assuming that lies used to cover-up the underlying mental ailment, Secret Service employees who perceived the senator lunge at Noem and thought Padilla was an attacker should be put on mental-health leave so they can relax and untighten, and be subjected to psychological tests on latent aggression, for their sort of power-trip is much more dangerous than that which goes on in the U.S. Senate—and the White House, for this incident is but a glimpse toward a realization that not enough had been done even in multiple jurisdictions to root out the sordid pathology from the field of law-enforcement. De facto absolute power “on the ground” loves a vacuum of accountability, and is even willing to lie to keep it at bay.

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1. Ali Abbas Ahmadi and Kwasi G. Asiedu, “US Senator Dragged Out of LA News Conference and Handcuffed,” BBC.com, June 13, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

On the Hidden Police Power of Corporate America

After the UnitedHealthcare chief executive “was gunned down by a masked man outside a Manhattan hotel” in New York City, “a days-long manhunt” occurred that “spanned several states.”[1] The fact that only a few days were needed to find the suspect, Luigi Mangione, indicates just how massive and public the manhunt was. For it was not just any murder, as if the murder of a person who is the chief executive of a large corporation were worth so much more than that of the rest of us. I suspect that the influence of the company, and, moreover, corporate America, on local police in any U.S. member state is more than reaches the headlines. The case at hand my even suggest that that influence includes even tacit instructions to treat anti-corporate suspects of murder violently both in retaliation and as a visible reminder to other potential killers that CEOs are off-limits.

As Pennsylvania sheriff employees took Mangione from a vehicle to the back door of a courthouse, at least two of the employees shoved the suspect—and, remember, in the U.S. a suspect is presumed innocent unless or until proven guilty in a court of law—into a wall even though the wall was not on the way from the vehicle to the back door. In other words, the unnecessary violence was not on the way to the back door, and nor was the suspect resisting going into the courthouse. I contend that the unnecessary violence was at the behest of the corporation whose CEO the suspect allegedly shot. At that time, the evidence that would be found had not yet been found, as per the defense attorney’s statement in the courthouse. Whether the violence being maliciously applied by sheriff employees was merely to show the world how a suspect accused of killing a CEO gets treated by law enforcement, or to stop the suspect from speaking to the media present on his way to the backdoor is not clear. It seems to be possible, at the very least, that corporate instructions given to the police in Pennsylvania included: Don’t let the guy get his anti-corporate message out. This would be ironic, given that corporations had at the time the right of free speech, even through spending as if money constitutes speech.

That Mangione was not resisting going into the courthouse and yet was manhandled rougher than suspects were typically treated at the time may give Americans, as well as the world, a glimpse into the power that large concentrations of private wealth (which is what a corporation is) even as translated into raw violence. The use of police by companies in twentieth-century America to beat workers on strike is well documented. What I am suggesting is that local police were still susceptible to wealthy private interests such as corporations into the next century, at least as of the 2020s. I contend that any contact between police departments and the healthcare insurance company would properly have been limited to the police gaining information in the search for the killer.

Another indication of an over-reaction by local police occurred days after Mangione had been arrested, when Briana Boston was charged with a felony “with one count of making threats to conduct a mass shooting” during a phone call with Blue Cross Blue Shield, her health-insurance company, which was denying a claim that she had submitted. Obviously angry, she said, “Delay, deny, depose. You people are next.”[2] The phrase, “delay, deny, depose,” had been written on bullets by Mangione in reference to tactics that insurers use to avoid paying out claims and had become popular online. Because of the popularity, it could not be assumed that the woman was planning on writing the three words on bullets; the phrase had entered the lexicon. In fact, “(a)ccording to a consumer survey by KFF, more than half of insured [American] adults [had] experienced problems with their insurance provider, and some [of those adults] reported serious consequences.”[3] Strangely, the local police in Lakeland, Florida, said that her statement could be taken as probable cause of “making a threat to conduct a mass shooting . . ., according to the affidavit.”[4] A reasonable interpretation of, “you guys are next,” is that if Blue Cross continues to screw policy holders who do their part in paying premiums, someone may eventually go too far in retaliation. She did not say that she was going to take any violent action, or what that action might be. Given that she was momentarily angry, and perhaps justifiably so, the police employee who leapt to the conclusion that the woman was saying she would conduct a mass killing is ludicrous, and yet the police had the discretion (and thus power) to make an example of the woman by charging her with a crime carrying a fourteen-year sentence, without her having done anything. Had being angry at customer-service employees become a crime? Or, had free-speech that is objectionable to big business become a crime? If so, could corporations next go after certain thoughts, using employees of local police departments who dismiss protecting the public as dutiful sycophants?

We can turn the Lakeland police investigation on its head by investigating that department. It is significant that “Lakeland, Florida police said they were contact by the FBI . . . in response to the alleged threat.”[5] That the police did not waste any time and did not seem to second-guess the FBI may suggest that the FBI had been determined to snuff out the “potential” copy-cat. To be sure, the FBI may simply have been over-cautious, but even that could have been due to pressure from Blue Cross or elected officials who have received campaign contributions from the giant company. That both the FBI and the local police department in Florida would knowingly seek to charge an angry policy holder of a crime that carries a sentence of 14 years in prison indicates a grossly disproportionate reaction, which itself could point back to the deference that the FBI (and local police) give to business in doing its bidding, even to scare the public.

As an anecdote, once when leaving a restaurant after barely eating a very badly cooked meal, I was speaking to people in the shopping center’s parking lot about the food. The manager of the restaurant got wind of this and approached me even though I was no longer on her establishment’s property. “The police here are my friends!” she warned me. “Keep talking about my restaurant and I will get them to make you leave.” The manager’s sheer presumptuousness was laughable, so I kept talking as was my right. She did call her friends, who told me I had to leave the parking lot even though that lot was not owned by the restaurant. That the police dismissed my legitimate objection told me enough; I moved to another suburb of Phoenix only months later; Mormon-run Mesa was simply too corrupt (and drug-ridden).

If my small window into the deference that local police pay to small business in falsely enforcing law that is not really law is correct, it is not difficult to conjecture that the FBI as well as local police may be unduly biased towards, perhaps even de facto working for, large corporations. The sort of unaccountability in accusing a distraught policy-holder of mass murder (even without noticing that she had no record of violence and not even a gun!) and being willing to put her in prison for fourteen years, likely to send the public a message from the large corporations, is consistent with the lack of accountability generally on market participants that are so large and wealthy that even competition is stifled that so enrages consumers and thus prompts anti-corporate politics. The connection can be found in Adam Smith’s claim that one of the main rationales for government is to protect the wealthy from the poor, who would otherwise steal the wealth. Does this hold of the governments in the U.S., or is the public to be served? The official answer may differ from the real answer.

That the governments in the U.S. have allowed companies to become so large as to choke competition without anti-trust law being enforced—something that Adam Smith would not like—is yet another indication of the “under the table” power of large corporations in the United States, thanks in part to unlimited political campaign contributions being legal. Perhaps elected officials were the people delivering the instructions from the health insurance company to the Pennsylvania sheriff in Altoona: Be rough with the guy and don’t let him speak to the media. Push him up against a wall if you want. Grab him by the neck. Show the world what happens if someone goes up against corporate America.  Hence the anti-corporate political movement in a democracy that is premised on accountability rather than plutocracy with impunity.

My main point is that institutionally, or structurally, very large and wealthy private companies, whether corporations or privately held, are incompatible with not only market competition, which ensures fair prices (even at grocery stores after a pandemic), but also political democracy, wherein one person has one vote and thus is just as important as the next. Whether a man on the street or a corporate CEO is murdered, the police-response should be the same in terms of the cost and effort in the manhunt and how the suspects are treated. Innocent until proven guilty means that police violence against a suspect who is not being violent or resistant is itself a crime regardless of how rich the victim’s family or company happens to be. 

The case of the health insurance CEO’s murder in December, 2024 was deliberately not supposed to be a vehicle for getting an anti-corporate message out—with even violence being used to enforce this proscription—but how the Pennsylvania police aggressively treated the suspect unabashedly in public view can be seen as a poster advertising the interlarding of corporate power at the expense of accountability in American democracy. Both economically and politically, it can be asked whether large corporations are accountable in the United States; politically, the same question may be asked of the local police departments in the member states. The American governments in the U.S. could do worse than apply anti-trust law to a variety of markets and apply criminal law to local police departments whose actual paymasters can be characterized proverbially as the man behind the curtain—an allusion to the hidden Wizard in the film, The Wizard of Oz. Then again, perhaps Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a more pertinent film, as the senator played by Jimmy Stuart filibusters for hours and hours against corruption in his home state.

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1. Jessica Parker and Nadine Yousif, “Luigi Mangione Fingerprints Match Crime-Scene Prints, Police Say,” BBC.com, December 11, 2024.
2. Pocharapon Neammanee, “Woman Arrested After Saying ‘Delay, Deny, Depose’ On Call With Insurance Company,” The Huffington Post, December 12, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5.Ibid.

The Colorado Supreme Court Bars Insurrectionist Trump: Who Should Ultimately Decide?

On December 19, 2023, Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that Don Trump, a former U.S. president, had engaged in insurrectionist activity as a matter of fact, and furthermore, as a matter of law, the U.S. Constitution bars him from holding any office, including the presidency. With an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a certainty, realized even by the Colorado justices, and some notable (and very visible) Republicans arguing that the American people should have the final say on whether Trump will be president again beginning in 2025, the question of who should have the final say—the judiciary or the people—was pressing, and indeed, very important. I contend that the determination of fact should have been made by a jury in a criminal proceeding, and that even absent that, the ultimate decision should still be made prior to, and thus not during, the election, for the question is whether Trump can be listed as a candidate for the office. Ultimately, the tension lies between the value of a politics-free judiciary and democratic (majority) rule.

Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “prohibits anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then ‘engaged in insurrection’ against it from holding office.”[1] The Colorado Supreme Court reversed the decision of a trial judge with the simple logic that the section doesn’t explicitly mention the U.S. Presidency because it is so obviously an office. That it is so because, as the majority of Colorado’s high court’s justices wrote, the presidency serves “we the people” seems more like rhetoric than logic; the majority opinion could have left it at the rather obvious point that the presidency itself is not mentioned in section 3 because that section refers to all offices, federal and state, as being subject to the prohibition. Indeed, in political discourse, “the office of the president” is often mentioned, so the point hardly seems necessary to be made, but for the strange reasoning of the trail judge who had sought explicit mention of the presidency as if it were not included in “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State.”[2] That both appointed and elected offices are included is also indisputable on the face of it, and that the section expressly names senator and representative in Congress does mean that the presidency too must be named, for the distinction here is between the legislative and the two other branches (a justice is also an office). In fine, the presidency of the United States is indeed a governmental office.

Colorado’s high court was on shakier ground, and this is noted in the dissent in the 4-3 opinion, in accepting the district judge’s determination of fact that President Trump had “engaged in an insurrection.”[3] Insurrectionist activity was at the time a federal crime in the U.S., and yet Donald Trump had not even been charged with the crime, much less convicted by a jury. Rather, a district judge had made the finding of fact, such that not even any criminal sentencing could be done. At Yale more than a month before Colorado’s high-court ruling, I asked James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, whether someone would first have to be charged and convicted of insurrectionist activity. “No,” he said flatly, without feeling the need to elaborate.[4] I thought I had asked a stupid question until I read in Colorado’s decision that the dissent makes the same point. Presumably someone should be found guilty of the crime before being barred from holding any public office because of said crime. Therefore, I submit that Colorado’s majority opinion erred in accepting the district judge’s determination of fact in lieu of any criminal prosecution and conviction as a sufficient basis apply the 14^th Amendment to Donald Trump.

Given the weaknesses in the judicial rulings of both the lower and higher court in Colorado, it is a good thing that the U.S. system of government is federal because the U.S. Supreme Court could make corrections. By implication, perhaps a plurality of state supreme courts should be able to overrule a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Checks and balances should apply to the judiciary too. Relatedly, the lack of check and balance concerning some of the unethical gifts taken by Justice Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court from a Republican activist could diminish the legitimacy of the U.S. court in being the final decider on the questions of Donald Trump being an insurrectionist and, furthermore, being barred from holding any office. 

After the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court was made public, some of the Republican candidates for president publicly asserted that the American people should decide through the presidential election whether Trump should be president. A number of serious problems attend to this proposal.

Firstly, it is highly unrealistic, to say the least, that every voter would vote on the basis of the question of whether the U.S. Constitution forbids Trump from holding office. Even if Trump were to lose the election, it could not be inferred that the American people had decided that Trump was barred and thus could not hold any office.

Secondly, such a position incurs the worries noted by James Madison in his Notes on the constitutional convention that excess democracy, such as by having a de facto democratic judiciary (i.e., decided by votes of the people rather than rulings by justices), brings with it insufficient check on the passions of the people. A judiciary is one such check, and judicial review renders that branch a check also on the two other branches of government. In short, leaving the final word in interpreting the constitution to “we the people” leaves us without the ability to protect us from ourselves. For example, the rights of the minority would have no protection against the tyranny of the majority—democracy of course being by majority rule. Not the least of considerations, politics would also inevitably be involved.

Even in the U.S. Supreme Court, politics have likely been more of a force than the public realizes. Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, whose funeral took place just days from Colorado’s high-court ruling, had written the majority opinion for Bush v. Gore (2000) even before oral arguments were heard. She had been active in the Republican Party when she was an Arizona legislator, and her majority opinion sided with Bush. Objections to her partisanship imply a belief that the judiciary should be neutral politically.

Handing over the court’s functions to “we the people” would only add politics to constitutional interpretation. Voters in favor of Trump personally, or his policies, would likely find that he did not engage in an insurrection, and thus that the Constitution does not bar him from holding any office. President Biden’s supporters would be inclined to view Trump’s speech on January 6, 2020 as fomenting an insurrection. Who then should decide? This is the rationale for having a judiciary, especially where criminality is to be decided. Just as politics should not be criminalized, so too criminal proceedings should not be politicized.

I asked James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, why the federal prosecutor had not included insurrection among the criminal charges against Donald Trump. “It’s messy,” the judge replied. He meant that it is difficult to get a conviction. If so, then the fact that the district judge in Colorado so easily found that Trump had indeed been engaged in insurrectionist activity by urging his supporters to disrupt the counting of the electors’ votes for president warrants strict scrutiny. In other words, if the charge is “messy,” then shouldn’t a jury hear the case and be made to deliberate? Then, of a jury were to convict the former president, then appellate courts, including ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, would be oriented exclusively to deciding the questions of law concerning section 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

Separating the criminal proceedings from the work of the U.S. Supreme Court would buffer the impact of politics inside that court unless its justices would disregard a jury verdict. Such a rationale would have to be strong in its reasoning, least it appear to be part of a political effort to decide the 2024 presidential election by judicial fiat, as in 2000. Such an effort would effectively prioritize a decision by the electorate. Absent such judicial corruption, deciding whether section 3 of the 14^th Amendment applies to Don Trump by an election incorrectly treats the United States as a direct democracy rather than a republic in which democracy is a part of the system of the system of government. Especially when democracy itself is in dispute, a judiciary free from politics is so very valuable. Boasberg’s dismissiveness of my two questions at Yale in early November, 2023 left me wondering about the neutrality of the federal judiciary. At the very least, what he took for granted is hardly settled law.

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1. Nicholas Riccardi, “The Constitution’s Insurrection Clause Threatens Trump’s Campaign. Here Is How That Is Playing Out,” APNews.com, December 20, 2023.
2. The U.S. Constitution, Section  of the 14^th Amendment.
3. Kinsey Crowley, “What Is the 14^th Amendment? Why Colorado Disqualified Trump and Removed Him from Ballot,” USA Today, December 20, 2023.
4. Not even the report of the judge’s talk in The Yale Daily News includes any mention of the judge’s answer to my question. Presumably the student-reporter did not think the reply could be controversial.

On the Role of the U.S. Supreme Court in Safeguarding the Peaceful Transfer of Power

In the E.U., the state governments and federal institutions can ask the European Court of Justice (the ECJ) for an opinion on a legal matter. This is rare in the U.S., though waiting for a dispute to winds its way formally through district and appellate courts may be unduly bureaucratic, not to mention lengthy. On December 11, 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the U.S. Supreme Court the ECJ’s counterpart, to decide whether the former U.S. president Donald Trump had any immunity from criminal prosecution of his involvement in the riot at the U.S. Capitol that interrupted the formal counting by a joint session of Congress of the Electoral College presidential ballots. The trial was set to begin the following March, and the question of the former president’s immunity had to be decided before the trial could begin. Hence the “extraordinary request,” which I contend should not be extraordinary given the time frame and the important role of the highest court in safeguarding American democracy from domestic threats.

The prosecutor asked the U.S. Supreme court to review district Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling that Donald Trump is not immune from “the election subversion prosecution case.”[1] Trump’s lawyers had argued that Trump’s actions in speaking outside the White House on January 6, 2020 were part of his official duties because he was protecting the American democratic system from alleged vote-fixing by Democrats. Chutkan rejected that argument, pointing out that the speech was oriented to Trump’s re-election and thus was not part of a president’s official duties—efforts to secure another term extend beyond the performance of the office within the current term of office.  Essentially, applying to continue in an office is not a function of the office. Chutkan classified Trump’s speech as falling under the rubric of campaign speeches even though the election had passed because he was using the speech to try be re-elected by Congress (by disputing the authenticity of several state electoral ballots).

To be sure, it was not as if Trump went with the option that he was considering of surrounding the Capitol with tanks—something President Nixon had also considered doing in 1974 during the Watergate scandal, which by the way ended up prompting him to resign. Instead, Trump was trying to throw the election to the Congress by pressuring it to vote on the validity of several of the Electoral College ballots that had been submitted by the state governments to be counted. The U.S. Constitution does give Congress a role in presidential elections, both in certifying the ballots and electing a president outright if no candidate gets a majority of the Electoral College votes. Had there been evidence of significant election fraud that would justify Congressional votes on the Electoral College ballots from several key states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, then Congress could have intervened while staying within the constitutional framework. It was Trump’s way of applying pressure, by instigating a mob to disrupt the official counting, that resulted in the federal indictments that run just short of insurrection. By the way, I asked a judge on the D.C. district court why he thought Trump had not been indicted on insurrection. “It’s too messy,” he replied. “Isn’t that charge and a conviction based expressly on it necessary for someone to be barred from running for office in the U.S.?” I asked. “No,” the judge replied. “A judge in Colorado is looking at that now,” he added, presumably without there being a trial. It’s a pity that no one asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on what a Colorado judge was doing in lieu of a trial on the facts decided by a jury.

Perhaps even more than the presumption of innocence unless convicted of a crime, the rule of law applied even to U.S. presidents is vital to American democracy. Writing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the prosecutors with the special counsel insisted that “nothing could be more vital to our democracy” than holding a former U.S. president accountable for breaking a law.[2] Indeed, a “cornerstone of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law. The force of that principle is at its zenith where, as here, a grand jury has accused a former president of committing federal crimes to subvert the peaceful transfer of power to his lawfully elected successor.”[3] Many democracies have turned into military dictatorships precisely because the peaceful transfer of power was not respected. With a past of rule by kings, both domestic and colonial, many African countries have had trouble with the peaceful transfer of power. As a result, the foreign direct investment of multinational corporations has not been as large as the continent would need to develop economically. Even though it was hard to imagine a military coup in the U.S. in 2023, the precedent of a president getting away with having violated the U.S. Constitution could begin a slippery slope downward. More than sufficient grounds existed in 2023 for the U.S. Supreme Court to fast-track the question of Trump’s immunity.

The question of whether the trial could go forward was subject to time constraints; were the trial date of March, 2024 delayed pending the question of Trump’s immunity from prosecution going through the lengthy appellate process, the question of Trump’s guilt could still be unanswered by the next presidential election, in early November, 2024. Even though several presidential candidates were insisting that they would support a convicted felon for president, presumably voters would want to know whether Trump had committed a crime in attempting to thwart the results of the 2020 presidential election before casting their respective ballots.

Hence, the prosecutors wrote to the U.S. Supreme Court, “Respondent’s appeal of the ruling rejecting his immunity and related claims, however, suspends the trial of the charges against him, scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024. . . . It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected.”[4] The public importance has to do with the electorate having as much information as possible concerning the charges against the presidential candidate before going to the polls that upcoming November.

The fast-tracking would not be without precedent. In US v. Nixon (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court fast-tracked the question of Nixon’s claim of presidential privilege in being immune from a Congressional subpoena for the Oval Office tapes. “In that case, the high court moved quickly to resolve the matter so that one f the Watergate-era cases could proceed swiftly.”[5] It was not long after the ruling that the White House handed over the tapes to a congressional committee, and Nixon’s political fate was doomed from that point. Indeed, the difference between Nixon’s public persona and what he had been saying behind closed doors stunned many Americans who had no idea that even a “law and order” president could have such a squalid criminal mind. The public interest in furnishing the American electorate in 2024 with as much crucial information as possible on one of the presidential candidates can thus be appreciated. It should not be “extraordinary” for the U.S. Supreme Court to see to it that Trump’s federal trial could take place in time for the 2024 presidential election. Winding down the clock, to use a sports analogy, should not be a tactic that any defendant in a criminal trial should be able to use effectively, especially if accountability protecting the peaceful transfer of power is at issue.

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1. Hannah Rabinowitz and Devan Cole, “Special Counsel goes Directly to Supreme Court to Resolve Whether Trump Has Immunity from Prosecution,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

American Law Enforcement: Extricating the Aggressive Personality and Presumption to Violate the Law Off-Duty

The assumption that more police than we might expect have in not being subject to the law even while off-duty suggests that hiring, training, and retention practices of police departments are inadequate. The presumption of being an ubermench and thus untouchable is dangerous when the person can legally carry a gun. Memo to police departments in the U.S.: please notify your employees that they are subject to local, state, and federal laws, period. Any indication of any presumption to the contrary subjects the culprit to termination. Unfortunately, police departments and their respective city governments in the U.S. are far from such enlightenment as could hold their employees accountable.

In June, 2023, a police employee of Orlando, Florida faced charges by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office for reckless driving and resisting and fleeing from a deputy. The culprit “refused to show the deputy his license, got back in his car, and took off . . .”[1] He had been driving at 80 mph in a 45 mph zone. It is significant that he thought that going to work was a viable excuse for speeding. Even more incredibly, he told the deputy to notice his police uniform, as justifying the speeding! When the deputy asked for the man’s driver’s license, the violator abstinently said a quick, “NO!,” and turned to get into his car before fleeing the scene. How dare you as me for MY license! That’s something I do to OTHER PEOPLE. How arrogant, wrong, and incorrect. Moreover, the man’s reaction to being held accountable provides the public with a view of someone having the legal use of a gun and yet not willing to be held accountable himself. He may have incorrectly appropriated the former President Nixon’s erroneous declaration that if the president does something, it is legal. A local police employee is not even close to being the president of the United States. Even aside from prosecuting the presumptuous law-breaker in Florida, the city of Orlando would have done well in considering whether such a person should be granted the legal right to use lethal force.

My point includes the subtle one that prosecution is not sufficient and is thus inadequate as a litmus test for deciding whether a police employee literally takes liberties off duty should remain employed. Due to lack of evidence of a malicious intent, a police employee of Chicago, Illinois was not found formally guilty of assaulting a 14-year-old, whom the off-duty employee had wrongly assumed had stolen his son’s bike. The employee inserted one of his knees in the eighth-grader’s back.[2] Regardless of whether there was sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution, the photograph of the man on top of the boy should be enough for a chief of police to decide that such presumptuousness predicated on being a police employee should eliminate the attitude from being on a police force. The presumption in being allowed to attack a child who happens to walk past a stolen bike would be a red flag even in the case of a police employee on-duty. Off-duty, a man who happens to work as a police employee is just like any other dad. While any father may feel like being judge, jury, and executioner of a suspected thief of one’s son’s bike, what father would actually act on the urge? Hence, the off-duty police employee can be seen as presumptuous, and even as questionable psychologically, as can a police employee who curtly says no when asked for his driver’s license for speeding to get to work. An aggressive tenor can be detected from both men, and this alone should bar them from having the legal right of lethal force.

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1. Connor Hansen, “Orlando Police Officer Accused of Reckless Driving, Leaving Traffic Stop after Exchange with Deputy,” Fox35 Orlando, June 12, 2023 (accessed June 17, 2023).

2.  Alex Hammer, “Moment Off-Duty Chicago Cop Kneels on 14-Year-Old Boy’s Back after Mistakenly Accusing Him of Stealing a Bike,” DailyMail.com, July 4, 2022 (accessed June 17, 2023).