Constitutional Violations by Donald Trump

  I talked with a young soon-to-be law school student this week. He wants to be a trial lawyer, but he is worried there are so few trials. When I started to practice 11% of the Federal cases were resolved by trial. Now, that number is a little over 1%. The same trends are found in state courts all over the country. There are a great many causes I will mention only a few.      In the criminal area, prosecutors have been given enormous power to negotiate plea dispositions. The judges role has been minimalized by the use of sentencing guidelines that seek uniformity. In the civil area, billion dollar verdicts have made public trials too risky. There are also provisions which are under critical attack at the moment which allow settlements to be secret which have occasionally protected manufacturers producing dangerous products.      When public trials are followed by the press, reforms become the subject of public discussion, like the Chauvin trial. Co...

  Senator McConnell’s lecturing of American business to stay out of politics was hastily followed by his statement he was not talking about contributions . That lecture represented a reversal of normal political dialogue. In a democracy it is the voters who tell the office holders what they need and what they want. It is not the office holders who instruct the voters as to what they’re allowed to do. Under the First Amendment as declared by the US Supreme Court on several occasions, corporations have a right to express political opinions. Efforts to reduce the vote is among the most important subjects for public discussion. There’s something more important about what McConnell did. He took an axe to the republican base. For a number of years the republican hierarchy has been trying to manage a joining of American business with right-wing groups, some of them with extreme positions. It has been effective at times. But the recent praise by Senator Johnson of Wisconsin, lavished o...

       The business community and the legal community have had enough of the public vote theft. There is a full-page advertisement in the  New York Times  today listing approximately 100 major American corporations and almost all of the large law firms (including Morrison Foerster LLP) in the United States, in opposition to the public voter theft being enacted in several states.      Senator McConnell has overplayed his hand and is now in political trouble. It is often the American establishment that has to step forward and save our democratic form of government. Forty-seven states have pending or enacted statutes with the aim of reducing the vote. Those statutes eviscerate our democratic form of government. The immediate and widespread reaction of citizens was to stop doing business with any company that tolerated voter reduction or theft, and so it should be.      A bill pending in the congress now would establish a bipartisa...