Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
To me, using the legal system to attack politicians who do things you don't like is far far far more of a concern than using the power granted to you by the voters to do the same.
The
point of the legal system is to determine if there's been wrong doing.
Sure. But when the purpose of doing so is simply to get the indictment, knowing that this will by itself have political ramifications, it's an abuse of said legal system. It's become one of the dirty tricks that the Left uses when it knows it can't win political power fairly.
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A grand jury thought there was enough of a case here to proceed.
Sure. Which increasingly just means that 9 out of 12 people with limited legal knowledge and presented with only one side of the case decided that the case met the minimum requirements to possibly be true. Grand Juries are basically indictment machines. It's very rare for them to not indict, so it really reflects whether the case was brought to the jury in the first place, not whether there's sufficient evidence to actually hold a trial (which an arraignment process is much much much much much (times like 10000 more muches) better at accomplishing.
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Now, it might fizzle out from there but you can't frame this as "some guy just decided he didn't like Perry and is using the legal system, oh no!".
Except that's more or less exactly what happened. The "some guy" is a member of the group "Texans for Public Justice" named Craig McDonald. While the group claims to be non-partisan (hahaha! Yeah), they're basically a front group funded by far left political organizations specifically to file legal charges against political enemies (which is mostly Republicans, but the occasional Democrat who's not liberal enough apparently qualifies).
Now, I'm not sure how the grand jury process works in Texas and what levels of decision making occurs between someone like McDonald filing the criminal compliant and a grand jury looking at the evidence and deciding whether to indict, but from the admittedly surface level research I've done, it looks fairly automatic. If someone takes the time and trouble to properly file a criminal complaint, it ends out in front of a grand jury. Which means that all you really need for an indictment is a politician doing something that can be made to appear like it might be illegal to someone who isn't very knowledgeable of the law (well, 9 out of 12 someones) and taking the time/money to file the complaint.
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That said, your statement gave me the giggles since the GOP is busy trying to use the legal system to attack a president they don't like rather than using their actual Congressional powers of impeachment if they thought there was a real issue and weren't just playing politics
I used a broad term, but I was speaking about the criminal justice system, specifically using grand juries to indict political enemies. Which appears to be an increasingly popular tactic being used by an ever more desperate political Left.
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Oh, go ahead now with your million reasons why that case is so legitimate, yadda yadda...
Which case, exactly? You mean the lawsuit over Obama's executive overreaches? You do understand that lawsuits are how the courts are brought in on such things, right? And that congress (or individual members of congress) can properly sue in cases where another branch of government does something in violation of constitutional rules and/or separation of powers and are arguably
the only ones who can. Didn't the Supreme Court just rule against Obama on the issue of recess appointments? Who do you suppose brought that lawsuit? Oh wait! It was Congress. Because that is precisely the correct legal process to use in those types of situations.
Comparing this to our massively broken grand jury process is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Edited, Aug 26th 2014 7:06pm by gbaji