"Larry David had one of the stupidest op-eds in today's New York Times in which he compares Bill Maher having dinner with Donald Trump with having dinner with Adolf Hitler."

"Um, you know, Larry David, that's a form of Holocaust denial. Comparing Trump to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial because Trump didn't have gas chambers, he didn't have shooting squads, he didn't take babies, and throw them into ovens, and if you're making a comparison what you're saying is Hitler didn't have any of those things either. So shame — shame — on you Larry David. You know, we used to be friends, boy. No more. And the one thing: about Larry David he stopped being funny, I don't laugh at his jokes anymore because I know they're not jokes. That's who he really is, so they're not jokes...."

Said Alan Dershowitz, trashing Larry David's trashing of Bill Maher's dining with Trump.

Here's David's NYT op-ed "My Dinner With Adolf" — free-access link — which begins:

Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side....

Read the whole thing. I gave you the free link. Now, I do think what Larry wrote there is funny. It just violates a rule of taste: You shouldn't compare anything to the Holocaust. 

We can talk about why that rule fell out of fashion. But whether Larry David is violating a strict and important rule or just going with the flow of the current taste within his hyper-elite stratum of society is a separate question from whether it's funny.

"This is my home!"/"I had a home in Palestine too."

I'm watching the video at "'Please leave!' A Jewish UC Berkeley dean confronts pro-Palestinian activist at his home" (L.A. Times).

The headline says "his home," but it is the home of the law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife Catherine Fisk, who is a law professor. It is their home, and is Fisk who physically engages with the person the headline calls a "pro-Palestinian activist." The "activist" is a law student, one of a large group of law students who were assembled — outdoors — for a dinner. The activist student — Malak Afaneh — is female, which may explain why it was Fisk who took the lead in attempting to oust the student from the premises. It's a very disturbing video, with the student standing her ground and calmly claiming a First Amendment right, and Fisk staunchly asserting "This is my home." 

 

Dancing across the blurred lines of appropriateness along the legal landscape and shifting social tapestry.

You may wonder why I moderate the comments. If only they could just flow freely, like the thoughts in your head late at night. It's not just the trolls. It's also the spam that the spam filter doesn't always catch. And nowadays, it can use AI to compose the compliment that's supposed to provide camouflage for the link it wants to post. This came in overnight:

"[A]fter the flurry of hard-right rulings this June, many professors had their 'own personal grieving period.'"

"But they quickly turned toward 'grappling with how we teach our students' to understand the Supreme Court’s reactionary turn.... A professor must say what the court claims it’s doing, then explain what it is actually doing, which is often something completely different. This technique can disillusion students, leading them to ask why they’re bothering to learn rules that can change at any moment.... Students confront a legal system in a crisis of legitimacy led by an extreme and arrogant court. Still, they must slog on, most gathering substantial debt as they go, pretending that 'law' is something different from politics, a higher realm of reason and rationality where the best arguments prevail.... My father, Nat Stern, retired from a 41-year career at Florida State University College of Law in May.... When I asked him why he decided to retire, he told me that he had no desire to explain the Supreme Court’s conservative revolution as the product of law and reason rather than politics and power.... 'For the bulk of my career,' he said, 'I’ve felt I could fairly explain rulings and opinions that I don’t endorse because they rested on coherent and plausible—if to me unconvincing—grounds. In recent years, though, I’ve increasingly struggled to present new holdings as the product of dispassionate legal reasoning rather than personal agendas.'"

Writes Mark Joseph Stern in "The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too/Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough" (Slate). 

I got there via David Bernstein at Instapundit, who says: "We all know that left-learning lawprofs would be dancing in the streets if SCOTUS were equally aggressive to the left. And indeed, while Stern portrays discontent with the Court as a question of professional standards rather than ideology, he does not manage to find a single right-leaning professor to quote in his article."

I remember just before the 2016 election, when I was making my decision to retire.

"And we all know that this is about payback for supporting Brett Kavanaugh, no more. If it brings the law school bad press..."

"... and ruins the already disappointing deanship of Heather Gerken — spoiler, it has — then that’s justice. Just read this, and imagine putting any of these people in charge of your life, your liberty, or your business’s future."

Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the Yale Law School controversy. This is the complicated Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld matter that I'm not taking any position on, because I don't trust the witnesses.

Meanwhile, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos is reviling Chua and Rubenfeld.

Campos quotes NY Magazine...

Three other professors [said] that Chua is the victim of overzealous zoomers who have confused the natural hierarchy of achievement — and Chua’s right to favor whomever she wants — with a social-justice outrage. “There are a lot of mediocre students at Yale who were superstars in their little county fairs, and now they’re in the Kentucky Derby and they’re not winning their races and they feel like it’s unfair because other students are doing better,” says one faculty member who thinks the dean, Heather Gerken, was too deferential to students in how she handled the small-group affair.

... and goes nuclear:

This person should be fired directly into the Sun. It’s basically impossible to get into YLS without perfect everything, and the analogy between running the Belmont in 2:24 and impressing a bunch of wankers on the YLS faculty with your talent for subtle ingratiation disguised as “brilliance” is, shall we say, not a super tight one.

It's easy for me to picture how the most elite admissions process could lead to a student body that, in action, feels like "a lot of mediocre students." But that's a dreadful dysfunction of the institution that the faculty is responsible for. It's truly contemptible to stand aloof and blame your students. 

And the use of the rural setting for the analogy — little county fairs — is out-and-proud snobbery of the most embarrassing kind. Little county fairs and the Kentucky Derby — that's rich. Is there horse racing at a county fair? I'd really like to know who came up with that dimwitted analogy, and I can see why it pissed Campos off. He's right that in that analogy, winning the Kentucky Derby is analogized to ingratiating yourself to law professors.

But what we don't really know is what kind of ingratiating was going on with the great power couple that was Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld? Was it something different — creepier and more sexual — than the ingratiating that goes on with other Yale lawprofs?

Cancel adjacent, Part 2.

The previous post discusses the ordeal of Sharon Osbourne who found herself in the "cancel adjacent" position. 

I observed that the new rule seems to be "that you have to proactively denounce people, or you yourself will become the target," and I linked back to a March 11th post where I learned the term "cancel adjacent." 

Now, I want to show you "Georgetown law professor resigns for 'failing to correct' colleague on Zoom about 'Black' students comment" (Fox News). 

[Georgetown law professor David] Batson appears to nod his head but mostly remains silent as Sellers is talking.... Batson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News....

Silence didn't work the first time, but he's still going with silence. He was cancel adjacent, and the cancellation did reach out and engulf him. We are in dangerous times. What will terrified "cancel adjacents" do to save themselves?

Here's the video if you want to check out how little Batson did. That's what not to do, so learn your lesson:

.@GeorgetownLaw negotiations Professors Sandra Sellers and David Batson being openly racist on a recorded Zoom call.

Beyond unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/q5MoWjBok8

— Hassan Ahmad (@hahmad1996) March 10, 2021

"[I]t would appear that 'racist' means 'anything that a black person doesn’t like for some reason,' and we are to bow down and accept this..."

"... as post-Enlightenment, morally binding truth because black people have a hideous history. That is not a real discussion. It renders black people something less than human, in feigning that we are beyond serious critique. We are lying to one another and nervously hoping nobody will blow the whistle on what we are told to pretend is about 'social justice.' But lowering standards is not 'social justice,' nor is pretending that the standards have no value and calling for their elimination.... Nor is it 'social justice' to dragoon black students into a diversity diorama and then watch them complain about being foisted with the responsibility of representing their race, while also assailing the school for not addressing their 'diversity' in the right way, when what really should have happened is that they settled in at schools prepared to teach them effectively. Do I think [Sandra] Sellers should have been fired? Well, all I can say is that in our current climate I don’t see how she could teach effectively, although I’m not sure if that’s fair, because I cannot know whether she is 'a racist,' because what she said did not demonstrate that at all, even if not said with optimal grace.... I am seeking to find some sense in things. I’m afraid the Sellers story as we are being given it does not, in the true way, make sense."

Writes John McWhorter in "So there was a law professor at Georgetown who was a racist. And now she's gone, but wait -- what do we mean by "racist" these days? And why am I a heretic to even ask the question and want real answers?" (Substack). 

Much more at the link, including background on the case of Professor Sellers. 

If you really care about systemic racism, it's perverse just to go after those who blurt out something crude that can be denounced as explicit racism. If that's your tactic, you're teaching everyone to guard their expression. You are cutting off the flow of evidence of racism, making it harder to detect.

"This guy was known for loving the job so much that he literally skipped to work... I remember thinking, ‘He had a crush on our job...'"

"'... and he couldn’t not talk about it the way you talk about somebody you have a crush on'... I was like, ‘Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun.'" 

Said Liz Glazer, from "A Law Professor Switches to Stand-Up Comedy/Taking an improv class on a whim led to a career in comedy for this onetime law professor" (Wall Street Journal). 

The skipping-to-work guy was a partner in the law firm where she worked before she took up a job as a law professor, but the concept — wanting to really love your job — carried over to law professing, which she left for stand-up comedy. She'd received tenure, but then her school was making buy-out offers, and she snapped it up. She had been doing stand-up performances for a year at that point, and I guess she knew that was her real love.

Do you love your work and if so, does that mean you are in love with your work? There's a difference! Have you ever let go of a successful line of work because you weren't in love with it? Would you? Would you trust that this other thing that you feel you're in love with would really turn out all right? To put it that way makes the problem sound analogous to being married, without any serious problems, but falling in love with someone else. When that happens, do you think well, hell, I want the magic?

No, no... despite the "in love" business, work isn't like marriage. You don't swear lifetime faithfulness to your job, and your job doesn't have a consciousness capable of suffering. You can be untrue to your job. You're just being true to yourself. There's no moral question, only a question of how much to risk your own happiness. The thing you did for love might fail. It might turn out not to feel like so much fun after you've made yourself dependent on it. And you had tenure!!

Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun.

"It’s like you get the most confident, strong personality people, a lot of them being women, and it’s like you’re layering all of them on top of each other and it becomes everyone trying to talk over each other."

"So it’s a lot of really enthusiastic yelling.... It was nice to have so many different, really strong opinions. We always joke that whenever we bring our friends over for the first time they’re going to get grilled. Like, if you don’t have your 10-year plan, like, fully ready and outlined in a spreadsheet for them, you’re not going to survive that meal." 

Said Ella Emhoff, quoted in "What’s It Like to Have Kamala Harris As ‘Momala’? We Asked Her Stepkids/A Zoom interview with Ella and Cole Emhoff" (NYT). 

I was interested in the question — asked by the NYT interviewer — "Your dad has never not worked, right? What do you think that’s going to be like for him?" 

The reader is forced to infer that Emhoff is quitting his work. There's no link or statement to that effect, and I didn't know it. He's only 56. He's been a lawyer. I see at his Wikipedia page that he took a leave of absence from his law firm when Harris was running for VP, and he permanently resigned when she became VP. So what will this be like for him? I'd say, he's old enough to retire, and not retiring would probably cause more trouble than any good his working could have done, even assuming that his legal work was for the good.

Here's his daughter's answer:

I hope he takes up, like, another hobby. I hope he starts knitting, like I do. I think it’ll be a good time for him to slow down and just, I don’t know, like appreciate life. And tap into a lot of the things that he couldn’t do because he was working so much or had these, like, time constraints. I hope that it opens up some of those creative outlets, but that’s obviously just me, the creative child.

Let him play the supportive role with grace and dignity, like the female first and second spouses have done. He's inventing the masculine version of a traditional role. I've seen some people say that the arrival of a man into this role ought to be an occasion for getting rid of it altogether — as if the role itself is sexist, and putting a man in it reveals that it was never a good at all. But I'd say that line of reasoning is sexist. 

BUT: Just clicking on footnotes at Emhoff's Wikipedia page, I see "Kamala Harris’s Husband Named to Faculty at Georgetown Law":  

Emhoff will be a Distinguished Visitor from Practice focusing on media and entertainment law, which he practiced for nearly three decades as a partner at DLA Piper. He will also serve as a distinguished fellow of the school’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy.

Dad needs a hobby. Ha ha. Being a law professor is a hobby. Or such a nothing pastime that you need to load in something like knitting to keep from being at loose ends. 

That NYT question — "Your dad has never not worked, right? What do you think that’s going to be like for him?" — contains the inference that to be a law professor is not to work!

"Justices Scalia and Thomas disagreed often enough that my friend, Judge Melissa Parr, teaches a class called Scalia Versus Thomas..."/"Well, I’ll wait till the movie comes out."

From "Amy Coney Barrett Senate Confirmation Hearing Day 2 Transcript." 

Lindsey Graham made a joke. The class title — "Scalia Versus Thomas" — must have reminded him of all those movie titles — like "Godzilla vs. Rodan." 

Jokes are telling. Isn't it interesting that they're all gathered to grill Barrett on her judicial methods, the question on the floor is "People say that you’re a female Scalia. What would you say?," she's trying to explicate the details, and the pushback is something that translates to: Hey, keep it simple for us dummies and low-attention folk. You're getting into the weeds. 

Here's her full answer leading up to Graham's joke. It's not even long:

I'm so pleased to see that my old colleague Thomas Mitchell has won a MacArthur "genius" grant.

From the MacArthur Foundation website:

Thomas Wilson Mitchell is a property law scholar reforming longstanding legal doctrines that deprive Black and other disadvantaged American families of their property and real estate wealth. Heirs’ property, a subset of tenancy-in-common property, tends to be created in the absence of a will or estate plan and results in “undivided ownership,” which means each of the legally defined heirs own a fractional interest in the property (rather than a specific piece or portion of the property)....

"Individuals with stable property rights are better able to participate in meaningful ways in our society. Growing up in San Francisco, I witnessed with much sadness the dramatic displacement of African American residents and businesses that occurred in part because the people affected lacked secure property rights. As a lawyer, I realized that certain property laws needed to be changed and better policies needed to be developed to give urban and rural African Americans, and other vulnerable people, stronger property rights that could enable them to build wealth and preserve important aspects of their history and culture...."

"On Monday morning, members of the Yale Law School faculty received a terse message from their provost informing them that Professor Jed Rubenfeld 'will leave his position as a member of the YLS faculty for a two-year period, effective immediately'..."

"... and that upon his return, Rubenfeld would be barred from teaching 'small group or required courses. He will be restricted in social gatherings with students.' As of Tuesday morning, he was no longer listed on the Yale Law faculty site. Three people familiar with the investigation that led to Rubenfeld’s suspension said it stemmed from the university finding a pattern of sexual harassment of several students. The allegations, which spanned decades, included verbal harassment, unwanted touching, and attempted kissing, both in the classroom and at parties at Rubenfeld’s home.... Rubenfeld said Tuesday, 'I think subsequent to me having written some controversial articles about sexual assault, that I became a target of people making false allegations against me.' Who was making these false allegations, exactly? 'I don’t know,' Rubenfeld said, 'because of confidentiality. Identities were not revealed to me.' That’s not true, according to Yale’s stated policies — and one of the complainants.... Rubenfeld is married to fellow Yale Law professor Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and both wield power in the high-stakes race for judicial clerkships. In the summer of 2018, it was Chua who took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to vouch for then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a 'mentor for young lawyers, particularly women.'"

From "Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment" (New York Magazine).

Via Glenn Reynolds, who says: "If I recall correctly, they started going after him when he and his wife Amy Chua defended Brett Kavanaugh."

"Yawn. Nobody cares what law professors think, and this is a good illustration of why.

"80% Of George Washington Law School Faculty Call For Alumnus William Barr To Resign As Attorney General. Advice to people on the right: Get your ticket punched if necessary, but never donate or do anything for your alma mater, because they will show no loyalty to you. See also, Clarence Thomas’s shameful treatment by Yale Law. Of course, in retrospect it should be obvious that a strong black man would be treated badly by a school named after a slave trader."

Writes Glenn Reynolds.

"Jonathan Turley rips Cornell Law faculty letter against me: 'It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education.'"

A new post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, linking to "Cornell Professors Declare 'Informed Commentary' Criticizing The Protests As Racism" by Jonathan Turley.

An excerpt from Turley: "What is most striking for me is the inclusion of Professors Mark H. Jackson and Cortelyou Kenney, who teach in the Cornell First Amendment Clinic. They are in fact the Director and Associate Director of the First Amendment Clinic, which is presumably committed to the value of free speech even at private institutions. So these professors teach free speech and just signed a letter that people who question the BLM movement or denounce the looting are per se or at least presumptive racists. It is reflection of how free speech is being redefined to exclude protections with those who hold opposing views."

From Jacobson: "The law school, as an institution, picked sides and declared in a Dean’s Statement that my writings 'do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School ….' I vigorously disagree with that, but was not given a chance to be heard on it, much less some process to contest it.... [T]he Dean’s statement on behalf of the institution... should have been something along the lines of: 'Though I vigorously disagree with Professor Jacobson’s views, those views are protected by academic freedom and no disciplinary action will be taken.' Period."

ADDED: "'It is the antipathy..." — Doesn't he mean "It is the antithesis..."?

In context:

Not a word about academic freedom or free of speech [sic]; not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations. It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rather than address the merits of arguments, you attack those with opposing views personally and viciously. That has become a standard approach to critics on our campuses. Unless you agree with the actions of the movement, you are per se racist. It is a mantra that is all too familiar historically: if you are not part of the resistance, you are reactionary.

"Ann, I need your assessment. I thought Dershowitz was excellent but I’m not a lawyer nor a law professor. You are. Give him a grade, Professor."

Wrote M. Jordan in the comments to my post, "I will now give you a list of presidents who in our history have been accused of abusing their power, who would be subject to impeachment under the House Manager’s view of the Constitution," which quotes from the transcript of Alan Dershowitz speaking to the Senate last night.

That comment thread got off to an acrimonious start, with Annie C. saying: "Rats. When I saw your post in the cafe, I thought you were going to write what you thought about his presentation." In last night's café, people were talking about Dershowitz, and I said I'd watched and "Will write about it in the morning."

Am I writing about it if all I do is choose a passage and boldface 3 sentences of it? My answer to Annie C. — at 6:27 AM — was: "Push me to be useful and I will be even less useful."

I put up 3 more posts and went out for my sunrise run. Sunrise came at 7:18 this morning, and whatever I've said I will do "in the morning," the sunrise time is locked in. Unlike constitutional law interpretation, but sunrise is very precise.

Alan Dershowitz was concerned about precision and vagueness. He said "precisely" 5 times and  "precise" once. ("Another constitutional rule of construction is that when words can be interpreted in an unconstitutionally vague manner or in a constitutionally precise manner, the latter must be chosen.") He said "vague" or "vagueness" 20 times. Example:

Instead of answering my arguments... on their merits and possible demerits, they have simply been rejected with negative epithets. I urge the senators to ignore these epithets and to consider the arguments and counter arguments on their merits, especially those directed against the unconstitutional vagueness of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. I now offer a criteria for evaluating conflicting arguments. The criteria that I offer, I have long called the shoe on the other foot test...

In the last night's café, rhhardin said "Dershowitz thinks criteria is singular in number."

Out on my run, I thought about what Dershowitz said, and when I got back, I added to this morning's comments thread: "For the record, I was not convinced by D's argument and on reflection, I disagree with him. It would take some trouble to explain why, and I may do that later."

Precisely as I was writing that, M. Jordan was asking his question, the question you see in the post title above. It's easy for me to get started answering that question, hence this new post.

Here's how I graded when I graded students. I gave a question, and I judged them based on how they answered the question asked. I gave zero points for anything not responsive to my question, and then I converted the points to letter grades by following a required curve. So letter grades didn't mean too much to me. It was all comparative. But the points meant a lot, and you only got points for understanding the question and giving me material that got at the question.

I didn't give Dershowitz a question. To think in my lawprofessorly way about grades, I would have to infer a question that I might have asked.

I think that question should be: Restate the constitutional phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" into a workable standard that the House and the Senate can and should use today and in the future in all cases of presidential impeachment. Explain your choice using all of the methodologies of constitutional interpretation that you deem appropriate (and explain why you are deciding this approach to interpretation is appropriate).

Do you think he did that? Read the transcript.

"Imagine looking out at a class full of Schiffs."

I say out loud as I'm overhearing MSNBC where somebody's interviewing Laurence Tribe and saying "Adam Schiff was a student of yours."

"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

"See? They're so desperate. They're like 'Oh, no! Nobody cares!'"

I say out loud when I click on the link Meade just messaged me from across the room: "Why care about the Trump impeachment? Your right to vote in free elections is at stake/The Trump impeachment is about protecting our freedom and right to vote from lawless foreign election manipulation invited by a dangerous president" by Laurence Tribe (USA Today)

Meade: "That demonstrates where the Democrats are: They've worked themselves into a real fear that if Trump is re-elected, there's going to be a dictatorship."

Me: "They don't really believe that. You think Tribe believes that?"

Meade: "Yes. And it comes down to the right to vote: We will lose our right to vote."

Me: "That's just how they scare the little people."

Meade tells me the real reason he sent me that link is because, earlier this morning, I made fun of a NYT columnist who wrote that he would "bet you dollars to doughnuts" that people will not be thinking about the impeachment when we get to Election Day. The columnist, Michael Tomasky, isn't that old. "He's 59," I said, "I'm going to assume he's adopting a cornball, folksy style because he knows it's a con."

In that light, Meade wanted me to see the same thing going on in Laurence Tribe's prose:

In principle, we care about the Constitution. In practice, not so much. The question is why citizens ought to consider this situation with unique seriousness while so many other daily concerns — raising a family, going to college, paying for health care — feel so much more pressing. The answer is one the Democrats urging the impeachment and removal of this president have a unique obligation to provide if they — all right, I’ll say it: we — are to succeed in our goal of protecting the Constitution from a president who doesn’t give two hoots about it, much less understand a word of it.

Two hoots is the dollars to doughnuts, here. It's a tell, in my book. But Tribe is 2 decades older than Tomasky, so he might come about the cornball, folksy style honestly. Also, "doesn’t give two hoots" is the most ordinary way to clean up "doesn’t give a fuck" or "doesn’t give a shit," so it doesn't show the same strain as "dollars to doughnuts."

I'll just end this by saying that I'll bet you bitcoin to cronuts that the vast majority of Americans don't give a fucking shit about lectures from lawprofs.

Jonathan Turley writes that he was "a tad naive in hoping that an academic discussion on the history and standards of it might offer a brief hiatus from hateful rhetoric on both sides."

Hate! Don't say that word! Nancy Pelosi is a Catholic, and she freaks out at the word "hate."

Here — at The Hill — is Turley's reflection on his sojourn before the House Judiciary Committee. It's almost entirely a self-defense, because he's being attacked for contradicting things he said in testimony when Obama was President and when Bill Clinton was President:

Despite 52 pages of my detailed testimony, more than twice the length of all the other witnesses combined, on the cases and history of impeachment, [Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank] described it as being “primarily emotional and political.” Milbank claimed that I contradicted my testimony in a 2013 hearing when I presented “exactly the opposite case against President Obama” by saying “it would be ‘very dangerous’ to the balance of powers not to hold Obama accountable for assuming powers ‘very similar’ to the ‘right of the king’ to essentially stand above the law.”

But I was not speaking of an impeachment then. It was a discussion of the separation of powers and the need for Congress to fight against unilateral executive actions, the very issue that Democrats raise against Trump. I did not call for Obama to be impeached....

In my testimony Wednesday, I stated repeatedly [as I stated in my testimony during the Clinton impeachment] that a president can be impeached for noncriminal acts.... My objection is not that you cannot impeach Trump for abuse of power but that this record is comparably thin compared to past impeachments.... ... Democrats have argued that they do not actually have to prove the elements of crimes.... In the Clinton impeachment, the crime was clearly established and widely recognized.... [W]e are lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger.... 

There should have been a witness who did take the position that the President can only be impeached for criminal acts. Turley took a middle position, and perhaps he demonstrates the dangers of moderation. He's drawing distinctions that his antagonists can fail or decline to see.

I see there's a column at The Nation titled "The Republicans’ Star Impeachment Scholar Is a Shameless Hack/Jonathan Turley’s testimony was so inconsistent, it contradicted his own previous statements on impeachment." Elie Mystal writes:

"Inviting the administration now to participate in an after-the-fact constitutional law seminar with yet-to-be-named witnesses only demonstrates further the countless procedural deficiencies..."

"... that have infected this inquiry from its inception and shows the lack of seriousness with which you are undertaking these proceedings. An academic discussion cannot retroactively fix an irretrievably broken process."

Wrote White House Counsel Pat Cipollone in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Nadler. The hearing in question, is scheduled for December 4th, and — as Cipollone understands "from rumors and press reports" and not from any official notice — "will consist of an academic discussion by law professors."

ADDED: I must say that as a longtime law professor, I'm finding the disrespect for law professors inadequate. You heard me right. I do not for one minute believe that the 3 lawprofs the Judiciary Committee will put on display will be speaking as if they are conducting something that deserves to be called an "academic seminar." But I understand Cipollone's refraining from getting into the problem of the politicalization of the academic field of constitutional law.

AND: "Seminar" is an interesting word. It's only been in the English language since the late 19th century, according to OED. It was originally something done in German universities, "a select group of advanced students associated for special study and original research under the guidance of a professor" and it came to mean "a class that meets for systematic study under the direction of a teacher." The oldest appearance in English is:

1889 A. S. Hill Our English v. 209 In New York and Washington, if I am not misinformed, ‘seminars’ are periodically held, at which a clever woman coaches other clever women in the political, literary, and ethical topics of the day.

Clever women. You can really feel the insult in "clever." In Samuel Johnson's dictionary (1755), the entry for "clever" is: "This is a low word, scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation; and applied to any thing a man likes, without a settled meaning."