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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (115510)	3/24/2019 3:58:54 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361094

>> The direction changed with Trump. I think the true inflection point was before that, but I'll not go into those details as we agree there were things happening before and that Trump coalesced some of them, I think. >> Hard to stuff back into the closet. I agree with you about this. Once the barrier is knocked down in politics it often creates new permanent boundaries. >> My point was that making legality the standard instead of relying on moral norms would mean creating a whole lot of laws, legislating what had previously been controlled informally by voluntary conformity with accepted behavior. Sure, and legislating morality isn't something most of want to do anyway. You have to have some hard cutoff where you say, "This is morally bankrupt behavior in the extreme, and this is where we draw the line." That is the line, and anything short of it may be morally unacceptable, but not legally unacceptable. One can argue that presidents ought to be held to a higher standard. Should a president who is the most powerful man in the world engage in oral sex with a 23 year girl who is infatuated, maybe envisioning herself at Camp David with the president, but for now, the Oval Office closet will do? That was about as morally reckless as one can imagine, but we cannot take a president down for that, we can't even run an impeachment trial based on that. I don't think we disagree vastly on your post.

To: Lane3 who wrote (115510)	3/24/2019 4:38:30 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361094

My point was that making legality the standard instead of relying on moral norms would mean creating a whole lot of laws, legislating what had previously been controlled informally by voluntary conformity with accepted behavior. Yep. And this should be obvious. Look at Nixon. There were a lot of things that were just assumed no president would do. Then Nixon went ahead and did them and Congress scrambled to legislate the lanes more. They didn't go all that far in doing so, but succeeding presidents tried to more or less stay inside the vague boundaries to keep flexibility. But Trump has decided to not only push those soft boundaries but even go against some of the hard ones. Because his base seems to tolerate virtually anything, he thinks he can get away with it...