1 November 2016
H2O compact book, SD-7 write-in, more on Bundy, more on not voting
New book on the Flathead water compact. I just bought for $2.99 my Kindle edition of Dr. Ed Berry’s Montana’s Last Indian Water Compact. That price will hold through election day. Although a conservative Republican, Berry supported the compact and spent considerable time debunking many of the crackpot arguments advanced by its opponents.
Sen. Jennifer Fielder gets a write-in opponent. Glenn Ferren, who lost the Republican primary for Senate District 7 (mostly Sanders County, and a few acres of Flathead County out Marion way), is running as a write-in candidate for SD-7. Mark Sheets is the Democratic candidate for the seat. There’s a very high probability that Fielder, who wants federal lands turned over to the state, will be re-elected.
The Bundy bunch’s acquittal has people worried, perhaps unduly so. The initial reaction by most was “Jury Nullification!” Indeed, that was my initial reaction. But as we learn more about the jurors’ deliberations, the clearer it becomes that this was not jury nullification — the jurors were frustrated they couldn’t convict Ammon, et al — but a bungled prosecution. That will take a bit of time to sink in with some of Bundy’s admirers, but sink it it will, especially if he’s convicted in Nevada next year. Nevada’s U.S. Attorney will not repeat the mistakes of Oregon U.S. Attorney Billy Williams.
In Montana, both George Ochenski and Justin Robbins have thoughtful reactions to the verdict. At the Seattle Times, columnist Jerry Large thinks race might have been a factor in the verdict, a thesis I think is nuts.
Ammon Bundy, reports the Oregonian, believes the verdict vindicates his beliefs and was part of God’s plan to protect him. He may take that belief to his grave, but smarter people understand he was acquitted not because of jury nullification but because of prosecutorial incompetence:
…defense attorneys, legal experts and at least one juror told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the government had a big problem, the Achilles’ heel of one of the most prominent prosecutions from Oregon in years: the conspiracy charge.
The prosecutors also faced hurdles that included an unfavorable ruling by the judge, the fact defendants were given great latitude to testify about their “states of mind” during the occupation and the geographic diversity of the jurors. And the defense raised unanswered questions about the role FBI informants played and why some occupiers were indicted but others left alone.
Yet the choice of the conspiracy charge may have lost the case before a single witness took the stand. In the end, after five weeks of trial, jurors took only six hours to return the verdicts. They decided the government hadn’t proven that protesters deliberately conspired to stop federal employees from carrying out their duties through intimidation, threat or force.
U.S. Attorney Billy Williams has a reputation for aggressively charging alleged wrongdoers. It may be he’s overly aggressive, and that some of his previous convictions should be revisited by President Obama to determine whether commuting overly long sentences might be in the interest of justice.
William Skink responds to my argument that not voting is a bad choice. You’ll find his response, In Defense of Not Voting, at Reptile Dysfunction. At In These Times, James Thindwa addresses the subject in The Luxury of Opting Out of this Election. Also at In These Times, legendary labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan provides 3 Reasons to Vote for Hillary Clinton that Have Nothing to Do with Hillary Clinton. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s not about Clinton herself. Your vote puts not just Clinton in power but literally thousands of appointees. It may be the deputy administrator in an EPA regional office, or the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the new policy and strategy chief at U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services—or a new member of the National Labor Relations Board, or even chief number cruncher at the Census Bureau.
Many of Clinton’s appointees—and her appointees’ appointees—will be young and idealistic. How do I know? In the time of Jimmy Carter, I used to be a lowly “Schedule C” appointee, among the several thousand below the level of Cabinet or deputy secretaries. I saw with my own eyes that my fellow Schedule C’s, even the higher-ups who bossed me, were nothing but kids. As to the money I was making, it was OK but barely competitive with what I was making at the United Mine Workers defending the rank and file.
And it hasn’t changed much. I was just down at the U.S. Department of Labor, and there are staffers in their 30s, an older group than in the Carter days, but one that still seems young to me.
Demographically, because of age and willingness to forgo a private-sector salary, it’s likely that many of these appointees will be Bernie voters. Over the next four years, these thousands of people will perform a million little acts of mercy — for you, me, for all of us. As a lawyer who represents the poor, the middle class, the post-middle class and maybe members of your family, I can swear under oath that many of these appointees will do, off-handedly, the most saintly acts in the world. They will do things that transform so many individual lives, like an NLRB official who gets a 20-year-old black kid back into a Painters Union job. Appointees in the embassies and consulates can sneak in 10-year-olds from Honduras. By your vote — or decision not to vote — you will decide the fates of all of those who could be saved by these little acts of mercy.