Buying Testimony

 

It is nominally against the law to offer anything of value to another in exchange for testimony at trial.  I cannot offer you money, no matter how small an amount, to get you either to testify or not to testify or (especially) to testify in a particular way — notice how I skillfully avoided the word 'perjury'.

Yet, prosecutors do this all the time without penalty as when a criminal is offered leniency in sentencing in exchange for one criminal testifying against another.  There's even a name for the process.  It's called 'rolling'.

It is said that one knows one is living in a police state when the government may do with impunity that which the citizen cannot.

In fact, we're seeing this happen in real-time as Robert Mueller bags Paul Manafort for tax evasion and offers an easy sentence if he'll only testify against Donald Trump so Mueller can get a conviction for election tampering or 'collusion with the Russians' — or something.

 

The (longed-for) 28th Amendment

 

There's a chunk of text making the rounds — has made the rounds, in fact, for quite some time — calling for a 28th amendment.  The (proposed, longed-for) 28th amendment would say

Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to Senators and Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.

or some variation thereto.

I think I may have started this a long time ago.  At least, I have a text file dated 11/11/2000 at 9:40a that reads

The 28th Amendment

Restoring Sanity to The Law

1. Congress may not exempt itself or its agents from compliance, in whole or in part, with any Federal law or regulation, nor allow regulations which do so, nor shall it encourage state or local jurisdictions to exempt it from compliance with their laws.

2. Any existing Federal law or regulation which exempts Congress from compliance with its provisions, in whole or in part, is hereby rescinded in its entirety.

There's a big difference between the two.  Did you notice?  The one I wrote 17 years ago undoes all the historical damage caused in its absence by automatically revoking all laws currently in existence that violate it.  Leaving that part out is really very 'conservative':  it freezes the current situation in place.  I suppose that makes my version 'regressive' although I personally think of it as 'progress'.

There are many now calling for a con-con, a constitutional convention, to remedy what they see as myriad ills plaguing our nation.  I truly believe most of those ills would evaporate if we were merely to prohibit past, present, and future acts of discrimination by our Congress.

What do you think?

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Update:

While browsing through some old material, I came across an essay I wrote for 'Adverse Reactions', my (quasi-)regular column in Tampa Bay Mensa's newsletter, The Tampa Bay Sounding, and it seems to have been written even earlier than November 2000; probably July 2000.  It was about campaign finance reform and it was called The Big Lie.  That essay was the impetus for the original suggestion.