By the end of this post I hope you will understand that the adage or point of law "the King can do no wrong" is a form of "immunity" that was supposed to be left back in the 15th century, back long ago when our forefathers and foremothers left that liberty forsaken place.I also hope you understand that for every "official immunity" there is an equal and opposite spread of disease into the populace.
I hope to show that when government officials are pronounced immune through the operation of the "judge created' doctrines of absolute immunity or qualified immunity, it means that the wrongs they are pronounced immune from are then and thereby propagated into the populace.
Clearly, the immunity to a government official is part of the same instance where a wrong has been done to a citizen from which that citizen then has no cure and no immunity.
For example, the most "popular" immunity (in terms of quantity, not quality) currently propagated again
st the citizenry these daze is "qualified immunity".The policeman who wrongfully does this or that, from shooting a citizen to breaking into the wrong house on a drug bust, can "qualify" for immunity.
The wrongdoer can receive a pronouncement from the Doctor Judge that the official is immune, forgetting for the moment, for the sake of the glory of government, that the citizen is not.
No disease here folks, move along now, is what they want us to believe, but as we saw yesterday in A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 4 , that wrong evolves to propagate itself.
The problem is that the "folks" are crippled or killed without recourse, but the official who did them wrong is squeaky clean a.k.a. "immune" because
"the King can do no wrong".The less "popular" immunity (again, in terms of quantity, not quality), is "absolute immunity" which applies to judges, prosecutors, and a few other higher officials (e.g. George, Yoo, Bybee & Dick) who do wrong to the citizenry without commensurate accountability.
For "some unfathomable reason", as the great Professor Prosser was want to say, the alien doctrine of "official immunity", which has its origin in the legal doctrine of England which was that "the King can do no wrong", sneakily made its way into American Jurisprudence decades after the Declaration of Independence from that very doctrine.
If we take a close look at this doctrine, it is obviously nothing more than immunizing the government from accountability, while at the same time forcing harm, damage, or disease upon those in the citizenry who have been wronged by that government action.
Some discussion, which is more comprehensive than what I can do in this one post today, can be perused in posts at the Toxins of Power Blog, which show how this erroneous, anti-democracy doctrine spreads to eventually infect millions.
Lets tune in to one typical, every day case that qualifies for a fractured flickers episode:
The Government presents an impressive array of theories which would preclude it from any liability ... we ... hold that the Government should escape unscathed ... It is often said that the doctrine of sovereign(Somebody vs. The King). Since they concluded "we nonetheless ... hold that the Government should escape unscathed", we should note that "the assault upon the citadel of immunity continues presently apace" in the wrong direction.immunity is a derivative of the common law maxim "The King can do no wrong." But conceptually it is far older. Zeus himself carried an aegis or breastplate, a buckler, and a thunderbolt which made him, the mythological sovereign, immune from all that could beset him. And common law provided its sovereign with the immunity of Zeus ... The tide of history is running clearly against the concept of sovereign immunity. The disfavor into which the doctrine has fallen was observed as far back as ... 1939 ... [and] this Court pointed out that the assault upon the citadel of immunity continues presently apace.
The words "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke" are in Bob Dylan's lyrics in "All Along The Watch Tower", and are in the minds of others of the citizenry as well.
Where did this crap come from, how did it swim the great ocean between the King's England and the people's new America?
The answer is that regal immunity is like the toxins released into the G
ulf of Mexico last summer, they go with the flow even as the government denies their existence.We now have immune officials like Dick Cheney and Bush II walking around bragging about torturing, water-boarding, and how good that perversion is for America.
Unwittingly, they seek to make corruption a disease from which there is no immunity.
Yes, they are immune we are not, but unless we become immune and they become accountable again, this trickle down madness will eventually take all of us down.
Watched Oliver Stone's W again last night on the satellite, which of course brought back warm memories of halcyon days gone by. Reminds me again that with the Bush bunch we saw an unprecedented power grab by the executive branch that combined with the concept of immunity surely signals looming disaster on the horizon. NoBama hasn't exactly "refudiated" it either, even though he seems to be the the third-string waterboy for the GOP House these days.
ReplyDeleteGonna be quite interesting to see how things play out in 2012, when whatever virulent strain of right-wing fascism that wins the day reoccupies the WH and likely the Senate too. I'm guessing they won't be nearly as polite about it this time either, judging by the heated rhetoric we're already hearing from their practitioners and voices of hate. Won't it be funny if what finally unites dems and Repubes after all these years is the realization and longing for the "good old days," when that comedic troupe the Bush bunch was the biggest of our many problems?