While Trump Invokes The 8th Amendment, Letitia James Dreams Of Selling Off His Property

Rabid hatred hellbent on the personal destruction of a defendant is normal for a DA... no?

As Trump is quick to remind us, Letitia James promised voters that she would be all about grievance politics and the personal destruction of POTUS 45. It was so blatant that Dershowitz wrote a book about it called, ‘Get Trump’.

In the eagerness to destroy him, James cut corners. In the event that those corners violated his rights as an American citizen, he will have every right to sue the government — and the agents of the state responsible — for personal damages.

It was an obscene ruling against him with a novel case in which Trump’s guilt was presumed even before he entered the courtroom, made even more outrageous by the lack of any injured party and the aggressive penalties that must be met even before he can exercise his lawful right of appeal.

Now that the ruling has been handed down, she is eager to see Trump suffer. She doesn’t just want to strip him of a shocking percentage of his personal wealth, she wants to strip him of his property. Literally, she’s eager to seize his buildings. Not ‘prepared to’ seize them. Eager.

She told ABC news that if Trump can’t find the cash to pay the fine, she’ll seize his assets. She seems really happy about that prospect.

“If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James said in an interview with ABC News’ Aaron Katersky.

Trump was fined $354.8 million plus approximately $100 million in pre-judgment interest on Friday after Judge Arthur Engoron determined that he inflated his net worth in order get more favorable loan terms. […] Saying that she was “very confident” with the strength of her case on appeal, James reiterated that her office would not hesitate to seize Trump’s assets — mentioning Trump’s 40 Wall Street skyscraper by name — if the former president is unable to find the cash to cover the court-ordered disgorgement.

“We are prepared to make sure that the judgment is paid to New Yorkers, and yes, I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day,” James said of the standard court process for collecting judgments in civil cases. — ABC

Oh, how nice. She even has a favorite building picked out as the punishment she wants to inflict on him.

If you want some sense of how dizzying the numbers in this judgement are, the Louisiana purchase converted into 2022 dollars (taking Wikipedia with the usual grain of salt) is estimated to be about #358 Million.

On April 11, 1803, just days before Monroe’s arrival, Barbé-Marbois offered Livingston all of Louisiana for $15 million,[16] which averages to less than three cents per acre (7¢/ha).[17][18] The total of $15 million is equivalent to about $358 million in 2022 dollars, or 67 cents per acre. —Wiki

If that number is to anywhere close to accurate, after interest, the Louisiana Purchase would be LESS than the amount Trump was ordered to pay for a victimless crime.

That brings us to the 8th Amendment, which Trump brought up in his town hall with Laura Ingraham.

A lawyer friend of Mark Levin’s wrote a piece that was so good he read the whole thing on air. Here are some of the key details:

Professor Jonathan Turley called the $370 million judgment confiscatory, extreme and abusive. Professor Steven Calabresi termed it a travesty and an unjust political act. The subhead for his online commentary employed the term “Stalinist.” Both law professors are right.

Because the judgment does not relate to any loss, the $370 million is not, properly understood, violative of the prohibition against grossly excessive punitive damages. It does fall, however, directly within the excessive fines clause of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In an opinion especially illuminating to understand the wrongdoing by the attorney general and Judge Engoron, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Timbs v. Indiana (2019), that the excessive fines clause is an incorporated protection applicable to the states (all of them, even New York) under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court stated that the clause “traces it venerable lineage back to at least 1215” and the Magna Carta. “Despite Magna Carta, imposition of excessive fines persisted. The 17th century Stuart kings, in particular, were criticized for using large fines to raise revenue, harass their political foes, and indefinitely detain those unable to pay.” These remain concerns.

As the Supreme Court stated in Timbs: “For good reason, the protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history: Exorbitant tolls undermine other constitutional liberties. Excessive fines can be used, for example, to retaliate or chill the speech of political enemies, as the Stuarts’ critics learned several centuries ago.”

And excessive fines are a cheap source of revenue, in the case of Trump being a lot of revenue, especially for a state that has been bleeding population and high-income taxpayers. —FoxNews

In pressing an 8th Amendment challenge, the political biases of both Judge Engoron and Letitia James will go under the microscope.

If successful, Engoron and James will have the tables turned on them. The predators who weaponized the government against a citizen will find themselves in legal jeapordy, possibly selling their own property to cover Trump’s damages.

Imagine how quickly the smug looks on their faces would melt away if the 8th is brought up against them.

WIKI

England was still the least taxed country in Europe, with no official excise and no regular direct taxation. To raise revenue without reconvening Parliament, Charles resurrected an all-but-forgotten law called the “Distraint of Knighthood”, in abeyance for over a century, which required any man who earned £40 or more from land each year to present himself at the king’s coronation to be knighted. Relying on this old statute, Charles fined those who had failed to attend his coronation in 1626.

The chief tax Charles imposed was a feudal levy known as ship money, which proved even more unpopular, and lucrative, than tonnage and poundage before it. Previously, collection of ship money had been authorised only during wars, and only on coastal regions. But Charles argued that there was no legal bar to collecting the tax for defence during peacetime and throughout the whole of the kingdom. Ship money, paid directly to the Treasury of the Navy, provided between £150,000 to £200,000 annually between 1634 and 1638, after which yields declined. Opposition to ship money steadily grew, but England’s 12 common law judges ruled the tax within the king’s prerogative, though some of them had reservations. The prosecution of John Hampden for non-payment in 1637–38 provided a platform for popular protest, and the judges found against Hampden only by the narrow margin of 7–5.

Charles also derived money by granting monopolies, despite a statute forbidding such action, which, though inefficient, raised an estimated £100,000 a year in the late 1630s. One such monopoly was for soap, pejoratively referred to as “popish soap” because some of its backers were Catholics. Charles also raised funds from the Scottish nobility, at the price of considerable acrimony, by the Act of Revocation (1625), whereby all gifts of royal or church land made to the nobility since 1540 were revoked, with continued ownership being subject to an annual rent. In addition, the boundaries of the royal forests in England were restored to their ancient limits as part of a scheme to maximise income by exploiting the land and fining land users within the reasserted boundaries for encroachment. The programme’s focus was disafforestation and sale of forest lands for conversion to pasture and arable farming, or in the case of the Forest of Dean, development for the iron industry. Disafforestation frequently caused riots and disturbances, including those known as the Western Rising.

Against the background of this unrest, Charles faced bankruptcy in mid-1640. The City of London, preoccupied with its own grievances, refused to make any loans to him, as did foreign powers. In this extremity, in July Charles seized silver bullion worth £130,000 held in trust at the mint in the Tower of London, promising its later return at 8% interest to its owners. In August, after the East India Company refused to grant a loan, Lord Cottington seized the company’s stock of pepper and spices and sold it for £60,000 (far below its market value), promising to refund the money with interest later.

Charles was accused of treason against England by using his power to pursue his personal interest rather than the good of the country. The charge stated that he was devising “a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people”. In carrying this out he had “traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament, and the people therein represented”, and that the “wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of him, the said Charles Stuart, have been, and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation.” Presaging the modern concept of command responsibility, the indictment held him “guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars, or occasioned thereby.” An estimated 300,000 people, or 6% of the population, died during the war.

Over the first three days of the trial, whenever Charles was asked to plead, he refused, stating his objection with the words: “I would know by what power I am called hither, by what lawful authority...?” He claimed that no court had jurisdiction over a monarch, that his own authority to rule had been given to him by God and by the traditional laws of England, and that the power wielded by those trying him was only that of force of arms. Charles insisted that the trial was illegal, explaining that,
no earthly power can justly call me (who am your King) in question as a delinquent ... this day’s proceeding cannot be warranted by God’s laws; for, on the contrary, the authority of obedience unto Kings is clearly warranted, and strictly commanded in both the Old and New Testament ... for the law of this land, I am no less confident, that no learned lawyer will affirm that an impeachment can lie against the King, they all going in his name: and one of their maxims is, that the King can do no wrong ... the higher House is totally excluded; and for the House of Commons, it is too well known that the major part of them are detained or deterred from sitting ... the arms I took up were only to defend the fundamental laws of this kingdom against those who have supposed my power hath totally changed the ancient government.

The court, by contrast, challenged the doctrine of sovereign immunity and proposed that “the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern ‘by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise’.”

At the end of the third day, Charles was removed from the court, which then heard over 30 witnesses against him in his absence over the next two days, and on 26 January condemned him to death. The next day, the king was brought before a public session of the commission, declared guilty, and sentenced. The judgement read, “For all which treasons and crimes this court doth adjudge that he, the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.” Fifty-nine of the commissioners signed Charles’s death warrant.

At about 2:00 p.m., Charles put his head on the block after saying a prayer and signalled the executioner when he was ready by stretching out his hands; he was then beheaded in one clean stroke. According to observer Philip Henry, a moan “as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again” rose from the assembled crowd, some of whom then dipped their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood as a memento.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England

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