Emoluments lawsuit dismissed
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/news/judge-dismisses-crew-trump-lawsuit/index.htmlA federal judge has dismissed an ethics lawsuit against President Trump.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, sued the president in January.
The group claimed Trump's "vast, complicated and secret" business interests are causing conflicts of interest and violate the U.S. Constitution. A nonprofit restaurant group, a woman who books events at D.C. hotels, and a New York hotel and restaurant owner later joined the ethics group as plaintiffs.
But U.S. District Judge George Daniels said in a decision Thursday that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to bring the suit. He granted a motion by the Department of Justice to dismiss the case.
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1. IANAL but I've been studying hard since I decided to start taking on sovereign citizens.
2. There are two kinds of law in this country, criminal and civil. This is a civil case.
3. The general rule in civil suits is, "no victim, no tort." A person has to suffer actual harm from an action or inaction to have standing to sue.
4. I have devised The Purple House Test for civil situations. It goes like this.
Joe and Sam are neighbors. Joe paints his house purple. Sam hates purple houses. There is no CC&R in the neighborhood prohibiting purple houses.
Sam can't sue Joe because his house is butt-ugly. The law does not give anyone the right to not be offended.
Sam can't sue Joe because he wants to sell and he thinks being next to a purple house will make his house harder to sell. This is "perceived harm" and is also non-actionable.
Sam can't sue Joe because Sam put his house on the market and no offers are forthcoming. In theory Joe's butt-ugly house might be dissuading potential buyers of Sam's house...but it's equally likely the family of alligators living in Sam's pond are to blame. Once again, this is a perceived harm.
If ten couples come to look at Sam's house and they all tell him the same thing - it is a good house and the alligators aren't a problem, but we just can't live next to a purple house - Sam now has a case. The purpleness of Joe's house is keeping Sam from selling his, so Sam is suffering actual harm.
5. Does CREW have a case? No, because CREW is not suffering actual harm. On a perceptual basis, Trump owning a hotel foreign diplomats do business with diminishes us all. Being diminished - which is closer to butthurt than perceived harm - and taking money out of your own pocket are two different things.
6. Do the hotelkeepers have a case? Some of them maybe, but it would be extremely hard to prove. If the New York hotel and restaurant owner doesn't do business in Washington, he has no case. "Your hotel is 230 miles from the convention center we're using" is a good enough reason to not stay there. For the Washington-based hotels and restaurants, they'd have to show that business was in fact moving from their establishments to Trump's, and that the move was an attempt to curry Trump's favor and had nothing to do with intangibles like Trump having a brand-new hotel. "Trump owning a restaurant that might take business away from mine" isn't going to work. "Trump opened a new restaurant and my business declined as a result" won't help much if Trump's lawyers can prove thirty new restaurants opened within four months of Trump's, and they're all thriving. There is only so much money available for restaurant meals; customers for a new eatery always come from other restaurants. "He competed better than I did on a level field" is not an actionable tort; it is the Gods of Commerce putting a boot to your ass and telling you to get to work.
6a. If you could prove Trump was trading benefits from the US Government for payments to his hotel (aka "laundering kickbacks"
it shouldn't be tried in a civil court. It should be tried in an impeachment hearing; If you could prove he was doing it - not one of his minions, but Trump himself - it would be the worst political scandal in the history of this country.
In short, the judge made the right decision. "Standing" in a civil case means you can prove you were harmed by the person you're suing, and the plaintiffs in this case can't do that.
As much as we'd all like to see Trump taken out back and dropped on his head over his clear conflicts of interest and corruption, Congress rather than the courts is who's going to have to do it.