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Sunday, December 26, 2021

Lying and Liars

 I have just finished a short, provocative book by a very good friend of mine, the law professor Catherine Ross.  Entitled A Right to Lie? Presidents, Other Liars, and the First Amendment, it surveys the law of lying in the United States with particular attention to several interesting court cases, and then asks what might have been done to deal effectively with our once and possibly future liar-in-chief, Donald J. Trump.  It is a very readable work of detailed legal scholarship and lay person will learn a lot from it.  While I would not have been able to accept a formal reviewing assignment because of our friendship, I see no reason not to explore the issues that it raises here.

The first part of the book explains carefully, first, that lying is generally protected by the First Amendment, and second, that as a result, recent states' attempts to ban lying during campaigns have generally been thrown out by federal courts.  Lying is of course illegal in certain contexts:  in legal proceedings, in filling out government forms, and if it is undertaken to secure monetary gain via fraud.  We also still have state laws against defamation--that is, slander or libel--but under New York Times vs. Sullivan (1964), which Ross discusses relatively briefly, it has become almost impossible for public figures to win defamation cases, since they must show willful, reckless disregard of the truth, motivated by "actual malice," on the part of the offender.  In 2005, the federal government tried to ban one form of lying in the Stolen Valor Act, which criminalized false claims of having been awarded certain military decorations.  When the case of Xavier Alvarez, a local elected official and compulsive liar, reached the Supreme Court, however, the court decided, in a split opinion, that the law was unconstitutional because it banned falsehood for its own sake, whether the speaker uttered it for a separate nefarious motive or not.  While banning falsehoods to serve a compelling interest might be legal were it done narrowly enough, any blanket prohibition against lies would violate the speech clause of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court held, in short, that the government cannot restrict speech under the First Amendment without some clearly compelling interest to do so that would not, in turn, lead to further indefensible prohibitions  Ross clearly agrees with that holding, and so do I.  The courts have also protected satirical falsehoods, creating a potentially dangerous doctrine that one is not liable for falsehoods that listeners could not be expected to believe--a sound doctrine, perhaps, in quieter times, but a slippery one in the climate of the 2020s. 

Political campaigns in the United States have featured outrageous lies both by candidates and their supporters since the first truly contested presidential election of 1796, and our greatest presidents, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, probably faced more of them than anyone.  Ross cites the infamous Willie Horton ad of 1988, in which the George H. W. Bush campaign falsely claimed that Michael Dukakis was personally responsible for the furlough policy that had enabled a convicted murderer to commit a rape, as a particularly influential case.  However, in a long, controversial case involving a Wisconsin campaign for a seat on the state supreme court, Judge Michael Gableman eventually got away with a very similar and even more misleading claim against his opponent, even though he was bound by a judicial code of ethics that specifically banned campaign misstatements of fact. The case eventually reached the state supreme court--he recused himself--and Republican justices found ways to claim that the ad was not a lie, because its individual statements, while arranged in an utterly misleading sequence, were each true.  The court split 3-3 and dismissed the complaint against Gableman.  More generally, Ross tells us, federal courts have thrown out every state statute that has come before them since 2012 that tried to regulate campaign speech, except some relating to judicial elections where different rules often apply.  Various federal Courts of Appeals have agreed that such laws have to pass a strict scrutiny test, meaning that they would have to serve a "compelling interest," that they would truly solve the problem, and that they would not unnecessarily restrict other speech.  Opposing speech, in short, remains the only legal remedy against false campaign speech--but any serious historians knows that that has been the effective rule for the whole of our history, and we have so far survived.  Ross also makes clear that she believes this is how things should be.

In its last section, the book turns to the falsehoods of Donald Trump, who appears to have been a compulsive liar for the whole of his adult life.  She focuses on two sets of lies.  First, starting in early 2020, Trump's false statements about COVID, masking, and potential treatments obviously hampered a proper response to the pandemic and cost the nation an untold number of lives--in  my personal opinion, tens of thousands at least.  Second, of course, his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election before, during and after it took place undermined faith in democracy and led to the January 6 insurrection.  In order to propose a remedy for these and similar lies, Ross begins with another provision of federal law.  The President is undeniably a government employee, and the political speech of government employees is in fact severely restricted.  Ross mentions that under the law, government employees' speech is only protected if they are speaking as private citizens on a matter of public interest.  I might add that federal employees in recent decades have been severely disciplined for circulating articles endorsing or criticizing candidates via email at work.  Such laws open the door, she argues, to legislation or other Congressional action--including warnings, censure, or impeachment--in response to presidential lies.   While she recognizes how unlikely such legislation is in the current climate, she wants us all to start thinking about it.

It is here that I personally have a different view.  I share the concern about the impact of presidential lies, but I think the remedy is already in the Constitution in the impeachment clause, which provides for the removal of the president upon conviction of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."  While lying in itself does not fall under those words, Trump's lies about COVID--and many other things as well--formed part of a pattern, for me, that would have fully justified his impeachment and conviction.  Here I am relying on my reading of another work of legal scholarship, Impeachment, the Constitutional Problems, by Raoul Berger, which appeared (fortuitously) in 1973.  The phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors," he showed, came from British precedents having to do with the impeachment and conviction of high officials (the monarch, unlike the president, being legally invulnerable in Britain.) It clearly did not refer to ordinary violations of laws, and an eminent 18th-century commentator, Richard Wooddeson, listed among precedents various kinds of malfeasance in office: "a lord admiral to have neglected the safeguard of the sea," "a privy councilor to have propounded or supported pernicious or dishonorable measures," and "an ambassador to have betrayed his trust," among other measures.  It is true, as Ross mentions, that in the debates in the constitutional convention, James Madison rejected "maladministration" as one specific grounds for impeachment because the word was too broad.  Yet in my opinion, those precedents show that truly disastrous performance of one's duties in office is indeed grounds for impeachment.  If a failure to "safeguard the sea" is sufficient grounds, then surely a failure to safeguard the whole people of the United States against an epidemic and instead repeatedly make statements that put that people risk must surely be grounds as well, in my opinion.

Although President Nixon resigned before he could even be impeached, he would not only have been impeached but convicted--as no other president has been--had he tried to remain in office. Lying, as Ross points out, was one of the reason--but his lies were a critical part of an attempt to cover up a serious crime, the Watergate burglary.   We agree that subverting our laws is proper grounds for impeachment.  I think that the nation now fails to recognize that disastrous performance in office should--indeed, in my opinion, must--be grounds as well because we take our government's functions for granted and tend to regard the presidency as something we bestow upon people we like.  Thus the Republican Party was willing to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about an extramarital sexual encounter, but turned a blind eye to Trump's four years of disastrous government.  Indeed, most of that party has now chosen to embrace his lies about COVID implicitly (by opposing various kinds of mandates) or explicitly (by endorsing the idea that the election was stolen.)

And on this point Ross and I agree: the current state of the Republican Party makes any remedy for these very serious ills impossible.  On the one hand, the Republic has ever been entirely healthy in this respect--we have heard many campaign lies and some presidential lies for the whole or our history.  It is only in the 21st century, however, that a major party nominated and the country elected a hopelessly compulsive liar to office, whose party subsequently became entirely loyal to him and reluctant to disagree with anything that he said. Meanwhile, I would add, distrust in government has grown so far that another large segment of the population no longer has any real expectations of it. The founders understood that our republican experiment depended upon an informed electorate and a responsible leadership class, and both of those, now, are lacking.   There may be no legal remedy for such ills.

6 comments:

Energyflow said...

Pilate asked Jesus " What is truth?", cynically aware of power politics but knowing a holy man stood before him. Jesus spoke in parables. These, he made clear were not to be taken literally but to be understood through discernment. In high school I discontinued religious faith thinking it all lies. Later I understood that myth is a part of culture, that archetypes are as true as concrete examples, much as a general scientific law is as true as its application in an individual case. Similarly I see the current political struggle in America as one of a classic opposition of ideologies developed in a hegelian manner of pro, con and integration over many decades. The chaotic atmosphere where both sides hold the other to be liars or perhaps even insane is likely the final stage before a consensus doctrine emerges based on compromise amnd insight won perhaps by intuition of the younger generations with no endless grudge to bear. I believe Ilya Prigogine's work on entropy which won him the 1977 nobel prize in chemistry deals with this concept on a biological level of systemic reorganization from chaos. The Generations theory, among others, holds that civilizations pass through such phases periodically and at some point fail to regenerate, landing in utter chaos and decline. How far the decline goes is difficult to determine beforehand. The British rid themselves of colonies and global superpower status becoming essentially a US protectorate, along with Western Europe as a whole. The Soviet Union disintegrated leaving 1990s Russia like 1930 gangland Chicago, but rising slowly again to preeminence through cautious diplomacy and concentration on internal economics. The USA seems to have classic imperial overreach, particularly since 9/11. Internally since Lehman bros. the banking system was not corrected as in the 1930s glass steagall act but increasingly distorted by QE. The JIT manufacturing combined with overstretched global delivery chains was ripe for a disturbance like Covid as the proverbial straw on the camel's back. Relocalization of chip, clothing manufacture, troop withdrawals( Afghanistan) are taking place. A general bipolar realignment is becoming more concrete year for year, which could last, like the previous one, perhaps for 60 to 80 years. Stock market valuations are absurd, along with wealth distributions and await serious corrections through dollar devaluation, interest rate hikes and extreme taxes on the ultrawealthy. A populist being elected of whatever stripe in a period of extreme instability is simply an expression of malcontent by the common man. Any attack on him will then be perceived as protection of the stus quo sytem bby those benefitting from such. Once this system collapses of its own weight such a rabble rouser, opportunist, will be superfluous. An honest system, i.e. stable and well grounded in its foundations has no need of revolutionaries.

Bozon said...

Professor
Very interesting article.

Her reasoning here, is nonsense:
"Ross mentions that under the law, government employees' speech is only protected if they are speaking as private citizens on a matter of public interest. I might add that federal employees in recent decades have been severely disciplined for circulating articles endorsing or criticizing candidates via email at work. Such laws open the door, she argues, to legislation or other Congressional action--including warnings, censure, or impeachment--in response to presidential lies. While she recognizes how unlikely such legislation is in the current climate, she wants us all to start thinking about it."

Your solution, in impeachment provisions is too.

Let's talk, rather, about liberal democratic helter skelter modernism, bleeding over into nihilistic postmodernism, and the resulting death, stone dead death, of the very concept of "objective" (Enlightenment) truth, about anything, required as a necessary predicate for the very idea of lying in the first place.

If truth is relative, what, then, is lying, anyway?

All the best

Bozon said...

Professor

I agree, Trump is a great liar.
When he says things like elect him and make America great again, that is obviously patently false.

But then, also, any politician, who claims that, would also be a great liar.

All the best

Unknown said...

The methods of discerning truth do not advance; the rules of logic are much the same as they developed in classical Greece. The techniques of liars have advanced because they can always adopt new technologies for creating forgeries, developing spin and propaganda, using dark secrets of human nature to convince vulnerable people, and disseminating falsehood. Liars used to have to lie in person or do a forgery themselves. Now they can use television (cable or broadcast) networks and the Internet. Even the now-primitive technology of radio well served the most egregious practitioners such as Josef Goebbels of the lie, including the Big Lie.

What has not advanced, regrettably, is the willingness of people to analyze the usually-strange claims of outright liars. Just think of COVID-19: it has had the unsavory effect of promoting medical quackery on a great scale.

There have been technological fixes to catch some liars, and even if what one says is largely truthful one can be a cheater if one does plagiarism. A technology is in use to detect word use and grammatical structures characteristic of people presenting stuff not of their creation as high-school and undergraduate papers. As an example, some words are unlikely to appear in even undergraduate communications; bureaucratic style (need I say Orwellian?) style typically arises from several years of communicating bureaucratic messages to captive audiences such as fellow bureaucrats and government officials (government is the definitive bureaucracy). But that is comparatively easy. The teacher or professor may find that a suspected plagiarizer has genuine talent as a writer and fully understands a rare world generally associated with experts in the field. If one reads enough peer-reviewed material one starts to talk in much the same manner. (It is like my experience after reading The Brothers Karamazov: I noticed as I got deeper into the book my grammatical constructions became a bit more exotic. It is still Russian literature in translation.

But back to liars: liars see other liars as peers and imitate each other if they are at all successful at making money or achieving political ends through their deceits. Those become more sophisticated and even tailor their messages to avoid dealing with people sophisticated enough to recognize a 419 scam as such. With Donald Trump his messages appealed to people limited in their ability or willingness to think between sentences or read between the lines. Intellectual laziness does at least as much harm as stupidity.

Bozon said...

Professor

Re Unknown

Many things have changed, however, since the Sophists, including logic.
Here is a wonderful passage:

"...What has not advanced, regrettably, is the willingness of people to analyze the usually-strange claims of outright liars. Just think of COVID-19: it has had the unsavory effect of promoting medical quackery on a great scale.

"There have been technological fixes to catch some liars, and even if what one says is largely truthful one can be a cheater if one does plagiarism. A technology is in use to detect word use and grammatical structures characteristic of people presenting stuff not of their creation as high-school and undergraduate papers. As an example, some words are unlikely to appear in even undergraduate communications; bureaucratic style (need I say Orwellian?) style typically arises from several years of communicating bureaucratic messages to captive audiences such as fellow bureaucrats and government officials (government is the definitive bureaucracy). But that is comparatively easy. The teacher or professor may find that a suspected plagiarizer has genuine talent as a writer and fully understands a rare world generally associated with experts in the field. If one reads enough peer-reviewed material one starts to talk in much the same manner. (It is like my experience after reading The Brothers Karamazov: I noticed as I got deeper into the book my grammatical constructions became a bit more exotic. It is still Russian literature in translation..." Unknown

My college professors reasonably thought I had plagiarized my entire undergrad thesis, and went around looking for its source.

All the best

Bozon said...

Professor
Many in this country, of all countries, would rather put Lying and Liars as:

Lawyering and Lawyers!

Maybe your audience will be receptive to this little quip.
I have old friends who feel the same.

All the best