Former senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and comedian Richard Pryor died yesterday. Here are McCarthy’s NY Times and WaPo obituaries, and here are Pryor’s NY Times and LA Times obituaries, along with this rather touching and sad post by Roger Simon. Moreover, Riehl World has this compilation of links to some very funny Pryor stand-up routines.
McCarthy’s first and only serious Presidential campaign came during the tumultuous year of 1968. McCarthy’s campaign was based primarily on opposition to the Vietnam War and it effectively ended the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who elected not to run for the Democratic Party nomination after McCarthy’s anti-war campaign showed unexpected strength early in the campaign. After fellow Democratic Party candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June (which occurred just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King), the Democratic Party convention that year took place in Chicago amid riots and civil strife, and ended up nominating Senator Hubert Humphrey, who lost a close election to Richard Nixon. Although McCarthy went on to become somewhat of a Democratic Party gadfly over the ensuing decades, there is no question that his 1968 Presidential campaign sparked societal forces that changed the American political landscape dramatically — the Democratic Party held the White House for 36 of the first 68 years of the 20th century, but has held it for only 12 of the past 37. McCarthy was 89 at the time of his death.
Pryor was a talented stand-up comedian and comedic actor whose career was cut short by self-destructive behavior. He almost died in 1980 after he set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine, but he ended up using the incident as a joke in his routine — “You know something I noticed? When you run down the street on fire, people will move out of your way.” Pryor was 65 at the time of death and had been suffering from the effects of multiple sclerosis for many years.

This CNN article reports that former Texas senator and presidential candidate (for about 15 minutes) Phil Gramm cut the crowd up yesterday while testifying as a witness in the public corruption trial of former Illinois Governor, George Ryan.
While running for President in 1996, the Gramm campaign paid a rather large “fee” to a Chicago-based “consultant” who turned around and funneled the money to Ryan’s daughters and two aides while Mr. Ryan was serving as Illinois Secretary of State. Prosecutors allege that the consulting fee was Mr. Ryan’s requirement for endorsing Mr. Gramm in the Illinois Presidential Primary that year. Asked by prosecutors whether he would have approved of the payments to the Ryan daughters and aides if he had known about them, Mr. Gramm replied that he would not have approved of them, explaining:

“It’s sort of like the difference between love and prostitution,” the folksy former Texas senator testified, drawing gasps and laughter from spectators at a hearing with the jury out of the room. “You don’t pay people to like you.”

By the way, a Gramm aide also testifed that, when questioning a Ryan aide about the unusually large size of the proposed “consulting fee,” the Ryan aide told him:

“That’s the way we do things in Chicago.”

Hat tip to the ever-alert Ellen Podgor for the link to the CNN article.

This earlier post noted the weak nature of the indictment against former House Speaker Tom DeLay, although the Republican outrage over the indictment rings somewhat hollow. But following up on the thought about the dubious basis of the indictment, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, Bradley A. Smith, does the best job that I have seen to date of disassembling the case against DeLay in this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed:

To summarize, the theory against Mr. DeLay goes something like this: Corporations made legal contributions to TRMPAC; and then TRMPAC made a legal contribution of this soft money to the RNSEC, which, as required by federal law, kept the funds in a separate account. The RNSEC then used an account containing individual contributions (hard money) to make otherwise legal contributions to 42 candidates for state or local office in Texas, including seven who may have been specifically recommended to them by Mr. DeLay and others. Somehow this series of legal transactions constitutes money laundering.

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Being independent politically, I tend to look for political issues where the right position is so clear that advocacy of the opposing view is an indication of a politician who is interested in something other than improving government. This Chronicle article addresses one such issue — Texas’ utterly unsupportable system of electing judges. This earlier Daily Texan article does the same.
Texas’ system of judicial elections is, at best, not a good way to choose judges and, at its worst, a corrupt one. Along with former Texas Attorney General and state Supreme Court Justice John Hill, former state Supreme Court Justice Tom Phillips and many others, I have been supporting for over 20 years a new system for appointing judges in the Texas state courts similar to the appointment process that is used in the federal judicial system. This is not to say that the system in which federal judges is selected is perfect and does not generate a bad judge from time to time. But the risk of a bad judge reaching the bench in the federal system is far less than it currently is under the Texas system of judicial selection.

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George Melloan, the deputy editor, international, of The Wall Street Journal, has recently written two columns (here and here) in which he has addressed a common topic on this blog — i.e., the increasing criminalization in American society of ordinary business practices. Following on those columns, Mr. Melloan notes in this WSJ ($) column that the equally dubious criminalization of politics that is evident in the Scooter Libby indictment is a likely precursor of an even greater threat to freedom in American society:

The prosecutorial tsunami that has swept through a land teeming with lawyers and litigants has now come lapping up on the shores of the First Amendment. Now that politics has been criminalized, can reporting on politics be far behind?
If that sounds far-fetched, think how far prosecutors and state attorneys general have managed to stretch the reach of the law, tolerated by judges and a gullible press. A huge accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was wiped out by an indictment because it failed to uncover the Enron fraud, something accountants are ill-equipped to do. Sarbanes-Oxley makes it hazardous to manage a company or sit on a corporate board because of the new liabilities it imposes. . . And then there’s Eliot Spitzer, an AG who specializes in extracting confessions to non-crimes.
The next big story will be the debate over Mr. Bush’s new nominee for the Supreme Court, Appeals Court Judge Samuel Alito. Advance word is that he, like sitting Justice Antonin Scalia, is concerned about abuses of constitutional law. That won’t save Scooter Libby from the ordeal he faces, but the high court is very much in need of such views.

Finally, as noted earlier here, having encouraged abuse of state power against unpopular business executives, the Bush Administration and Republican-controlled Congress are now in no position to rein in similar abuses toward the unpopular politician of the moment.
What a mess!

Here’s a good trivia question for your next tailgate party this football season — What’s the connection between Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and Texas Longhorn football?
Larry Ribstein has the story about Ms. Miers’ involvement in her former firm’s settlement of claims arising from its representation of former All-American Longhorn placekicker, Russell Erxleben.

Larry Ribstein notes in this post that, based upon Harriet Miers‘ investment track record, it may be a mistake to presume that she will be as adept on business-related issues as a Supreme Court Justice than a proven Judge such as, say, Edith Jones would be. But Professor Ribstein shares my view that we should wait to evaluate Ms. Miers’ performance in the Judiciary Committee hearing before deciding whether to support her nomination, although he wryly notes:

I’m still reserving judgment until I see Miers’ performance in the Senate. But, then, I’m still expecting Ernie Banks to some day lead the Cubs in the World Series.

Gordon Smith shares Professor Ribstein’s skepticism of Ms. Miers’ track record on business-related issues.

Robert H. Bork, whose own nomination to the Supreme Court generated the verb “to bork” in American political lexicon, lays the wood to President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in this Opinion Journal piece, which includes these gems:

There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association’s journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no “ability to write clearly and argue incisively.”

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Income tax simplification is a recurring subject on this blog, so I took notice of this NY Times article regarding yesterday’s announcement that President Bush’s tax-overhaul panel had agreed to offer two alternatives to the present tax code — one alternative that essentially streamlines the current income tax and a second, bolder alternative that would replace it with a progressive tax on consumption. Although both proposals would do away with the deduction for state and local taxes, limit the current deduction for home-mortgage interest and tube the unpopular alternative minimum tax, the two plans differ in their approach to taxing business.
Both proposals will be included in the panel’s final November 1 report to the Treasury Department, and the report is expected to be the framework for legislative proposals regarding overhauling the tax code next year. The income tax that the panel approved in principle yesterday is based on the following basic framework:

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Here are a couple of sites that provide comprehensive information regarding President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

This University of Michigan Law Library site is a good resource for background materials on Ms. Miers (hat tip to Tom Mighell for the link);

and

This Legacy Network site that provides a comprehensive outline of, and background materials on, the pro and con arguments in regard to the Miers nomination (hat tip to Gordon Wood for the link).

Better, I think, to focus one’s evaluation of the nomination based on information gleaned from these resources than this type of thing.