Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
The core problem with the majority judgment in EFF II is that the majority’s public reasons for its judgment are insufficient to explain the case’s outcome. It handed down a judgment that intruded on the ambit of the legislature’s authority and intervened in the highly political impeachment process; without having carefully set out legally legitimate reasons for doing so. The majority’s expressed reasons failed to substantiate the outcome at which it arrived, leaving a ‘reasoning vacuum’ waiting to be filled by competing hypotheses. One potential hypothesis gives the Court the benefit of the doubt: the majority, though handing down a ‘troubling’ decision ‘not justifiable from a ‘traditional’ separation of powers perspective’, was ultimately acting to reinforce the democratic process, in acknowledgement that Parliament had egregiously failed in its duty, as representative of the people, to hold political elites to account.
