The judge’s ruling really doesn’t mean much. This will go through many layers of appeals, and ultimately will probably be a song for the Supremes.
As I have noted before, the basis for the case is obvious. If the suit is denied, it means that Joe President can accept any level of bribe from a foreign nation as long as he does it though a business. In that case, a President could not accept a billion dollar personal bribe from the country of Musialstan, but he could own an antique store with one item on sale – an old beat-up couch, for example, worth five bucks. As long as he lets his son run the antique store day-to-day, the son can slap a billion dollar price tag on that couch, and sell it to the Musialstanis. That’s exactly the same in intent and effect as the billion dollar direct bribe. It seems to me pretty obvious that we can’t allow our President to be in that position.
That said, it doesn’t matter that the case obviously has merit. What matters is what the courts ultimately rule, and I can’t predict that.
Don’t unnecessarily complicate things. The current Supreme Court is corrupt and will rule accordingly.
Oh sure, but if the Supreme Court rules that there is a precedent for a President to operate a business while President, I like to think I’ve explained why that argument doesn’t hold water.
It’s been mentioned before that previous Presidents owned businesses (farms) while President – although Jimmy Carter divested himself of his farm and related businesses.
This is why it helps for Judges/Justices to have a background in economics. There are four different types of market structures:
1.Perfect competition
2.Monopolistic competition
3.Oligopoly
4.Monopoly
The reason for a great deal of advertising is for a business that operates in something close to a perfect competition market structure to distinguish itself so as to make itself a monopolistic competitor. The most frequently cited example is razor blades. They all do they same thing, but according to the advertisements, a razor with five blades is completely different than one with three blades.
Although it might be true that Thomas Jefferson sold wine, a form of monopolistic competition, to foreign dignitaries, he and all the other Presidents that operated businesses as President owned farms that sold their products on the open market. They did not control the price their goods sold at and almost certainly nobody knew if they were buying commodities from the President’s farm.
The situation with Trump’s hotels and other business ventures are a completely different situation. He and the foreign dignitaries both know what they are doing.