- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Union officials can read contracts, but can they read them to the same degree as a lawyer does?
Further, the contracts they read are employment contracts, which is a different species entirely from contracts which actually have constitutional force and laws.
Obama is a constitutional lawyer, this means that he has by training an understanding of constitutional law superior to that of a layperson, right down to precedents and principles.
Hillary is a corporate lawyer, which though less attractive on a generalist sense, at least means that trade negotiations come with somebody having an advantage in negotiating trade deals. She would also have an edge over a non-corporate lawyer in understanding what tort reform would mean.
This is one of the major selling points to Hillary, she understands corporate law in a time when you have corporations raping America.
They are trained to deal in a legal field which is the field in which the president is most active in a real sense.
Or you could go with the Republican ideology, of hiring people whose main interest in the law is in the narrow needs of business people and actors. This gave America Reagan, Bush Snr, Bush Jnr, and the worst example Delay (An exterminator.)
The main crux in my post was hiring a president who gets the implications of the law because they are trained to seek the loopholes and peculiarities of the laws you already have.
At some point you should read up on the laws President Clinton vetoed and why he vetoed them, and then compare and contrast to GW's "Signing statements."
It is not the "Working class is stupid." It is, you want somebody signing your contracts with the world with a fair degree of knowledge as to those contracts' implications in the rest of the law.
Of course other considerations come into play too, which is why someone being a trained lawyer is a plus not a deciding factor, but it is a plus in the end.
