Posted on 11/19/2024 6:57:59 AM PST by MtnClimber
A hundred years from now, Americans will benefit from a lesson learned in this election: When a political party prosecutes the leading figure of the opposing party in an attempt to influence an upcoming election, voters revolt against the politicization of criminal justice. Prosecuting the other side as a political maneuver makes a martyr — who probably wins the next election, the retribution election.
Shorter version: Donald Trump just buried lawfare. Maybe forever, certainly for a long time. And political lawfare, this profoundly authoritarian misuse of police and prosecutorial power, needed to be killed and buried. Conservative-ish media interprets the moment narrowly:
So lawfare against Trump, by Democrats, is over. I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that lawfare is discredited, full stop. Ninety years from now, when the Taylor Swift Party thinks about prosecuting the presumptive presidential nominee of the Drake Party, they’ll be all like, wait, didn’t that like not work and stuff? Donald Trump didn’t kill Democratic lawfare against Donald Trump; Donald Trump killed lawfare. Win elections with political arguments, the end.
Now, NBC News has published a story today that would win all the prizes for tone-deafness and missing the point, if we had journalism awards for that. I’m hinting about a new kind of journalism award, by the way, if anyone wants to design the trophies.
Oh no, Trump might “prosecute adversaries.”
But the story hurls itself right over the peak of the whole point with these paragraphs about an interview with the law professor Ilya Somin:
Somin warned that a prosecutor can investigate an individual over a long period and find that they had broken unrelated federal laws that cover minor offenses.
If Trump’s attorney general, for example, appoints a special prosecutor to examine the federal criminal investigations of Trump, they could find that a Justice Department or FBI official broke a federal law that does not relate to the Trump probes, such as a tax or drug infraction.
“If you think about it, a majority of adult Americans have probably violated federal laws, such as smoking marijuana, at some point in their lives,” Somin said.
Wow, so if a prosecutor starts with the person, wanting to charge a particular person with a crime and then going out and hunting for a way to do that, rather than starting with a reported crime, they can probably stumble into something stupid but prosecutable, because a majority of Americans have probably done something illegal at some point. Like, I don’t know, the 34 felonies of having your accountant pay your lawyer and record the payments in a ledger and with invoices?
I wrote repeatedly here about the Trump lawfare books, which all very openly bragged about trying to cook up something to stick onto Trump. The Manhattan DA’s office, Mark Pomerantz told us, assigned a bunch of staff prosecutors to a Get Trump effort, well ahead of having an identified crime to pursue, and then brought in retired prosecutors and high-powered litigators borrowed from white shoe law firms on temporary assignment. They:
1. Decided to prosecute Trump
2. Then built giant teams of lawyers to do that
3. Then tried to figure out things to charge him with, sometimes testing creative legal theories through months of brainstorming sessions
4. And then charged him.
See also the nearly identical boasting from the cretinous Norm Eisen, the District of Columbia’s village idiot.
Now scroll back up and look at what Ilya Somin told NBC News. The warning against Trump’s presumptive hypothetical future lawfare is a precise warning against the Get Trump lawfare....SNIP
President Trump, please protect the USA from political prosecution of conservatives such as yourself, Steve Bannon, Rudolf Gulianni and others! Prosecute all those involved in these prosecutions, from the prosecutors themselves, the investigators’, the staff, etc. They all belong in Jail for a long time!
The Don is a man for all seasons.
AND Trump did this against people with a bottomless pile of taxpayer money to spend to damage him, intelligence thugs who practiced psysops, and a democrat party so vile they didn't care what they did to Trump as long as it got him out of the way. (And yeah, we would have been next if they had been able to knock Trump down)
Sure. I will wager that the lawsuits are already being prepared now to flood the courts on day 1. California has already said it’s going to do that, and it was recruiting other dem states to do the same. Does anyone really believe that the suits will not leak over to personal destruction of people close to Trump like it did last time?
Years ago Law and Order was a good show, sometimes the DA won and sometimes he didn't. But then they changed it. All of a sudden the formula became 1) the DA bring a case but it flops. 2) the DA railroads the guy on some unrelated minor charge. 3) court gives the guy 100 years and everyone celebrates.
I stopped watching them cheer abuse of the justice system every week.
Article IV Section 4.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of government . . .
See Federalist 39.
I’m resolved that if any Democrat ever challenges me over the election of a felon to POTUS, I’ll point out that the Constitution is silent on the issue - and I think that points to the need for a constitutional amendment. My proposal is:That’s blatantly onesided, of course. But then, Democrats have prosecuted an opposing presidential candidate for POTUS for political gain, and Republicans never have - and no self-respecting Republican voter would ever vote for a candidate who had done so.
- No person who has been convicted of a felony shall be elected president of the united states.
- If any Republican prosecutor in any state can find a cooperative judge and 12 cooperative jurors, said prosecutor and judge shall be unopposed for reelection if they convict a Democratic candidate for POTUS of a felony.
So my “proposed constitutional amendment” would only level the playing field. In reality, of course, it would be catastrophic.
History clearly would suggest that the framers of the Constitution had every reason to dismiss my proposed Article 1. After all, every man jack of them was considered “a felon” by the king of Great Britain.
In a sane world, yes, voters would behave this way because an injustice was done. Cooler heads prevailed and the Democrats had two horrible candidates in Biden and Harris. Trump's apparent sanity and ability to actually articulate his preferred policies won over those middle of the road, independent voters.
But history often is told by its winners. In the absence of any real penalty, those who prosecuted Trump with lawfare and those who failed to report it in the media will be able to walk away and dust themselves off of any crime.
In fact, knowing how those on the Left operate, their post-election analysis involves asking themselves: "How could we have lied better?"
They used all the buzzwords: indicted, prosecuted, 34-counts, felon, etc. The only one they didn't get to use was "incarcerated." (Some of them clearly wanted to use "assassinated," but thankfully that one escaped us as well.)
I don't want to see revenge, but I think retribution is necessary. Revenge will bring more of the tit-for-tat; every election cycle will inevitably bring with it the question, "Who's going to be arrested this year?" After a couple election cycles, we'll be a full-blown banana republic.
We need retribution, where those that did these things to Trump are convicted and punished with commensurate penalties. Enough to send a message to any other politically ambitious judge or prosecutor.
I won't hold my breath.
I agree with your great post. Retribution for crimes committed will be the only thing that makes the left think that they can’t lie about what they did and get away with it. No matter what MSNBC and CNN scream about. I also think some leftist “news” people need to be charged as accomplices.
If Trump dropped dead tomorrow he accomplished more than the last 10 presidents by exposing the ultra corrupt and trenched criminal posers who hijacked this government.
Entrenched to
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