A Mockery of Justice
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A Mockery of Justice
Indicting the former president is a criminal solution to a political problem
Not everything that’s bad in politics is illegal – especially in a country that has the First Amendment. Joe Biden’s Department of Justice seems to have forgotten that. At least, that’s the conclusion to be drawn from the latest federal indictment of Donald Trump.
Jack Smith, the same federal special prosecutor who indicted Trump in Florida over the classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, has struck again. He charged Trump in D.C. with a conspiracy to defraud the federal government and obstruct federal proceedings. The legal theory of the indictment is that Trump tried to obstruct the peaceful counting of votes and to deprive Americans of their right to vote by overturning the election. It alleges six unindicted co-conspirators, apparently including Rudy Giuliani, election lawyer Sidney Powell, Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, and law professor John Eastman.
The indictment is based upon Trump’s efforts to get political actors such as state legislatures, the vice president, and Congress to throw out the results of the 2020 popular vote for president in states such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It includes schemes to name substitute slates of presidential electors, efforts (on Eastman’s dubious legal advice) to get Mike Pence to throw out state electors, and Trump’s incitement of the January 6 mob to menace Pence for not doing so.
Trump did a lot of unethical and dishonest things, and the Senate should have convicted him in his impeachment trial. Impeachment, as the British philosopher and Member of Parliament Edmund Burke argued, should be “tried before Statesmen and by Statesmen, upon solid principles of State morality.” But crimes are supposed to be about the law – which has to be plain enough to govern us all. No criminal charges like this have ever been brought before, and it is far from clear that any law was broken.
The indictment charges that Trump and his confederates lied to legislatures about the election being fraudulent. That’s bad – but presidents and governors lying to legislatures to get them to do things happens every day.
It charges that Trump spread lies to the public and smeared elections officials. That’s dirty politics, but it’s politics.
It charges that Trump got his electors to cast votes that would not be counted unless a court or some other government body recognized them, and tried to browbeat the Georgia secretary of state into deciding that the election included thousands of fraudulent votes. But in none of these cases was anyone deceived – the same legal problem that undermines Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump for lying to his own checkbook. The electors were doing what electors have done in the past when a state’s votes were still in dispute.
Democrats Against The Court
Poll: Democrats turn against the Supreme Court.
American approval of the U.S. Supreme Court is tied for a record low, with the second-lowest support from Democrats ever recorded by Gallup.
Just 40% of the American public now approves of the court, a sharp decline from the 51% average since data was first collected in 2000…
The 45 percentage point gap between GOP and Democratic approval represents a flip from eight years ago after the court legalized same-sex marriage.
At that time, three quarters of Democrats approved of the court's job, compared to just 18% of Republicans.
The Poison of Accusation
Among all the instances of elite projection and cynical opportunism over the past few years—the censoring Left sees fascism everywhere; the concept of systemic racism offers a blessed distraction from the purges of #MeToo; the agenda-driven media deplores Donald Trump’s bending of the truth—Joe Biden’s demagoguery has got to be the most glaring. It’s bad enough that the self-appointed savior of indebted students is the same man who, as a U.S. senator from Delaware, was instrumental in passing legislation that made it impossible for students to discharge student debt through bankruptcy; Delaware, after all, is where the credit-card empires have their headquarters. Now we have Biden decrying the country’s “divisions,” even as he multiplies them himself. He has gone from disdainful opponent of busing—Biden in 1975: “I oppose busing, it’s an asinine concept”—to bold defier of “Jim Crow 2.0.”
The latest example of truth-bending and rabble-rousing comes from deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates. Bates was responding to a comment by Greg Gutfeld, a Fox News host who was discussing a section in the Florida Standards for Teaching Black History that addresses, as the Standards state, “various duties and trades performed by the slaves.” The Standards advise teachers to instruct students in “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Referring to Viktor Frankl’s classic work on the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, Gutfeld said, “Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility! Utility kept you alive.”
The Biden White House/campaign apparatus leaped. Bates thundered to CNN: “What Fox News allowed to be said on their air yesterday—and has so far failed to condemn—is an obscenity. In defending a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of Americans who suffered from the evil of enslavement, a Fox News host told another horrid, dangerous and extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of people who suffered from the evils of the Holocaust. Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust. Full stop. Americans deserve to be brought together, not torn apart with poison.”
Never mind that by raising the specters of racism and anti-Semitism where they did not exist, Bates himself was spewing poison while making his condemnation. The Florida Standards for teaching black history describe the horrors of slavery; they also describe the character and dignity and resilience of many slaves. It is a simple, uncomplicated fact that the skills some slaves learned were those that they used to make a living after emancipation. The College Board’s AP curriculum for black studies, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis rejected, happened to make that same point. You would have to be operating far beyond the boundaries of reality to believe that the Florida Standards portray slavery as a great vocational opportunity. (And no sane person who actually thought that would say it.)
But what is truly galling about Bates’s calculated outburst is that it is entirely divorced from historical truth. By the standards of today’s group solipsism, I may not have the bona fides to talk about being black, or gay, or transgendered. I can, however, talk about being Jewish. My Jewish relatives, on both sides of my family, were killed by Ukrainians in the Odessa pogrom of 1905—the Soviets had unsuccessfully tried to stamp out anti-Semitism in Ukraine—and then by Nazis, aided by Ukrainians, in 1941.
The Decline in Church Attendance
Church attendance for Gen Xers has dropped off more dramatically than other age groups.
Americans in their 40s and 50s often identify with a religion, but they’re also in the thick of raising kids, caring for aging parents and juggling demanding jobs that spill into the weekend. During the pandemic, many got out of the habit of going regularly to religious services and didn’t resume. Some had been drifting away before or became disillusioned by church scandals or positions on social issues in recent years.
The percentage of people ages 39 to 57 who attended a worship service during the week, either in person or online, fell to 28% in 2023, down from 41% in 2020, according to a survey this year. This was the largest percentage-point drop of all age groups examined in the survey of 2,000 adults conducted by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University.
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Who are the six co-conspirators in Trump’s indictment?
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Will latest indictment rally Trump’s supporters?
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The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in running to host PBS show.
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Podcast
Quote
“In the hard life of politics it is well known that no platform nor any program advanced by either major American party has any purpose beyond expressing emotion. Platforms are a ritual with a history of their own and, after being written, they are useful chiefly to scholars who dissect them as archeological political remains. The writing of a platform does indeed flatter many people, gives many pressure groups a chance to blow off steam in public, permits the leaders of such pressure groups to report back to their memberships of their valiant efforts to persuade. But in actual fact, all platforms are meaningless: the program of either party is what lies in the vision and conscience of the candidate the party chooses to lead it.”
— Theodore H. White