Trumpistas and the law

"[In the Trump Administration] a brazen disregard for the law and the expectation of total impunity has been perhaps the most coherent and consistent direction of the president’s four years at the helm."

That's Alexander Sammon writing in Prosecuting Trump Is the Only Way to Heal the Nation The American Prospect 11/25/2020. He gives this summary of the problems he's referencing:

The stuff we know about—the violations of the Emoluments Clause, the solicitation of foreign interference in elections, the tax cheating, the use of the military on civilian protesters, the sexual assault allegations and the attempted use of the Justice Department to fight them, the obvious and repeated obstruction of justice, and on and on—may be dwarfed by the crimes we haven’t yet been made aware of. Trump was impeached for a tiny percentage of this, and then he and his enablers in the attorney general’s office and the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security kept on unabated. [my emphasis]

But he warns that we're already seeing signs that some Democrats would prefer to give the Trump Administration criminals a free pass:

What exactly to do about Trump, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and their epic corruption will be a defining question of the Joe Biden presidency. For many Democrats, the prospect of hauling a political rival before the courts is too messy and excessively political, the sort of thing done in banana republics and not in the high-minded and high-functioning political culture of American democracy. So appalled were Democrats by Trump’s calls to lock up Hillary Clinton, most are determined to overcorrect by proposing to give Trump’s crimes a pass.

The modern Democratic Party tries to model good behavior. It rejects actions that could be perceived as partisan (seemingly still unable to internalize the fact that the GOP has remade every democratic procedure as partisan); it’s antithetical to their commitment to national “healing” — the process by which Democrats cede ground to Republicans after voters rebuke the GOP by taking the presidency away from them. [my emphasis]

That, of course, is a generous interpretation, though it's accurate as far as it goes. In our increasingly plutocratic society, impunity for elites - the very wealthy and the politicians they finance own - is a strong expectation for those who want to preserve that increasingly unequal order of things. And too many leading Democrats just buy into that concept.

But, as Sammon puts it well, "A failure to bring Trump to account before the law would mark a profound politicization of the legal system, one that would call into question the legitimacy of our rule of law and notch a new low in its undermining." (my emphasis)

He's very right about that. It is the responsibility of Presidents to enforce the law. In Watergate and various other instances of criminal behavior in office, we've seen that the US justice system can function as an independent system that can professionally prosecute crimes by political players without it being a partisan political process.

I'll comment here on an important "left" insight that will inevitably be used by people defending Trump and his criminal associates, probably more by Republicans than people who consider themselves on the left. It the very reality-based argument that we have class justice in the US because the wealthy can afford much better legal representation and they are normally subject to the kind of persecution and arbitrary violence that poor people and minorities are. Another way to put it is that even a well-functioning liberal-democratic, rule-of-law system is still vulnerable to inequities imbedded in the economic system and class order. (Yes, Republicans will use some contorted version of this argument to argue that self-claimed billionaire Donald Trump and his cronies are being persecuted because they stand up for "the workin' man".)

But it's no excuse for not prosecuting government officials who actually commit crimes. That fact that a rule-of-law system functioning equitably and fairly can't completely offset the realities of wealth, income, and class doesn't mean we shouldn't have liberal-rule-of-law justice systems. When we finally get that One Big Union or some other system that more closely approaches utopia than what we have now, that situation will be much better. But the fact that we aren't there yet should never be an excuse for not prosecuting government officials who break the law.

Sammon's desription of past Democratic failures on accountability for Republican law-breakers is well worth reading, especially the part on the Obama-Biden Administration.

In an earlier Prospect piece from this past summer, Sammon reminds us of how serious a failure it was on the part of the Obama-Biden Administration not to deal responsibly with criminal behavior by the precedent one (Biden Must Bring an End to the Bush Era 07/21/2020):

Many Democrats, for some reason, have spent the past 12 years forgetting the actual impact of the Bush presidency. One of the least popular presidents in history at the time of his departure, mastermind of the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and more, Bush’s approval rating among all Americans sunk as low as 25 percent, which still somehow seems high. Fast forward not even a decade, however, and a majority of Democrats now say they view him favorably.

Joe Biden was elected alongside Barack Obama with a powerful mandate to undo the abominable handiwork of the Bush administration. But Obama and Biden did nothing of the sort. They insisted on looking forward, and prosecuted no one involved in crimes of finance or war. They pledged to close Guantanamo Bay, but didn’t. Looking forward, it turned out, meant letting many of Bush’s great sores continue to fester. [my emphasis]

This was a serious failing, although the Obama-Biden Administration itself was remarkably free of any scandals involving criminal corruption.