“For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law,” Peru’s former dictator, Oscar Benavides, allegedly told his functionaries. This apocryphal quote illustrates how authoritarian regimes can reward allies while demanding that their opponents live by the letter of the law. It’s an outlook that was adopted by the modern Left.
Democrats contend that President Donald Trump has destroyed the rule of law. Even if it were so, I’m afraid their protestations are hollow and fraudulent. Indeed, it takes a preternatural shamelessness for the Left to act as defenders of blind justice.
For years, from the local to federal level, Democrats have weaponized the system to punish and censor political opponents, from the leading presidential candidate to pro-life activists to concerned parents who were smeared by the attorney general as would-be terrorists because they had the nerve to complain to school boards about draconian COVID-19-era policies.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictments of Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot read like a political oppo document cobbled together by a congressional staffer with some perfunctorily last-minute novel legal reasoning tacked on. It was obvious the entire purpose of the enterprise was to put Trump in an orange jumpsuit before Election Day.
“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” former President Joe Biden said after Trump was convicted of covering up his alleged affair.
If this were true, why wasn’t former President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, handcuffed and thrown in prison like Trump adviser Peter Navarro for ignoring a congressional subpoena? Navarro’s arrest for contempt was the first in at least half a century.
If it were true, Biden would not have spent decades pilfering classified documents, even as his administration was prosecuting Trump for the very same crime. For many years, there have been two dramatically different sets of standards.
The preemptive, blanket amnesty Biden handed to his political allies certainly put people like Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci above the law. Worse, those pardons created a moral hazard that ensures others will do the same. Right now, many of Trump’s advisers are probably operating under the expectation that the president, who is already uninhibited with his pardon power, will give them retroactive amnesty.
Even now, in many of the biggest alleged cases of Trump abuse, Democrats are putting their friends above the law.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of helping an illegal immigrant evade arrest by federal authorities. Who knows, maybe she’ll beat the charges. If you listen to the Left, though, you would think the Trump administration detained Gandhi.
After Trump voluntarily surrendered himself to authorities at the Fulton County Jail on racketeering charges, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) held that Trump should be treated “exactly like everybody else.” Raskin is now saying Dugan’s arrest is a “drastic escalation and dangerous new front in Trump’s authoritarian campaign of trying to bully, intimidate, and impeach judges who won’t follow his dictates.”
Dugan, who was indicted by a grand jury, isn’t above the law. Nor, incidentally, are the laws that govern illegal immigration “dictates” from the president. Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, the man Dugan allegedly hid from authorities, is facing charges of battery, domestic abuse, and infliction of physical pain or injury. He is not above the law, either.
Nor is Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka, or the three congressional lawmakers who rushed through the gates and past security at a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Civil disobedience may or may not be an effective way to protest, but it isn’t a shield from consequences.
“They’ll find out,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) warned Republicans if the Department of Homeland Security follows through on its threats to arrest trespassers. “It’s a red line. They know better than to go down that road. There are clear lines that they dare not cross.”
So, you’re saying the red line wasn’t crossed by Democrats when they indicted the opposing presidential candidate on a slew of transparently risible cases? Ro Khanna is now saying in America, “You cannot arrest your political opponents.”
There’s a mug shot of a former Republican presidential candidate on the internet that says differently.
New York Attorney General Letitia James ran for her position in 2018 on a promise to prosecute Trump. “Give me the man, and I’ll find the crime,” reminds most of us of the Soviets. Yet not one Democrat, as I recall, protested. James kept her word, bringing down the power of the state to punish and embarrass Trump personally, and to derail his likely presidential campaign.
If Trump had broken the law, it would have been fine by me. But New York’s case was dubious. At best, it was a case of highly selective enforcement. James said Trump inflated assets on financial statements provided to banks when obtaining loans. Why didn’t New York seek recompense for the victims? Because there were none. Not one witness during the trial ever accused Trump of misrepresenting his position. The bank didn’t complain. A Deutsche Bank official testified that it made lending decisions based on an internal assessment rather than relying on Trump’s claims.
It didn’t matter. A New York jury hit Trump with a $454 million judgment.
Then there was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted Trump for violating federal campaign-finance law for attempting to conceal allegedly damaging information by signing a nondisclosure agreement with porn “actress” Stormy Daniels.
If attempting to conceal unsavory information about your past from voters using completely legal means is a crime, virtually every politician would end up in prison. So, obviously, I’m not completely opposed to the idea. But it needs to be meted out impartially. However, Bragg is notorious for using the law as a political tool, dropping charges against pro-Hamas campus rioters and pleading felonies down to misdemeanors and allowing criminals to operate above the law.
The one thing one needs to remember when engaging in lawfare is that you need a clean bill of health yourself. That may not have been the case for James. The FBI is conducting a criminal investigation into alleged mortgage fraud related to “falsified records” to get home loans for a property in Virginia that James said was her “principal residence” in 2023. However, she is still serving as a New York state prosecutor. She signed the papers in late August 2023, a few weeks before opening the fraud trial against the Trump Organization. James is not above the law.
SCAPEGOATING JOE BIDEN ISN’T GOING TO SOLVE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S PROBLEMS
The truth is that modern Democrats don’t really trust the law. For years, there was a popular sentiment on the Left that the Supreme Court should be ignored. You might also remember that after Trump’s arrest in Georgia, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared: “Everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” This, of course, is a perversion of the fundamental notion once shared by most people in free societies that one is innocent until proven guilty. And the formation was not a slip of the tongue. It was written down in a press release. Pelosi’s sentiment was reminiscent of how Democrats acted when they smeared Brett Kavanaugh as a (gang) rapist. Senators such as Mazie Hirono (D-HI) refused to admit Kavanaugh deserved the “same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America.” It’s fine, even idealistic, to contend that no one should be above the law. I wish it were true. But no one should be below it, either.
Some people, no doubt, will say lingering on the past actions of Democrats amounts to little more than “whataboutism.” For one thing, it’s not only legitimate but useful to point out the inconsistencies of politicians who have degraded our norms. Holding elected officials to their own stated ideals is something we should all be doing. However, that doesn’t mean anyone should excuse Trump’s actions, which are also testing the limits of executive power. However, the ugly truth is that the opposition party has no moral standing on the matter. And that’s a big problem.
