One of the most high profile criminals in all of American history is not just walking away scot-free, he is headed for a second term as President of the United States. If I were writing a novel and I wanted to create the most incredibly unbelieveable problem for the characters to resolve, I could not have come up with a theme as crazy, and as incredible as this.
He attempted to overturn the results of a state's election by intimidating election workers and threatening state officials, corruptly asking to "find me 11,000 more votes." He took classified documents from the White House, an openly illegal crime, and then attempted to hide them from the FBI. He tried to cover up an illicit affair with a porn star by putting the payoffs into his business budget. And worst of all, he attempted to overthrown the results of a legitimate election, and thus overthrow the government of the United States, by inciting a violent riot that intended to commit murder to do so, and in fact, did just that.
And he walks away from all of it. This isn't something hidden in some corner, it's something the whole world can see, and it is an utter embarrassment to the United States. It is a message to the rest of the world that there is no rule of law in America, and that we have, by default, become an oligarchy of the rich, even as our form of government goes through the motions. The constitution has failed in one of its core objectives to protect the American people.
The Message That Has Been Delivered to the American People
"The law is meaningless."
Getting to this point has been inevitable. We've been electing politicians for decades now who have helped put legislation in place to make it possible for some people, those who have the money to hire lawyers capable of manipulating the law in their favor, to avoid the will of the people, expressed through the law. We have allowed the open bribery of Supreme Court justices who, once on the court for life, have ruled against the original intentions of the founding fathers, and mainly, in a corrupt way, to protect the President who appointed them as a quid pro quo. And while there is an outcry about it, our politicians claim powerlessness and have done nothing about it.
What Trump has gotten away with is the result of inexplicable failure to take action and do the right thing when it counted, and when it could have made a difference. Trump was identified, correctly, as an existential threat to American democracy eight years ago. After he'd been in office four years, it became the responsibility of the Biden administration to clean up all of the messes, from the Covid disaster to the Trump insurrection to the stealing of classified documents from the White House and deliberately misleading the FBI in their recovery. These all involved crimes against the American people.
Personally, I had a feeling that nothing was going to come from all of the crimes he committed, and I was actually surprised that investigations were conducted and indictments handed down. We were teased into thinking his crimes were taken seriously, as a Congressional investigation laid out the evidence in prime time on national television. I operated under a major mistaken impression that the evidence discovered by Congress would go directly to the Justice Department where a case would be brought in federal court. The man instigated an insurrection against the Capitol building while Congress was in session for the purpose of overturning the electoral count that was happening. Members lives were in danger, the intention of the mob being to completely disrupt the proceedings by violent means.
I still fail to understand how it could be that a mob could attack the Capitol, at the instigation of the President, and he was not arrested, charged and taken into custody the day after the insurrection, when it was clear he incited it. That's what should have happened, and why it did not happen is something generations of Americans will pay for with their individual rights and freedoms. I've heard all of the Justice department apologists and they can keep their defensive rhetoric. This was a monumental failure of justice, of the legal system, the courts and of the Department of Justice.
And the message that has been delivered to the American people, and to the world, is that America is no longer a nation that lives by the rule of law, and it no longer has a government capable of the administration of justice. Our court system is so clogged by a legal bureaucracy of its own creation, to find ways to get around the law, that it no longer has the ability to defend the truth, or even know what truth is.
Justice in America can be bought with enough money, power and influence. We know the exact purchase price of some Supreme Court justices, exactly how much the bribery needs to be worth to get them to sell out their oath of loyalty to the constitution and do the bidding of the one who bribed them. The foot-dragging, obfuscation, interminable delays and incompetence of an Attorney General who was appointed by the Democratic administration charged with repairing the damage caused by Trump's first term is an inexplicable and appalling failure. The sense of urgency that should have accompanied the knowledge that Trump was an existential threat to American Democracy was never part of any of the actions taken by the Justice Department.
The message that is being sent to the nation, and to the world, is that equal justice under law does not exist. We have, indeed, done the thing that our founding fathers feared the most, and we have created an executive government post in which the occupant is above the law.
And here is what people will figure out, in short order. If he doesn't have to respect the law and obey it, why should I? Let the implications of that set in. The President of the United States is an office the founders intended to be the most public example of a law abiding citizen. We've turned that upside down, and those who were responsible for doing so are going to be the ones who must shoulder the blame for the disaster this is headed toward becoming.
I Don't Think This Can Be Fixed
We've been told, by our own justice department, and by several judges, that the law is meaningless. It carries no weight or authority to protect the people any more. We saw how much of our constitution and our rights eroded away during Trump's first term, and when Joe Biden started to put things back together, there was hope, and a lot of talk that the law, and the courts, had "held." But they haven't held. They've failed.
We've been told, by our corporate controlled media that this is what people voted for. They are either completely ignorant of what the man has done, or they think he's being persecuted, or they don't really care. We no longer have a free press. People voted the way they did because every public media outlet in the country covered every move Trump made and every word that came out of his mouth 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If Biden got ten minutes of coverage once or twice a week, that was lucky.
The courage and boldness that was needed to make sure we got things back on track and didn't let this happen again were needed in the first two years of Biden's term, when we had both houses of Congress under our control. The topic came up but it got shut down. We knew what we were dealing with on that Supreme Court. It would have been risky, and a bold move, to revise the Judiciary Act, then break the filibuster in the Senate to pack this Supreme Court, but we are certainly going to pay a huge price now for not doing that.
Go ahead, be critical. But if we'd done that, we would not now be facing a Trump Presidency with blanket immunity for any crimes he commits while President. That essentially bypassing the constitutional provision for impeachment. And a packed court, with progressive judges, could have struck down any Republican changes to the Judiciary Act to keep them from packing the court. That's the way they've played politics since the days of Rush Limbaugh. Why can't we do the same?
They now have a very narrow, razor thin margin of control of Congress. And if there's a person in the country who is depending on any of those Republican members of Congress to do the right thing, they are going to be incredibly disappointed. They're not.
This country has resisted every attempt to force it, by law, to get over racial prejudice and bigotry, misogyny and complete the vision of the founding fathers. It took a Civil War to reset the racial prejudice, and that didn't do anything except create even deeper resentment because no matter what the law says, it takes a change of heart and a transformed character to overcome racism and understand human equality.
Every time we move one step forward, we move ten steps back.
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