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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Our Razor’s Edge Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/28/our-razors-edge/

At the end of the year, we are on the razor’s edge of many things that soon may blow up.

Americans are far beyond President Joe Biden’s serial untruths of some eight years that he never discussed Hunter Biden’s various get-rich-quick schemes.

All were predicated on the perception of foreign interests purchasing from the Biden family the influence of then-senator, vice president, and possibly soon-to-be President Joe Biden.

The Bidens now risk exposure to criminal charges of multimillion-dollar tax fraud, perjury, influence selling, and bribery as congressional committees and a special prosecutor unravel years of tangled-up quid pro quos.

A newly indicted Hunter remains reckless and unpredictable. He continues to publicly blame his mounting legal problems on everyone and everything other than his own selfish excesses.

Hunter deliberately involves his family and may even bring down his own father. His tax lawyers have previously threatened to call President Joe Biden to testify on his behalf under oath.

He continues to court public scandal by hawking amateurish “representational” paintings to the quid-pro-quo wealthy and wannabes wishing clout with the White House.

His laptop messages reveal a prodigal son angry that his bagman services were never fully appreciated by his familial beneficiaries.

Hunter’s wayward laptop is a felonious trove of drug-addled, illicit Petronian excess and sex, interspliced with his self-incriminating family communications on the distributions of pay-for-play payoffs.

Hunter’s business aides will be called back to elaborate on their already incriminating testimonies.

The effort to keep Trump off the ballot has been a century in the making It is part of the progressives’ long march through the Constitution Charles Lipson

What happens now that the Colorado Supreme Court has kicked Donald Trump off the primary ballot? The first thing, apparently, is similar lawsuits in other “blue” states. Those will continue despite the Wednesday decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that Trump’s name can remain.

Nearly all the commentary has been devoted to the legal reasons for these rulings and their political implications. But it is important to consider the effort to exclude Trump in a wider context, one that goes beyond his personality, polarizing candidacy and events of January 6.

That wider frame is a century-long progressive effort to reframe the way America is governed and to loosen the constitutional barriers to those changes. That effort might be called the progressives’ “long march through the Constitution.” The Colorado decision was the bitter fruit of that march. It will almost certainly be slapped down, harshly and quickly, by the US Supreme Court.

The long march began in earnest over a century ago with Woodrow Wilson, more as a scholar than as a president. It became dominant among jurists with the rise of “legal realism” in the 1940s.

It took almost a half-century for serious intellectual pushback to form. It did so with the rise of the Federalist Society and its emphasis on “originalist” jurisprudence. Although that position is still a small minority within law schools, it is strongly favored by Republicans, whose appointments have made it a majority on the Supreme Court.

This sustained effort to reshape the Constitution began with Wilson and the Progressive Movement. It was Wilson who leveled a blunt, principled attack on what he considered the drastic limitations of the “Founders’ Constitution.” He was joined by a coterie of intellectuals, led by Herbert Croly, who founded a prominent magazine with a telling title, the New Republic.

Their basic point was that the constitutional provisions adopted before 1800 were fine for their time but woefully inadequate for the modern era. They needed to be replaced by a “living constitution” that evolved to keep up with the times. Progressives still hold that view, though they seldom declare it as openly as Wilson and Croly.

They knew, of course, that the Constitution contained rules for modifying and updating its provisions. But progressives also knew they lacked the supermajorities needed to pass those fundamental changes. So, they chose other means.

Their success is captured in a phrase that appears on a tombstone over three centuries old, that of Christopher Wren, the great architect who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. “If you seek his monument — look around you.” The same could be said of political edifice built by Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and their followers. If you seek their monument, look around you.

The foundation stone for that monument was laid during the Great Depression, in Roosevelt’s fierce response to a hostile Supreme Court that had ruled his New Deal programs unconstitutional. If the court didn’t change its direction, he thundered, he would change the court. He planned to do it by adding three extra justices to gain a voting majority. (The Supreme Court had nine justices but the Constitution didn’t specify that number.) Roosevelt’s threat worked — and he didn’t need to expand the court. After 1937, it approved all his programs.

Elite law schools were eager to support this new direction and did so by changing the legal theory they taught. Their students became the next generation’s judges.

This new framework, known as “legal realism,” was “predicated on the notion that all law derives from prevailing social interests and public policy, as opposed to purely formalistic legal considerations.” The implication is that if older laws and policies don’t meet those social interests, as judges alone determine them, then the courts should impose new and better ones.

The only way to implement these vast changes was to cast aside the “outmoded, formalist” constraints embedded in the Constitution, as they were traditionally interpreted. As the courts adopted this new approach, they dramatically decreased the likelihood any laws, regulations or federal programs would be declared unconstitutional.

The impact on American governance and American life was far-reaching. The new jurisprudence:

Overrode a long line of constitutional precedents, particularly those protecting property rights, contractual freedom, and limitations on federal authority;
Concentrated power in Washington, away from state and local governments; and
Shifted lawmaking power away from voters and their elected representatives toward federal judges and bureaucratic regulators.
Why didn’t Congress resist these changes, as the Founders expected when they separated the government’s legislative, executive, and judicial powers? Because congressional majorities were increasingly (and willingly) subordinated to presidents from the same party. Those were usually Democrats who favored a larger, more powerful, more centralized national government with its accompanying bureaucracy.

The effect was to delegate broad rulemaking authority to federal bureaucracies. Congress didn’t resist it — and the courts approved it. The process created the modern administrative state and transformed the role of Congress. Its main job was to pass laws that set broad parameters, delegate the specifics to federal agencies, and then oversee (poorly) the mammoth bureaucracies they had created.

This fundamental transformation of American governance imperils two ideals at the heart of our constitutional democracy:

Laws should be made by elected representatives, not appointed officials, and made through settled constitutional procedures involving both Congress and the president. The most consequential laws should certainly be made that way. And
The powers of the national government should be divided between the president and two chambers of Congress, not concentrated in the Executive Branch and its agencies. The Founders relied on this separation of powers to prevent tyranny. To work, the separate institutions needed to defend their prerogatives against encroachment by the other branches
Modern rulemaking, made by bureaucrats and judges, tramples those ideals and the constitutional constraints designed to implement them.

Today, the most important laws passed by Congress include thousands of references that say the “secretary of transportation” or “secretary of Health and Human Services” shall make this or that determination and then establish a bevy of regulations to fulfill Congress’s broad intent. In practice, much of Washington’s control over American life stems from those regulations, which are made, enforced and often adjudicated by mid-level bureaucrats.

No one doubts the wisdom of allowing administrative experts to make detailed rules on relatively small, technical matters. The problem arises when rules and decisions are more consequential. Delegating those decisions to unelected administrators and suppliant judges is not only undemocratic, it violates established rules that prohibit Congress from offloading its legislative responsibilities.

This transformation of the Founders’ Constitution is exactly what Woodrow Wilson sought and what Franklin D. Roosevelt did so much to achieve after his 1937 threat to “pack the court.”

The pushback began during the Reagan administration. Led by the Federalist Society, it developed a strong, coherent intellectual position and steadily gained ground, despite tenacious resistance by progressives.

This shifting balance put leftist legal scholars in an odd position. After decades of cheering major constitutional surgery performed by courts — out with the old, in with the new — they began pleading to shut down the operating room. Stop the changes, lest they overturn the old and cherished victories.

Although this resistance comes from the left, it makes a point conservatives should take seriously. A central goal of any well-ordered legal system is to provide a stable, comprehensible order. That stable order allows individuals and organizations to make informed decisions, knowing which rules apply. They can’t do that if legal precedents are easily discarded.

Important as this need for stability is, it has its limits. The most important are that it should not:

Perpetuate clearly unconstitutional laws and regulations
Give unelected bureaucrats and judges the power to make major laws, or
Block citizens’ rights to choose their representatives
Because citizens have this fundamental right to elect who will represent them, judges should be extremely wary of excluding candidates from the ballot. They should do so only when candidates have violated obligations that are plainly spelled out in the Constitution (and, ideally, supported by well-established precedents) and when those candidates have been afforded due process to rebut any charges that would keep them off the ballot.

Those are load-bearing walls of a representative democracy. Maintaining them is a core judicial responsibility.

That conclusion bears directly on Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to keep Donald Trump off the primary ballot, a move other progressive states are eager to replicate. That move will almost certainly be rejected by the US Supreme Court.

It should be rejected unless the High Court finds Trump committed unequivocal constitutional violations, that those violations are clearly covered by the text and well-established legal precedents and that the prohibitions are meant to cover actions by the president himself, not his appointees.

Unless SCOTUS finds those major violations of the constitution, it should reaffirm the voters’ rights.

The Supreme Court will almost certainly rule there are no such prohibitions against Donald Trump remaining on the ballot, despite his very troubling speech, actions and inactions after losing the 2020 election and especially on January 6, 2021. Remember, an aggressive Special Counsel, Jack Smith, conducted a thorough investigation and never charged Trump with insurrection. Yet a state supreme court is now keeping him off the ballot primarily for a crime he was not charged with or convicted of.

SCOTUS is also likely to find that, as president, Trump was not covered by a key portion of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits citizens from holding a broad range of positions if they violated their oaths as “officers of the United States.” The question then becomes: who is an “officer” and who isn’t? The answer is contested. Section 3 of the Amendment names a number of those “officers” but does not include the president or vice president. Courts have ruled the same way, though the point is hardly settled law.

One fairly recent case (on a different matter) takes up the issue directly. In that 2010 case, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the “people do not vote for the ‘officers of the United States.” Instead, officers of the United States are “appointed exclusively pursuant to Article II, Section 2 procedures.” The key word here is “appointed,” not elected. Roberts’s conclusion matches one reached two centuries earlier by a towering legal figure, Justice Joseph Story, in his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States.

Finally, the courts are likely to conclude the question is essentially a political one that should be decided by the voters. The justices will be extremely reluctant to wade into this maelstrom. They know that prohibiting a candidate who received over 70 million votes last time, has a good chance of winning this time and has never been criminally charged with insurrection would be the most controversial and divisive court decision since Dred Scott. That, as you may have read, did not work out well.

Whatever the legal arguments, no one familiar with a century of expansive progressive jurisprudence should be shocked by the Colorado rulings. It fits snugly within that tradition. But that once-dominant tradition is now in retreat intellectually and outnumbered on the High Court. That bodes ill for the Colorado decision and any that replicate it. The only question is whether the Supreme Court will reject them unanimously.

Barack’s Lieutenant: The Racism, Revenge, and Ruin of Claudine Gay – Barack’s CRT Legacy :Scott McKay

https://spectator.org/baracks-lieutenant-the-racism-revenge-and-ruin-of-claudine-gay/

You’ve no doubt seen a lot of discussion of the fact that, despite her manifest lack of qualifications, Claudine Gay got the big job at Harvard because she checked all the boxes: black, female, dedicated heart and soul to the vileness of DEI.

And that’s all true. Claudine Gay got that job running Harvard on the strength of identity politics and identity politics alone. This is a woman who is now under suspicion for some 40 allegations of plagiarism. Far from being the “distinguished scholar” she was advertised as, Gay is essentially a serial academic rapist. And Harvard, for having installed her atop its hierarchy, deserves to be deposed from the ranks of elite, or even noteworthy, universities.

Harvard has been utterly corrupted and defiled. It’s now an institution without honor or quality. Its reputation has been exposed as a fraud.

That’s the effect Claudine Gay has already had on Harvard. The only potential fix for it is her immediate resignation, along with that of all of the people involved in hiring her.

And that won’t happen.

Why? Claudine Gay also checks another set of boxes, not coincidentally the ones set out in the very title of my new book: Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama.

Indeed, there is no more apt poster child for the America Obama left us than the pathetic Ms. Gay. In a time when not just race but adherence to noxious neo-Marxism govern hiring decisions everywhere from the campus to the “entertainment” world, (and, increasingly, Fortune 500 boardrooms), no one better exemplifies the ruinous legacy of our 44th president.

Who Supports Hamas? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20261/who-supports-hamas

Many of the protests that now demand a unilateral ceasefire — including the attempts to shut down Christmas celebrations — are orchestrated by some of the same radical groups that organized the pro-Hamas demonstrations before Israel went into Gaza.

Demonstrations and protests by groups such as the Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace or the National Lawyers Guild seem anything but spontaneous and grassroots responses to “Israel’s military actions in Gaza.” They are not demonstrations against what Israel does; they are protests against what Israel is, namely the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people.

Recall that these protests began before Israel counterattacked against Hamas. They were in full bloom on October 8, even while the bodies of 1,200 murdered Israelis, including babies burned alive, were still being gathered and counted, and the roughly 240 hostages taken by Hamas to Gaza identified.

The protests are exclusively anti-Israel, anti-American, pro-Hamas, and pro-terrorism.

Where are the calls for anything that would actually help the Palestinians or make their lives better: freedom of speech, equal justice under the law, freedom of the press, better job opportunities, and an end to government corruption and abuse?

So when you watch an anti-Israel demonstration on television, please understand who is behind it and what are their ultimate goals, because the next target is American democracy — and you.
The main groups that comprise the bulk of organizers and demonstrators who have supported the Hamas barbarism against Israel are:

1) Radical Islamic groups that, like the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution, regard Israel as the “Little Satan” and America as the “Big Satan.”

2) American revolutionary groups who used to be affiliated with Communism but now call themselves radical socialists or workers parties. Their goal is to overthrow our government and they attach themselves to every disruptive movement in the hope of garnering support and creating distrust for American democracy.

Fight This Information War with KISSes By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/fight_this_information_war_with_kisses.html

I believe in the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.  I do my best to boil events down to their essential truths and then hammer those truths again and again.  Repetition is my weapon of choice.

The reason I stick to this strategy has nothing to do with who is reading.  It has to do with the nature of the war we are already fighting.  Never before in human history have people been so bombarded by lies and propaganda from their own political leaders.  The information warfare that the U.S. government and other Western nations use against their own peoples is meant to conquer minds with direct programming instead of directed bullets.

How do you counter-program people who have been indoctrinated for years, if not decades?  You KISS them, so that they’ll KISS others, and a steady flow of simple truths can begin to crack the glass of our invisible cage.  The whole thing sounds quite dirty and promiscuous, but constantly reminding ourselves what is actually true in a blizzard of lies is an admirable pursuit.  Crafty French diplomat Talleyrand, who managed to keep his head through both the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, observed, “Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts.”  The Marxist globalists who use censorship and propaganda as shield and sword are Talleyrand’s ardent disciples.

The size of the information war being conducted against us is astounding, and because the formerly free press has been conquered and conditioned to support the State, news outlets willing to report the truth are few.  When the corporate news cartel controls 95% of the information flow and the Department of Homeland Security is effectively censoring the remaining 5%, it becomes essential for those of us who see this war as it really is to sound a little like broken records.  Using labels such as “Deep State,” “Uniparty,” “Marxist globalists,” “ruling class,” and “elites” is a form of subversive branding meant to align us against a common enemy.  “Make American Great Again” is more than a jingle or campaign slogan; it is an attempt to cut through artificial political divisions so that abused citizens can find common purpose.  Rejecting “woke” dogma, “political correctness,” and other Marxist distortions of truth is a form of mental armor that defends against the government’s unabating propaganda.  Repetition of simple truths must meet the repetition of outrageous lies head-on.

U.S. Power of Deterrence is Disappearing Only one thing will restore it. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-power-of-deterrence-is-disappearing/

Since the savage attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, one of Iran’s terrorist proxies, the Houthi, have launched drones and ballistic missiles 100 times against our military and commercial shipping in the Red Sea, through which 10% of global trade passes. Twenty-five crewmen of one ship have been held hostage for over a month.

The U.S., with two Carrier Battle Groups in the region, has not responded with significant force, content to play defense by knocking down missiles and drones, but not destroying the launch sites, stores of missiles and drones, or other military assets. Such hesitation bespeaks in part a fear of “escalation,” a scare-word redolent of the appeasing “Vietnam syndrome.” But why aren’t Iran and its proxies afraid to escalate against an enemy many orders of magnitude more powerful?

Of course, we all know that electoral political calculations are hamstringing the Biden team, already fretting over the president’s tanking poll numbers and the Biden family pay-to-play scandals circling the DNC like buzzards. But to restore our power of deterrence, we must start destroying military assets, especially Iran’s, the funder and director of several terrorist groups responsible for most of the region’s mayhem.

These attacks by Iran’s proxies, moreover, are not spurred by outrage over the Israelis’ existence or right to defend themselves. They are opportunistic tactical moves against the U.S. and the West, and their “rules-based international order” that protects global trade and security. Iran and its new BFFs Russia and China are exposing the West’s weaknesses and failure of nerve.

It’s also showing the rest of the world that their triumvirate of tyranny is a better bet to take over global hegemony than suicidal Western nations that skimp on defence spending, splurge on redistributing money, obsess over apocalyptic “climate change,” and dismantle its vital energy industry that provides cheap, abundant fossil fuels.

Leftists Scratch Their Heads As More Abandon Their Ranks

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/27/leftists-scratch-their-heads-as-more-abandon-their-ranks/

The only thing more uplifting than watching several prominent liberals drift rightward is the cluelessness of those on the left as to why it’s happening.

This drift is obvious enough, since it includes journalists once heralded by the left such as Matt Taibbi (who won a Young America’s Foundation award) and Glenn Greenwald, and Democratic politicians, including Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (whose speech at a Daily Caller award ceremony drew many loud cheers from the conservative audience), and Sen. John Fetterman (who recently declared that “I am not a progressive”).

Celebrities such as Russell Brand, David Chappelle, and Bill Maher (who “has been riding an asphalt roller over the far left,” according to Townhall) are part of the shift, as are a handful of prominent business leaders, Elon Musk for instance.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that surveys show once tried-and-true liberal constituencies – Hispanics, Asians, blacks, working class, and the young – are abandoning the Democratic party.

It’s not as though these people are suddenly small-government conservatives. They just are waking up to the fact that the left is a cesspool of hatred and intolerance and are looking for the exits.

The Underground People David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2023/12/26/the-underground-people-n4925025

My wife and I have been considering buying a property on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to escape the chill, rainy Vancouver winters. One can imagine our distress when we learned that someone I regard as among the most contemptible people on the planet, Mark Zuckerberg, is building a 1,500-acre compound on this most beautiful island in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Citing various sources, Stephen Green at PJ Media reports that “a 5,000-square-foot underground lair featuring its own energy and food supplies is under construction.” According to Housing.com, also cited by Green, Zuckerberg’s $270 million Koolau Ranch project “is designed to function as a self-sufficient space, ready to withstand global catastrophes…It is packed with security measures, encompassing keypad locks, soundproofing and concealed doors, while an extensive camera network ensures surveillance.”

The Guardian informs us that Zuckerberg’s lawyers “filed suit against hundreds of local Hawaiians who may own an interest in small pockets within his estates boundaries… [which is] surrounded by a 6ft stone wall blocking easy access to Pila’a Beach.” A local resident described this legal action as “the face of neocolonialism.” Zuckerberg eventually backed down, and the disputed parcels of land were sold at auction. How that changed anything is beyond me.

Apparently, “a smaller-scale ‘bunker’ is being built on nearby Maui by none other than Oprah Winfrey.” Mr. Portfolio himself, Bill Gates, who owns at least seven multi-million dollar homes, extensive farmland, hotel chains, and a private island in Belize, is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties. 

Billionaire bunkers are in, it seems, to protect the world’s oligarchs from an impending apocalypse that they have conspired to bring about. “A number of companies around the world are meeting a growing demand for structures that protect from any risk, whether it’s a global pandemic, an asteroid, or World War III – while also delivering luxurious amenities,” says CEO Robert Vicino of Vivos, an underground shelter company.

‘Christmas Is Canceled’: Pro-Palestinian Protesters Riot in New York, Block O’Hare in Chicago Joel B. Pollak

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/12/25/christmas-is-canceled-pro-palestinian-protesters-riot-in-new-york-block-ohare-in-chicago/

Pro-Palestinian protesters spent the weekend rioting, disrupting holiday travel, and targeting Christmas in general in an attempt to force Americans to listen to their concerns by causing them inconveniences, disturbing their holiday plans, and irritating them.

In New York City on Monday, several hundred demonstrators carried a bloodied Nativity scene to Rockefeller Center. Some carried Islamic symbols.

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – DECEMBER 25: Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in front of the News Corporation building and near the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and march on 42nd Street, 5th and Park avenues on Monday, December 25, 2023, in New York City. They chant ‘Christmas is canceled’ while carrying blood-red mock Nativity scene through New York City streets. The police arrest several protesters and use force while detaining. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

They attempted to disrupt festivities and later clashed with police.

One man was heard on video evidently shouting “Jew!” at police.

Update: Video emerged of pro-Palestinian activists vandalizing the Union Square Christmas market with anti-Israel graffiti, and even anti-police graffiti familiar from the Black Lives Matter movement:

The New York Post reported:

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters converged on Midtown Monday, lugging a blood-red mock Nativity scene and chanting “Christmas is canceled here.”

“Long live the intifada,” the crowd of about 500 demonstrators yelled, using the Arabic word for “rebellion” or “uprising,” as they mobbed the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree where revelers were enjoying the holiday.

Will The Guardians of The Narrative Win? We watch the unfolding of an unedifying spectacle By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/24/will-the-guardians-of-the-narrative-win/

Much that is happening in the spectacle of America’s legal-political  life today reminds me of some pages in Johan Huizinga’s great book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938). In a chapter on “Play and Law,” Huizinga distinguishes the unfolding of legal proceedings in advanced cultures, where strict adherence to process and abstract notions of right and wrong prevail, from the situation in more primitive cultures, where the ultimate criterion is victory. “Turning our eyes from the administration of justice and highly developed civilizations,” Huizinga writes, “to that which obtains in less advanced phases of culture, we see that the idea of right and wrong, the ethical-juridical conception, comes to be overshadowed by the idea of winning and losing, that is, the purely agonistic conception. It is not so much the abstract question of right and wrong that occupies the archaic mind as the very concrete question of winning or losing.”

In this sense, I submit, Special Counsel Jack Smith, District Judge Tanya Chutkan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the rest of the anti-Trump legal confraternity perfectly epitomize the atavistic persistence of archaic impulses in the law. People like me are always going on about “the rebarbarization of civilization.” The peculiar legal assault against Donald Trump is one instance (among many) of that phenomenon.

It’s been going on for quite a while. The 2020 election, for example, took place during the period of eagerly embraced Covid hysteria. That hysteria provided a justification or, more accurately, an alibi for the numerous violations of the law in the conduct of the election. The Constitution of the United States stipulates that state legislatures are in charge of determining voting procedures. But various governors and secretaries of state, from blue states mostly, swept that Constitutional provision aside in their eagerness to assure the appearance of a Biden victory. Such anomalies were noted and commented on at the time but somehow never got traction. Why? Because the media, that great tool of The Narrative, determined that it oughtn’t to get traction.

In subsequent months, the public has been treated to an efflorescence of similar and even more extreme anomalies as Donald Trump can barely turn his head without being indicted for something or other. I do not think that the public at large grasps how bizarre the quartet of indictments, proceeding in tandem in four separate jurisdictions, really is. It is unprecedented, yes, but it is also surreal. It is also a travesty of the legal process. The aim is not justice but the grubby partisan goal of removing a popular political rival from the field. The Attorney General of New York, Letitia James actually campaigned on the promise that she would “get Trump.” How is that OK? What has happened is that the law—or, more precisely, the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the law—is simply the weapon of choice, all else having failed. Those who point out that the effort to transform a political rival into a pariah is tantamount to banana republic tactics are right. But to say that is not yet to do justice the breathtaking situation in which a former president who happens to be, by a wide margin, his party’s favorite for the presidential nomination is treated worse than a common criminal. Common criminals, as a rule, are not subject to gag orders for trying to defend themselves.  “Shut up, or you might convince people you are being unfairly persecuted!” What a blow against “Our Democracy™” that would be.