The farther we drift from the constitutional rule in this country, the less shocking the shocking will become.

A few years ago, the notion of an incumbent American president prosecuting his political opponent for so-called "crimes" involving the opponent's speech would have shocked America's conscience.

This totalitarianism tactic happens in Russia, where Putin jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, or Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro arrests opposition leaders like Leopoldo López, or Cambodia, where opposition leader Kem Sokha was convicted of "treason," got 27 years in prison, and was banned forever from running for office.

But not in America.  Not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Imagine Ronald Reagan prosecuting Walter Mondale, or George H.W. Bush prosecuting Bill Clinton, or Bill Clinton prosecuting Bob Dole.

The shocking thought of such foolishness would never have been tolerated by the American people.

But no more.  Once the shock value wears off, and once the wide gates of banana republicanism are thrown open, there's no turning back.  How ironic that Putin-obsessed Democrats are acting just like him.

Afraid your opponent might beat you at the polls?  Is his rhetoric a little too hot to handle?  No problem.  Just prosecute him.  The Russians, Venezuelans, and Cambodians do it.  So why not the Democrats?  The ends justify the means, say the Marxists.

The Democrats over the last eight years have pushed the envelope ever closer to the unthinkable.  Never let a crisis go to waste, as Rahm Emmanuel famously advocated.  The Democrats create their crises, and then create their own heavy-handed, unconstitutional solutions to the crises, with the ultimate aim always the same: more power.

In other words, set the fire, and then solve it by pouring on the gasoline.

In 2020, they used COVID to generate chaos and bend election rules, ignoring established ballot verification requirements, arbitrarily changing voting deadlines, and shutting down counting in the middle of the night in places their guy was losing badly, all to achieve their desired electoral result.

With their lies about masks, vaccines, and lockdowns all exposed, another pandemic won't work, because nobody's buying that trick again.  So now, it's banana republic prosecutions against the Republican frontrunner, on multiple, coordinated fronts.  Note the timing here — not two years ago, but right before the election.  What a coincidence!

By bringing these prosecutions, Smith and Garland are breaking federal law by violating the Hatch Act, which states that a federal "employee may not ... use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election."  But the unfortunate fact remains that few legal tools or weapons exist to hold rogue prosecutors accountable for these wild shenanigans.

Violators of the Hatch Act, for example, face a maximum $1,000 fine and debarment from working for the government for a maximum of five years.  But does anybody think a thousand-dollar fine will deter Smith and Garland from their rabid anti-Trump fixation?

Come on.

Without criminal sanctions, the Hatch Act's slap-on-the-wrist, "fine and ban" approach provides no real deterrent against prosecutors like Smith and Willis and their insatiable thirst for power.

If Dracula were a prosecutor, he'd be Jack Smith — a blood-sucking prosecutor whose goal isn't just acquiring short-term political power, but the ultimate destruction of the Constitution, which, at least on paper, remains a theoretical barrier to totalitarianism

Smith and his banana republic prosecutions assault our constitutional republic and attack the Constitution itself.  Their goal: to first criminalize Trump's right to free speech, and then to criminalize ours.

They concoct flowery language, with pompous terms causing CNN to slobber — terms like "obstruction," "racketeering," and "the Espionage Act."  But that doesn't change the fact that these prosecutions are all, at their core, aimed against Trump because of his speech.

They don't like that he said on January 6, "You'll never take back our country with weakness.  You have to show strength, and you have to be strong."  They don't like that he called Brad Raffensperger to ask about suspicious circumstances in Georgia's electoral process.

They despise the fact that Trump would use his words to dare challenge their power or call their party into question.

Like what Bobby Kennedy, Jr. said last week before Jim Jordan's committee, when 102 Democrats tried censoring his appearance in a hearing about censorship, "The First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for."

Democrats prosecute Trump because they don't like the way he talks.  They don't like him complaining or asking questions about an election, which, frankly, should still be questioned.  So they attack the Constitution, hammering the right of free speech with their prosecutions.  They take dead aim against the Constitution hiding their motives under cleverly invented flowery language, like "inciting a riot," or "insurrection," or "Espionage Act," and MSNBC dutifully oohs and aahs.

But flowery language or not, and despite CNN's excited mouth-foaming over all this, at the core, theirs is an attack on the First Amendment.

Trump has a constitutional right to raise questions, as does every American concerned about the appearance of an election gone off the tracks, where Democrats changed rules in the middle of the game.

It's not Trump, but rather these Democrat prosecutors who directly threaten the Constitution.  Their prosecutorial assault against the Constitution is so serious that something must be done to shut them down in their tracks.

To protect the Constitution, Congress must bring down the hammer to create a deterrent so that the likes of Smith, Willis, and Bragg will think twice about political prosecutions in the future.  Congress must pass "rogue prosecutor laws" so that a prosecutor who prosecutes a political opponent, if that prosecution is primarily for political motives, can be prosecuted himself.

Under these laws, that prosecutor should face felony charges and years in prison for bringing a political prosecution.

Does this mean that all prosecutions of politicians must end?  Certainly not.  A prosecution involving a clear "meat and potatoes" crime, like murder, assault, or larceny — that's one thing.  But a prosecution where a defendant faces prison time for words spoken is quite another.

The issue is the prosecutor's motivation.  All these prosecutions against Trump take aim at his speech, which, unlike robbery, murder, assault,  and child prostitution — or whatever the Democrats were doing on Epstein Island — is constitutionally protected.

Targeting a political opponent's speech is prima facie evidence of a politically motivated prosecution, and at the end of the day, prosecutors who bring these types of cases should wind up in jail.  Why?  Because after paying lip service to their oaths to the Constitution, they seek to destroy it.  They use their offices to abuse the judicial process, transforming the process into a political weapon to grab power, threaten the Republic, and threaten our freedoms.  In doing so, they make a mockery of the criminal justice system.

No one, not even federal prosecutors, is above the law, and these political prosecutions of Trump based on his words, and nothing more, threaten us all.  Once they succeed in imprisoning Americans for words spoken in the political arena, our Constitution dies.  We will have become Russia, Venezuela, and Cambodia.

Garland, Smith, Willis, and Bragg must understand that what goes around might eventually come around.  With rogue prosecutor laws in place, a Republican attorney general might review their conduct one day.

To Speaker McCarthy and Republicans in Congress, pass rogue prosecutor laws to stop the lunacy.  Do it now.  It's time to prosecute the prosecutors.

Don Brown, a former U.S. Navy JAG officer, is the author of the book Travesty of Justice: The Shocking Prosecution of Lieutenant Clint Lorance and CALL SIGN EXTORTION 17: The Shootdown of SEAL Team Six, and the author of 15 books on the United States military, including three national bestsellers.  He is one of four former JAG officers serving on the Lorance legal team.  Lorance was pardoned by President Trump in November 2019.  Brown is also a former military prosecutor and a former special assistant United States attorney.  He can be reached at donbrownbooks@gmail.com and on Twitter at @donbrownbooks.

Image via Picryl.