PrintThe Republican establishment begins to understand that lawfare endangers them, too
One of the things that’s been vexing for many conservatives is how passive the Republican National Committee has been when it comes to the lawfare being waged against Donald Trump. Don’t they understand that Trump is the trial balloon and that, if the lawfare against him is successful, it’ll be used against all Republicans? However, an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal that Jeb Bush co-authored suggests that, finally, the GOP is becoming aware of the global threat of lawfare.
The GOP never liked Trump. One of the things to remember about Trump’s presidency is that, for the first two years, Congress had a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. Nevertheless, Trump was unable either to get rid of Obamacare or to gain funding for serious border control. In those cases, and many others, it was the Republicans who stood in the way. The Democrats’ ability to undermine him reflected not just the opposition’s animus but also a civil war within the Republican party itself.
That civil war was reflected in the fact that many Republicans have been muted, at best, in responding to the lawfare being waged against Trump. You can see them thinking either that “eh, there’s no smoke without fire” (as in, if Democrats are suing or indicting Trump, there must be something there) or they’re thinking, “thank goodness they’re getting rid of him for us so that ‘real’ Republicans can fully control the party.”
The problem with either of these lines of thinking is that they’re crumbling under the weight of reality. The conduct of the trials and the verdicts against Trump in the New York civil cases revealed that the judges and anti-Trump attorneys involved had no regard whatsoever for silly little things like due process, rules of evidence, legal procedure, honesty, etc. “Get Trump” was the sole principle guiding events.
The news that Biden is getting a pass for improperly handling classified documents when he was a Senator and Vice President—positions that gave him no authority at all to declassify documents—highlights the partisan nature of the attack on Donald Trump regarding classified documents.
Under the Constitution, and in keeping with Supreme Court precedent, Donald Trump had full authority to do anything he wanted with classified documents—including declassifying them by walking them out of the White House on his last day as president. Those legal realities, especially when paired with Biden keeping the documents in the garage to which his junkie son had access versus Trump keeping them in a locked room under Secret Service guardianship, rubbed everyone’s noses in the lawfare against Trump.
The icing on the political cake has been the recent revelation that the RICO lawsuit against Trump in Georgia was carried out in what can, at best, be called an “unprofessional” manner. As matters now stand, there are facts indicating that Fani Willis handed Trump’s indictment to a lover who was unqualified for the job and to whom she paid almost three-quarters of a million in taxpayer dollars, that he coincidentally paid for lavish vacations for the two of them, and that she apparently refunded those payments with cash that neither he nor she can account for. Oh, and he worked closely with the Biden White House before indicting Trump.
But it’s not just Trump, of course. Elon Musk was a leftist darling when he cranked out electric cars. However, when he proved to be a fan of free speech, bought Twitter, and turned it into a (mostly) free-speech social media outlet, the Biden government went after him, too. And it’s the fact that the Biden government and its state allies are branching out in their war against dissent that may finally be waking up the GOP stalwarts.
Last week, in the wake of Judge Engoron’s ruling against Trump and a Delaware court’s rewriting of Tesla’s compensation scheme, Jeb Bush (yes, that Jeb!) and Joe Lonsdale, an entrepreneur, wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal warning that the Democrat-led attacks on Trump and Musk “imperil the rule of law.”
But two unprecedented legal decisions, against Donald Trump in New York and Elon Musk in Delaware, call that into question. In both cases, judges have ordered massive punitive judgments on behalf of dubious or nonexistent “victims.”
Every American has a right to be critical of Mr. Trump’s politics—one of us ran against him in 2016—or Mr. Musk’s public persona. But equality before the law is precious, and these rulings represent a crisis not only for the soundness of our courts, but for the business environment that has allowed the U.S. to prosper. If these rulings stand, the damage could cascade through the economy, creating fear of arbitrary enforcement against entrepreneurs who seek public office or raise their voices as citizens in a way that politicians dislike.
The brief essay concluded that it’s currently up to the respective states’ appellate courts to review the two rulings “and try to stop further damage to the reputations of their respective judiciaries.” Failing that, the essay warns,
[B]lue-state politicians may have the satisfaction of “sticking it” to Messrs. Trump and Musk, but the loss to those states will be significant. The damage to the legal fabric of the country will be even worse. A dispassionate justice system is at the heart of American exceptionalism, and the country will be poorer if we lose it.
As Trump famously tweeted at the time of his first (bogus) impeachment, all of these actions aren’t about him; they’re about the ideas and the people for which he stands:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2019
It seems that some deep within the Republican establishment—and kudos to them—are finally figuring out the truth.
Image: Trump in the way meme.
