Pun Salad

The country we love has become unlovely.

It pains me to say that. But I can’t help but feel the same anguish written on the faces of friends who, like me, grew up in the justice system. Friends who couldn’t care less about Donald Trump, who won’t vote for him, who look at the cynical circus that just closed down in lower Manhattan as still more confirmation of his appalling judgment and character . . . but who remember what American law enforcement was at its imperfect best. Friends who verge on weeping openly over what’s happened to it.

Our system embodied the rule of law, the sturdy undercarriage of a free, prosperous, pluralistic society. Now, on its good days, it’s a clown show. On the bad days — there are far too many of those — it’s a political weapon.

If you enact laws that reflect civic virtue, and you enforce them without fear or favor, and if you work really hard at it because it’s no easy thing, you can have liberty in all its feisty splendor. But as the rule of law degrades into the rule of partisan lawyers, a constitutional republic inexorably decays into a banana republic. And it won’t take long.

Our system embodied the rule of law, the sturdy undercarriage of a free, prosperous, pluralistic society. Now, on its good days, it’s a clown show. On the bad days — there are far too many of those — it’s a political weapon.

Again, this isn’t about Trump. He is just the floor model. Don’t mistake him for the phenomenon itself.

To put Starr’s prosecutorial style in the proper historical perspective, Dershowitz cites Lavrenti Beria: ‘give me the man, and I will find the crime.’ In non-Stalinist systems, prosecutors usually start with a crime (the body of a murder victim, for instance), and then try to discover the culprit. Notoriously, Starr began with a man and spent more than 40 million taxpayers’ dollars on a fishing expedition trying to uncover any and every infraction his target might possibly have committed over a political lifetime. To shift from a Soviet to an American analogy, Starr used ‘means more typically associated with attempts to prosecute mafia dons, rather than political figures’. That was not exactly the purpose of the Independent Counsel Act and it is not what most Americans expect from the rule of law.

Eight years ago, I published an essay for Public Discourse about why I could not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoever—except the shape of your own character,” the piece concluded. “Vote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this November’s election day.”

There is nothing in what I said then that I would now retract. I rejected the idea that I, as one individual, must treat my choice as confined to the binary of Clinton versus Trump, as though the weight of the outcome were on me alone. It is frequently the case that we vote for one major-party presidential candidate principally because we are against the other one—usually because we find “our guy” a less than optimal choice but “the other guy” strongly repellent. But when we conclude that both of them are wholly unfit for office, our habitual partisan commitments, and our fond hope that the one representing “our side” will be normal, or guided by normal people, do not compel us to cast a vote in that direction. What we must consider, I argued, is not our role in the outcome of the election (which is negligible, and unknown to us when voting), but the effect on our conscience and character of joining our will to a bad cause.

The question isn’t “Biden or Trump?” so much as it’s “Should we continue with the constitutional order as we’ve known it or try something radically different?”

I’ll guarantee here and now that if Trump becomes president again and remains in good health he’ll try to extend his term in office past 2029. I won’t guarantee that he’ll succeed, but the attempt will be made as surely as you’re reading this. Trump is less a person than a personality type and his type is compelled to pursue its own interests remorselessly above all things. I think he’d honestly find it hard to comprehend why someone in his position shouldn’t try to extend their time in power.

Biden won’t do that if reelected. (And not just because he might be catatonic by 2029.) He won’t defy court orders. He won’t stock the leadership of the Justice Department with fanatics who have sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally. He won’t call the military out into the streets to confront people protesting him. And, contra Franck, I don’t believe he’ll claim a “mandate” if he wins, since he’s all but certain to do so with fewer electoral votes than he received in 2020 and with a Republican takeover of the Senate.