Republicans attacking the Judiciary
First, an exhortation for the weekend: Ken Burns, the film documentarian, is a national treasure. His keynote address at Brandeis University’s Commencement a few weeks ago is one for the ages. You can—and should—spend the 22 minutes to see and hear his address here on the Brandeis website without subtitles, but with a transcript available or here (with commercials, but also subtitles) on YouTube. You will be inspired. It brought tears to my eyes.
For the last week and a half the airways and the digi-verse were saturated with commentary on the significance of Donald Trump’s conviction as a felon. A unanimous Manhattan jury found that Trump engaged in criminal falsification of financial records in order to obscure that he directed money to be paid to silence a porn star—and thereby to enhance his chances of being elected President in 2016. If Trump had not committed this felony of records falsification and the sex story had broken in the media immediately following the Access Hollywood tape, the story might have turned off enough voters that Donald Trump would not have been elected President—and the course of national and even world history would now be different. Trump’s involvement in the felonious falsification of financial records was all about stealing the 2016 election by keeping voters in the dark. Don’t let our very human pre-occupation sex cause us to obscure that.
Trump was NOT convicted of having sex with Stormy Daniels (that’s not a crime), nor did that act need to be proven, although, based on prior behavior and reports of his boasting at the time, it seems highly probable that he did.
I was taught in school and by my parents to respect the decision of a jury that has had to sit for days and listen to the back and forth of lawyers and witnesses and actually examine the physical evidence—listening and inspection that I did not do—so, in general, who am I to dispute their conclusions?
The best summary of the significance of Trump’s guilty verdict and all the commentary around it was written by Doug Muder. Some of the best parts of Muder’s last Monday’s (June 3rd’s) post are copied below.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Everything below is copied from a post on Doug Muder’s The Weekly Sift. If you do not already read The Weekly Sift I encourage you to click on the title below and sign up with your email in the left hand column. It is both profound and entertaining.
The very last line in the quote is the clincher. [The Bold in the quote is mine.]
Trump is Guilty
Doug Muder, The weeklysift
June 3
An innocent man running for office should want to clear his name before the election, but Trump has used every device at hand to delay his trials until after the election (when, if he wins, he will gain new powers to obstruct justice). But Trump lacked any leverage for delaying the Manhattan trial: Because it’s a state trial, the Supreme Court had no grounds to stop it; because New York is a blue state, no state officials got in the way; and the judge overseeing the case was not indebted to Trump.
So the trial was held. It was a fair trial. Trump had been indicted not by President Biden or the Department of Justice, but by a grand jury of New York citizens. He exercised a defendant’s usual right to participate in selecting the trial jury. His lawyers were allowed to cross-examine the witnesses against him, to introduce relevant evidence in his defense, to file motions, to object to prosecution questions and witness statements, to call witnesses of their own, and to give a summation to the jury. The judge ruled on those motions and objections, sometimes favoring the prosecution and sometimes favoring the defense. Trump himself had the right to testify, but chose not to. The jury was instructed that they should acquit if they found any reasonable doubt about his guilt.
In short, Trump received every consideration the American justice system grants to defendants. In certain ways, he was treated much better than most other criminal defendants: Just about anyone else would have been jailed after 11 violations of the judge’s orders, but Trump was not.
The response. Rational people might begin to have second thoughts about supporting a candidate convicted of felonies, but that is not how the Republican Party works these days. With very rare exceptions, Republicans doubled down on their Trump support, choosing instead to attack the American justice system.
[T]he entire American political and legal system is controlled by Biden and Democrats: a banana republic, not a democracy worthy of its name. A range of leading Republicans — from House Majority Steve Scalise to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to rising Senate stars Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance — have all said basically the same thing.
At this point, you might be wondering: Is any of this surprising? Trump always claims he’s the victim of a conspiracy, and Republicans always end up backing whatever Trump says.
But that’s precisely the problem. The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.
Looking forward, Speaker Johnson called on the Supreme Court to intervene, opining that justices that he “knows personally” were upset by the trial’s outcome, and would want to “set this straight”.
What exactly needs to be “set straight” is almost never spelled out. I have heard and read a lot of outrage from the MAGA cult, but few of them care to argue the facts of the case. They just think Trump should get away with it. They attack the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, and the Biden administration (which played no apparent role in this trial). They argue that Trump should never have been prosecuted (which is a strange thing to argue after the jury returns a guilty verdict [3]), or that an appeals court should overturn the verdict on some technical grounds.
But they don’t argue that Trump didn’t do exactly what the indictment says he did.