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Notes -
What do you think this is?
Democrats laughed and applauded when Barak Obama "joked" on late nite TV about sicing the FBI and IRS on his critics, and dismissed the scandal as a "nothingburger" when it was revealed that he wasn't joking.
While a lot of Trump's supporters wanted to see Clinton, Comey and a lot of other senior Democrats prosecuted, Trump notably did not do this in his first term.
Democrats subsequently elected Letitia James, in part, on the premise that politically motivated prosecutions are a good thing that America needs more of.
Letitia James and her defenders are like an adult dog that was never house broken. They are never going to learn that what they have done is wrong if you don't grab them by the scruff of the neck and shove their face in it.
The Democrats as a people need to be taught that politically motivated prosecutions are going to blow-back on them in 4-8-12 years when the political pendulum swings, and that is what the Republicans are currently doing.
Yeah, but by asking them to be the instrument to teach this lesson, you're asking a lot personally from Republican-aligned prosecutors, you're asking them to make themselves a named, direct target for the next cycle. You're asking them to stand up to draw enemy fire. James probably felt safe because she thought that Trump would not come back and that the next Republican administration will want to distance themselves from Trump and so they wouldn't retaliate on his behalf. But I don't think any Republican-aligned prosecutor can feel quite so confident that the Democrats are not going to get back into power before this fades from memory, and that they will not be in a revanchist mood.
... there's a fun story from the criminal justice sphere, and by fun I mean incredibly depressing.
It's an old Freakanomics bit that drug dealers don't actually make that much money, but despite being in Freakonomics, it's actually true. The distribution agents and runners make peanuts, even mid-level dealers that handle a lot of cash end up spending a lot of that to replace stock, and you have to get real close to the top of the chain to break into high five figures or low six. Now, admittedly, that's tax-free and you don't have to deal with McDonald's customers, but there's a whole new level of problem when 'can't leave work at work' goes from late-night on-call to slightly more energetic concerns, whether from police or from other criminals.
Why would people accept a risk of 45 calibre wakeup calls for less than they could make sllepping fries ends up one of the big driving questions for criminology, and unfortunately there's a ton of different partially-right answers : lack of access to conventional employment, cycles of poverty, casual users making a little bit of money on the side, yada yada.
If you ask the actual people, though, a very common answer (especially once you get away from the casual users) is that they don't plan to stay at the entry-level. After all, it's not like the people at the top now have been there very long, and turnover for the mid-levels is often ridiculous. They're always hiring!
It seems stupid, from the outside view. They're jumping to get into the shoes of imprisoned (or dead) men, with at most vague motions about how they won't step into whatever trap got the immediate previous owner and not the thirty other previous owners. Maybe it is stupid.
They're still always hiring.
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This does indeed seem to be a plausible description of the thought process of these prosecutors.
If I, as a citizen, believe that this is in fact the calculus being performed by members of the executive branch, what conclusions should I draw?
I think few voters have illusions that their politicians have more loyalty to them than they have class loyalty to one another. The amount of knives buried in Trump's back attests to that.
Let me make the question a bit more explicit.
Within the existing system, what is the proper way to respond to Blue Tribe weaponizing the justice system to partisan ends? Because if the answer is "there isn't one", it behooves us to find alternatives outside the existing system.
People accuse me of being an accelerationist, but what's the alternative? We've seen recently that rifles and rooftops are certianly an option on the sociopolitical conflict menu, with the understanding of course that such actions cannot reasonably be attributed to the tribes from which they might emerge because stochastic terrorism abruptly stopped being a coherent concept. What other options are plausibly available?
After reading through this discussion, I am hopeful that going forward, the Blue Tribe will tone down these sorts of abuses. Even putting aside the possibility of tit-for-tat retaliation, it does appear that these lawfare attacks against Trump were not all that effective.
Actually, the fantasy situation for me would be (1) Elise Stefanik is elected governor of New York; (2) she immediately pardons Trump and leans on the AG to withdraw any outstanding civil claims against him; (3) the charges against James are quietly dropped; and (4) both sides agree to refrain from future lawfare attacks.
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But Trump HAS found a prosecutor willing to go ahead with the prosecution for him. In the future, it might just mean that the Red Tribe might have to look to outsiders, sometimes at the cost of not being able to rely on the person with the most inside/institutional knowledge. I don't think you've quite reached the point where the Red Tribe is unable to find anyone loyal to it.
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Trump 1 was plagued with people who didn't want to do what Trump said. He fought with Sessions trying to get him to do it and gave up after managing to get Sessions out. He said on Nov 2, 2017
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