This is utter horse shit, respectfully. Crimes against individuals and financial crimes are mere peccadilloes compared to the harm that would be inflicted on several hundred million Americans, and billions of individuals in the rest of the world, should the American government be overthrown by a dictator. Sedition against a democratic government is NOT a symbolic gesture, it is a direct attack on every person beholden to the government in question, and those who depend upon its stability. If EVER there were such a thing as a capital crime, that would be it.
Couldn’t agree more. Proving a crime of sedition will be a lot tougher.
And don’t forget–if the DoJ is unsuccessful, we’re going to hear for a long time “See, he was found innocent.” Better to lock him up for rape or fraud.
I’m more worried about the precedent that comes about if we don’t. That presidents are immune to charges, that “it’s not illegal if the president does it.”
Setting a precedent that being president does not make you immune from being prosecuted for your crimes is a good thing, IMHO.
You don’t think that they wouldn’t even if we treat Trump with kid gloves?
But is that the message potential henchmen would hear? Or would they hear, ‘When you strike at a king, you must kill him.’
On the larger topic, the “best” course of action might be to convict Trump on non-political charges first, then convict on the political stuff. It’s harder to play the poor-innocent-me card if you’re already a convicted criminal.
Well, the idea is that self-interest will prevail. “Hmmm, the last two dozen guys who went with crazy shit POTUS told them to do all died around their third decade of imprisonment…”
Get him for the 3 hour delay while he beat off in the dining room. Add in Lafayette Square for a pattern of lawlessness. Those seem pretty cut and dry. House arrest at Mara Lardo. The important thing is the fucker can’t run again.
Beating off is not a crime when the President does it.
Yes, but you’re thinking that their self-interested response will be a rational, “I shouldn’t do this or I will go to prison.” Another self-interested response is, “I have to go all out to make this coup work so I don’t go to prison.” I don’t think you can count on rationality from these folks. Which isn’t to say they shouldn’t be prosecuted, but the deterrent effect could just as easily backfire for some of these nuts.
My objection to this is going to take a bit to explain so apologies if it’s a bit roundabout.
For anyone here who hasn’t watched Star Trek, there’s a thing commonly called “technobabble”. When you’re a fantasy writer, coming up with scenarios for stories set in the future that often require sciency solutions, you are a person who is out of their depth and has no hope of coming up with something that’s going to make sense when it comes to real world physics. As the writer, you’re left with no answer expect to make up stuff that just sort of sounds right to the ear - if you don’t think about it too much - and evokes the sort of image of what’s going on and how things might work on that universe, as you envision it. It sounds good, it feels like it makes sense, but it’s patent, meaningless nonsense from start to finish. But, it also creates and fleshes out that fictional universe and can lead to a sort of ongoing consistency and logic in that world, which gives it more realism in the viewers mind.
A lot of recent political discussion, so far as I can tell, seems to center around technobabble.
A recent example was regular debate about “inertia” and the infrastructure bill. Republicans couldn’t vote for the infrastructure bill because, if they do, it would give the Democrats the inertia to pass the bigger spending, families bill…! And the Democrats needed to rush the infrastructure bill through, just as fast as they could, so they had the inertia behind them to also get the families bill passed! Woohoo!
And you see, in that paragraph, I’ve created in your mind this universe that none of you have experience in and you’re fleshing it out with my technobabble and installing the concept of “inertia” into it. But that’s the fictional universe in your mind and that needs to be separated from the real universe and the actual Washington DC that sits on the East Coast.
If 10 Republicans in the Senate read the text of the infrastructure bill, see that it’s just keeping the dams from collapsing and murdering everyone, decide, “Yeah, this is probably something smart to do.” Is that decision by those ten people suddenly going to make Rand Paul wake up tomorrow and discover that he always should have been a Bernie loving Socialist since he was a wee lad, and gee all those social programs in the families bill all means sense now? How does that work?
If you put a bill that makes sense in front of people and they agree to it, that has no bearing on what action they take when the next bill put in front of them is dumb ass stupid. There is no inertia, it was just that one was good and one was dumb.
So now, going to the quote, let’s say that the President gets on TV and proceeds to violently rape a 5 year old, in front of the whole country. You arrest him and throw him in jail because, hey, major crime, lots of witnesses. Does the fact that, that President attacked a child somehow make it more likely that the following President is going to do the same? Is there some voodoo curse that once presidents are convicted of real crimes that they genuinely performed, following presidents will be forced by the spirits of the funky chicken to commit the same crimes until one of them speaks the magic words and sacrifices a dachshund during the lunar eclipse?
To be sure, one reason for these technobabble statements is because people don’t really understand how things work and, among the throng, you just need one person to make up something that sounds good to him, that sounds good to others, and the idea will spread and multiply until everyone believes it.
The other reason, though, is because these statements allow you to say something that sounds better than the real reason. The Democrats want to pass the infrastructure bill in a hurry because it will make them seem powerful and competent to the base, and help during the next election. The Republicans don’t want to pass the bill because a) anything good for the Democrats is bad for them during the next election and b) letting good laws get passed by Democrats makes them look even worse and hurts them, again, during the next election. The concept of inertia allows both sides to avoid flashing their cretinous motives.
And the idea with the badness of arresting former Presidents, I assume, is that both sides know that they are sufficiently cretinous that regardless of whether one President genuinely committed a crime, the partisans will use that conviction as an excuse to start trying to get more presidents arrested, unjustly.
The technobabble creates its own rationalization to misbehave. It’s like Nixon convincing himself that everyone else is a cheater and a crook. If they are then it’s okay for him to do it to. You need the rationalization to feel good about yourself. But, nevertheless, the technobabble is nothing more than that.
And, further, the rationalization allows you to avoid the discussion that you, partisans, recognize yourselves as being that untrustworthy. If that realization gets out - exactly how low you are ready to stoop, up to and including the fact that one President committed a horrible and violent act on TV in front of everyone to justify throwing a second one away on falsified charges - then everyone will realize what horrible and dishonest people they’ve elected and you will lose power and the system will be corrected to keep your kind out.
But so, no, a President who committed a real live, provable and unambiguous crime should be put to trial just the same as any other person in the land. We live in the nation of the “rule of law” and there is no higher power nor rationale to top that. But, more importantly, we should all take note that when that happens we have definitively hit a point where we can say that our system of nominating and electing representatives has been coopted by the untrustworthy. We need a system that works to keep their kind from gaining so much sway.
Okay, but the ones for whom it wouldn’t work as a deterrent, aren’t they more inclined to do really crazy stuff that will get them caught? In a sense, that’s what undid Trump–his henchmen were so nuts, they left all sorts of clues, blabbed about it on TV, wrote books explaining why they did what they did, etc.
Plus – as I learned in another thread – the worst they can plausibly be charged with is seditious conspiracy, which carries a maximum 20-year sentence. Not nearly enough of a downside when the upside is installing a dictatorship.
With 40% of the people backing Trump, you will never get a jury that would convict him of anything. Fraud, sedition, anything at all.
Probably true. Though you might be able to voir dire the hell out of them.
Getting the henchmen seems a little easier.
I disagree. People come into courtrooms with all sorts of agendas. Judges and the lawyers are pretty good at weeding them out.
Also, it’s easy to shoot your mouth off about how you’d behave if you were picked to be on a jury. It’s another matter entirely when you’re actually sitting in the juror’s seat, with the weight of the judge’s instructions upon you and the reality of the evidence is being presented.
This is exactly what happened with the ultra-Trumpy juror who sat on Paul Manafort’s case. She really wanted to let him off. After hearing actual evidence and taking the judge’s instructions seriously – as most people do – she felt she had to convict.
This is a common response.
I wanted to mention this.
Political parties don’t prosecute people, politician or otherwise. You’ve got grand juries, juries, and independent judges leading this process. People only go to jail - in theory - if they committed a crime. If you (the average person) don’t want your favorite public figure to go to jail, start favoring people who aren’t criminal.
Except there is a bunch of stuff that happened, was published about when it happened and can be chased down for non-sedition. Nail him on taxes, financial fraud, that is what did Capone in.
I can see him popping off of a tantrum in court. I guarantee get him in court, he will mouth off and lie, so contempt of court and purjory work too =)
Except for the “shoot a person on Fifth Avenue” factor. There’s literally no prosecutorial strategy that could be used against Trump that Trump supporters won’t denounce as “politically motivated”, so concerns about being seen as “political” should be given zero weight.
I’m not saying don’t try to nail him with all these other charges (rape, murder, tax fraud, regular fraud, scaring the horses, and just generally being an asshole*), I’m saying, try to nail him with everything. Even if we can’t convict on the charges directly related to his abuses of power, the public airing of all that evidence against him , personally, will have value.
*That’s probably not actually illegal, but I’ve been saying for years that it should be, and I think the last two years of the pandemic have adequately demonstrated the wisdom of my position.
“More important”? No, not in my opinion.
There is nothing, NOTHING that will stop the GOP trying to attack a DEM.
It does not matter if Trump is convicted/fined, whatever. It, does, not, matter.
But. Seeing justice done is what should happen. Trump is not just a Con man and crook, he tried to overthrow the government.
I don’t give a fig about what is said about Treason has to be “Giving aid and comfort to a foreign enemy” Trying to overthrow the US government is treason.
Or sure should be.
And these whining assholes that helped with the attempted insurrection. Getting 2 weeks in jail. Booo Hooo asshole.
Drive from a state that has legal MJ to another where it’s not legal with a bit of your own personal MJ could get you years.