I think it’s along the lines of what you’re seen from some posters in this thread. A general notion that these guys are slimebags and we need to nail them on something. “How about this? Nah, too far-fetched. What about that? OK, that might fly, let’s go git im!” (In the case of DeLay, the prosecutor empaneled two grand juries who refused to indict before he pulled it off on the third try.)
The thing is that sometimes violations of the “spirit of the law” are extremely widespread and reflect common practice - as in the McDonnell case. Deciding to take one guy and prosecute him for violating the law under a standard that very few can pass is an abuse of power, as the SC noted.
In general, the idea that a prosecution can prosecute someone based on the sense that “Somewhere the law must say this is prohibited!” is a very dangerous one. As you can see from following political discourse even slightly, people tend to judge those on opposite sides of the political aisle and their actions very harshly. Prosecuting people based on the fact that you really really dislike what they’re doing is something we associate with places like Putin’s Russia and corrupt Third World countries, and one would like to hope the US remains better than that.
I totally agree with your conclusion, but for slightly different reasons. The universe of cases to pick from is so small – it is still quite rare that senior politicians are arrested – that it is impossible to draw out bias from such a limited sample. If I flip a coin four times and it comes up heads each time – that doesn’t mean the coin is biased against tails.
What’s more, this supposed bias of the justice system against Republicans clearly doesn’t extend to letting Democrats off the hook for crimes. Pretty lousy biased system if it can’t even let the “good guys” walk free, isn’t it?
And finally, there’s the absence of evidence for this imaginary bias. Like I pointed out in the McDonnell case: you have a career DOJ employee bringing a case before a Reagan-appointed judge, and you’re suggesting that they have a nefarious anti-Republican agenda at heart? Maybe I’d buy that if the US Attorney was Alan Grayson and the judge was Samantha Bee, but as it stands, those two individuals would seem to be quite far from being expected to have a partisan agenda.
I’m not familiar with those individuals. But it’s a mistake to think that career prosecutors are apolitical - they might be as political as anyone else. And also to assume that all judges appointed by a president share that president’s ideology - they are more likely to than not but exceptions are common especially at the lower levels.
No, here I disagree. There is no evidence of bias, but if there were, this observation would not meaningfully harm it – the crimes on the Democrats’ side were very clear and unambiguous. It is certainly conceivable to picture prosecutors going after unambiguous crimes for everyone and only going after the edge cases when the putative offenders are Republicans.
Yes… without doing any independent research into their careers, I agree with your conclusion here.
Well, here’s how I see it. In the USA, the government has made it very easy to prosecute for garden-variety crimes such as drug possession and drunk driving. As a result a large number of people, most of them poor and powerless, end up in prison. America has a massive prison population.
On the other hand, the government has made the particular set of crimes often committed by politicians very difficult to prosecute. So even with politicians who are very obviously sleazy and dishonest, like Bill Clinton, Tom Delay, George W. Bush, or Ted Stevens, actually getting them convicted and making the conviction stick is nearly impossible. Yet there’s a widespread perception among the public that these folks should be prosecuted for something, and it’s hardly surprising when prosecutors grasp at any straw they can when trying to get these people behind bars.
And it’s also no surprise that prosecutors bend or break the law when doing so. In today’s win-and-crush-the-other-side politics, how could that not happen? Both sides do so. Currently the Democrats have more power, holding the Presidency and the balance of power in many courts, so counting heads, their abuses during the Obama administration have probably been more common. But the Republicans did it as well during the last time they held power, and will surely do so at the next opportunity.
The 30 year hate campaign towards Hillary Clinton beats all of your supposed political prosecutions by a mile. Republicans generally deserve their prosecutions, Democrats don’t. Sorry but reality has a liberal bias
The OP looks like a pretty speculative attempt to draw conclusions about some kind of pervasive bias from a very small number of cases.
You’re not counting the Clinton impeachment? How about John Edwards, charged with six felony counts before the Justice Department dropped the charges? Robert Menendez? Lawsuits concerning Obama’s presidential eligibility?
AFAICT using the machinery of justice to go after a political opponent is not restricted to either side of the political spectrum.