Republicans Want to Break the Rule of Law to Protect Donald Trump
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With the indictment of former president Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, our country is in uncharted territory. Never has a former president been indicted for criminal activity, and never has a former president warned of “potential death and destruction” as a result.
What’s more, the indictments — stemming from Trump’s behavior after an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels — may just be the first of many, with the more serious charges still to come, amid alleged crimes including pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes,” fomenting the January 6 insurrection, and obstructing investigations into the classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Like it or not (and I hate it), the trials of Trump are going to dominate the 2024 election season.
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Now, it’s easy to write all of this off as just more politics as usual. Indeed, a recent CNN poll showed that 75 percent of Americans believe politics played a role in the indictments, even as 60 percent approve of them.
But this would be a mistake, and play into the hands of the plutocrats, theocrats, and bigots who have undermined our justice system in the first place. Because this is not just a He Said/She Said back-and-forth, with Republicans and Democrats feuding like the former members of Pink Floyd. This is one side — ironically, the side that says it stands for “law and order” — repeatedly undermining the rule of law and eroding our democratic institutions.
Let’s look at the record.
First, on Trump. Yes, paying hush money to a sex worker and covering it up via shady bookkeeping is not the same as, you know, fomenting rebellion or cheating in an election.
But it’s not nothing either. The indictments revealed this week show a decades-long pattern of lying and cheating to cover up Donald Trump’s sexual misadventures (remember, this is the man who bragged about women letting him “grab them by the pussy”). This matters, because the guy is again running for president. This isn’t partisanship: It’s holding a very powerful person accountable for breaking the law.
And how have most Republicans and Fox News personalities responded? By attacking New York DA Alvin Bragg (including with the ultimate antisemitic dogwhistle – ‘Soros’) and threatening violence and disorder. No one on Fox is saying reasonable things like “let’s not rush to judgment.” They’re dialing the rage up to 11.
But the GOP’s contempt for the American justicial system dates back much further.
Just look at the Supreme Court. First, the Republican-controlled Senate invented rules out of thin air to deny a hearing President Obama’s 2016 nominee to the Court. Then they squashed serious concerns regarding Trump’s second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, to ram him onto the Court as well. And then, in 2020, they shamelessly threw out the rules they invented in 2016 to seat Any Coney Barrett a few weeks before the election. And of course, all of these justices were hand-picked by the dark-money-funded theocrat Leonard Leo, rubber stamped by the Trump White House.
The result? Roe v. Wade was overturned, thanks to those three shameless justices who all swore that it was “settled law” and “the law of the land” in their bogus confirmation hearings. But it’s not just Roe: this term, the Court is set to gut affirmative action, having already shredded the Voting Rights Act and allowed nationwide voter suppression – primarily affecting young people, people of color, and queer people – the likes of which our country has never seen before. Not to be outdone by Senate Republicans, the Court’s arch-conservatives have made up a brand new doctrine based on absolutely nothing – the “major questions” doctrine – to shoot down any administrative action it doesn’t like, including, it appears, President Biden’s loan forgiveness plan.
The entire Supreme Court has been operating under a cloud of illegitimacy, thanks entirely to the actions of the American Far Right.
And so it goes throughout the court system, with 226 federal judges nominated by Trump and now serving for life. Many of these judges have caused havoc with ideologically-driven rulings on immigration, Covid, reproductive rights, gun safety regulations, environmental law, and other subjects.
Once again, there is no equivalent to this on the Left. Fox News hosts whine about “woke” college students shouting down a transphobic speaker on campus. But Trump-appointed judges and justices are taking away women’s and LGBTQ rights on the basis of ideological preference. Ron DeSantis’s goons in Florida are banning Michelangelo’s David and movies about Rosa Parks. Are these two sides really equivalent?
And of course, there’s January 6, the ultimate act of violence against America, law, and even the truth itself. Whether about the election or the insurrection itself, the majority of congressional Republicans have repeatedly responded to facts with innuendo, conspiracy theorizing, and pure, seething rage. Is this “law and order”? Hardly. Whether it’s defaming the heroic cops who defended the capitol on January 6 or defaming the judges, juries, and district attorneys doing their jobs to dispense justice, today’s GOP thinks nothing of denigrating the rule of law if doing so favors the interests of the party’s base.
Now, I’m not saying that the Democratic Party is some progressive utopia. It most definitely is not that. I’m just saying that there is no equivalence between what Democrats and Republicans are doing when it comes to the rule of law and our nation’s judicial system.
All this matters on a personal, even spiritual level. I get it: there are good reasons to feel despair, fear, and concern about our nation’s civic society: the courts, elections, politics. Among other things, I’m a rabbi and a longtime queer activist with trans friends who are justifiably worried about their physical safety, knowing the courts don’t have their backs, and, in some cases, are abetting the attacks against them.
But this isn’t happening because of some inexorable moral decline. It’s happening because the American Far Right controls the Republican Party and its propaganda arm at Fox News, and it is using these tools to systematically attack our nation’s institutions so they can desperately preserve the minority rule of white, Christian men and their enablers.
And that means that despair isn’t reasonable — but fucking irresponsible. Giving up means throwing my Black, queer, immigrant, and working class friends under the MAGA bus, as long as I feel like I can still get out of the way (which as a queer rabbi I probably can’t anyway). That is not the way I want to live.
So I want to invite two seemingly contradictory responses to the shitshow that’s about to unfold in the courts. First, feel that fear, disgust, or even despair if that’s what you’re feeling. But then, remember what got us into this mess, and what we need to do to get out of it: vote these bastards out of office just like young people did in 2022, march against them (peacefully!) in the street, and stomp out ignorance where you find it. The situation may seem dire, but the right response is clear.
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