When life gives you lemons, make litigation. All these bogus criminal cases against not only Donald Trump but against anybody who knows Donald Trump, or has spoken the name of Donald Trump, or was ever on the same continent as Donald Trump, are a legal abortion that would make Planned Parenthood blush. Yet, despite these charges having nothing to do with actual law, they have everything to do with creating an opportunity. And it’s an opportunity to use our power as a suppository against our enemies ruthlessly.
No, I am not for any of this. I think this is a bad idea. I warned people against creating these New Rules where you use the law, or, instead, you twist the law like some sort of Tibetan yogi into unrecognizable forms and shapes in order to trap your political enemies. I am on record saying it’s a bad idea. I still think it’s a bad idea. But what I think doesn’t matter. The New Rules are now The Rules, and it’s time to use them like Eric Swalwell used Fang Fang.
Quickly and unpleasantly for the recipient.
Now, you have to understand that these charges have approximately zero legal merit. There are a variety of reasons why. Some are just factually ridiculous. Some fail to apply the facts to the elements of the statutes. In others, the statute is applied in a way it was never meant to be applied. Finally, some of them are simply selective prosecutions. I mean, if you were going to charge Trump for obstruction for moving some boxes around his resort, you’ve got to have a good explanation for why you let Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit skate after taking a hammer and tongs to a bunch of hard drives that were literally under subpoena. And there is no reasonable explanation except that Democrats walk while Republicans get locked up. Which is unacceptable.
But while these legal atrocities are a disgrace and something these prosecutors would be ashamed of if they had any kind of professionalism or honor, this New Rule about how it’s now OK to manufacture charges against political opponents does provide us with an opportunity to jam up a bunch of Democrats. And jam them we must.
See, we can’t have one set of rules for one group and another set of rules for another. If you really like the Old Rules, you’re not going to get them back by empowering your enemy to violate the norms while, like a little submissive, you obediently continue to pretend that it is still 2005. The great George MF Washington, who you should read all the time, explains that there are risks to telling yourself that the enemy is so bad that you have to take radical steps in response and abandon the norms that make you a civilized society. Yeah, you can go too far – but you can also not go far enough. I understand the risks. The risks of not retaliating here are much, much worse than the risk of going too far. And by retaliating, I mean (mis)applying the law to them precisely as they are (mis)applying it to us. If you want to stop this nonsense, you have to make it painful.
Time to deal with pain.
Let’s look at the nature of some of these charges. They are vague and gauzy and ambiguous, like asserting there’s some sort of giant conspiracy out there to subvert the rights of people even though no people’s rights were subverted, nor would they have been subverted, and even if they would’ve been subverted, that subversion is within the scope of allowable political activity and the First Amendment.
A lot of these novel Democrat charges – and it is a really bad idea to create novel criminal charges when you’re prosecuting political opponents – depend on statutes that were used to, ironically, keep the Democrats from letting black people vote. A lot of them are phrased as making illegal any attempt to prevent someone from exercising his rights. That’s pretty vague, which is pretty useful when you want to abuse the statutes. And a lot of states have these laws. A lot of red states have them. And guess what? A lot of people in Washington D.C. have been violating them, arguably, if you accept that we are going to apply these laws to political activity. A state like Missouri probably has some of these laws. What it needs to do is start indicting people in Washington, D.C., for violating them.
Again, I think this is a terrible idea. This is not what these laws were designed to do. But there’s a thing called ‘precedent’, and they’re making it. They’ve established that you can use these laws to screw over your political opponents, and I say screwing is a two-way street.
So, for example, the attorney general of Missouri, or even a red district attorney in some red district in red Missouri, could go out and find a citizen who was forced into a mask and not allowed to make his living and denied the right to go to church – though not to a strip club or liquor store, because the left doesn’t hate those – during the COVID idiocy. And who was behind that? Well, that was Anthony Fauci and all his friends at the CDC and the NIH and all the other acronym places. So you indict them. All of them. Charge them for RICO on a conspiracy to defraud the rights of Missouri citizens or some such nonsense. I mean, most of these indictments are just a bunch of random words strung together anyway, so we need to do that too. But the important thing is to indict them in state court. And, of course, we will watch them seek to remove those cases to federal court and watch the hilarious 180 turns of all the legal morons on MSNBC who are mad because the defendants in the Atlanta frame job are doing the same thing.
I don’t think these laws were meant to prosecute dumb bureaucrats in Washington for saying stupid things that they knew were untrue and apparently getting rich off of it as well. Still, I made my opinion clear, and my opinion has been disregarded. The New Rule is that you do precisely that, that somebody out in the hinterlands who feels wronged by someone making a decision back in Washington can get his local constable to file charges and boom, welcome to court in Cowcakes County, rich men north of Richmond.
Of course, COVID creeps will not be the only target. Oh no. What about all the people who conspired to prevent Missouri citizens or citizens of Oklahoma or Idaho or Alabama or Florida or any other state not dominated by freaking communists from speaking freely on social media? It’s been a while since I’ve been at law school, but I think that the First Amendment still makes free speech a right, and if you’re interfering with the right to speak freely, well, that’s a conspiracy to RICO a felony rights fraud or something. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t really matter. You just take the present indictments against the people challenging an election that they thought was rigged, and you add a few facts. You change some theories from trying to challenge a disputed election to trying to keep people from saying what they think about the election shenanigans, and you file that.
They will scream and yell, and I think it will be funny. And I think it will be beautiful too. I am a big fan of symmetry. What they do to us, we do to them twice as hard. Suddenly, a whole bunch of them will be looking to the fed courts to 86 these nonsense cases, and, luckily for them, I think the federal courts will eventually throw out these nonsense Trump cases and create a precedent for throwing out theirs. Or not. So, they may beat the rap, but they will take the ride, just like thousands of good conservatives had to when leftists manipulated the legal system to screw over their political enemies. Like I said, screwing goes two ways. But enough about Swalwell’s personal life.
For the last time, I want to emphasize that I think this is all a horrible idea. We should never have gotten this far. But we did. And if we ever want to go back, we better roll up our sleeves and be prepared to get our hands dirty because you can never be submissive enough that they won’t try and destroy you. Just ask Mike Pence.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…
I told you so.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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