Meyerson on TAP: It Took a Village to Try to Seize the Presidency

With 19 indicted conspirators and 30 unindicted conspirators, there are now almost as many Republicans caught up in Fulton County’s wheels of justice as there are Republican candidates for president. At some point, we may want to indict those candidates (among whom only Chris Christie and, lately and reluctantly, Mike Pence have noted that Trump appears to have broken the law), too. On the charge of contributing to the erosion of American democracy, any number are guilty as sin.

The sheer length of Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s bill of criminal particulars makes clear that it takes a village to seize the presidency, even when that seizure is thwarted. Nor is it only in Georgia that those villagers are being hauled into court. Those Georgians who posed as the state’s electors have company in Michigan, where that state’s attorney general has indicted those Michiganders who swore, falsely, that they were that state’s authorized electors. According to a report in today’s Arizona Republic, both groups may yet be joined by Arizona’s electoral poseurs.

Such is the genius of federalism.

Some law school professors (not a lot) have argued that taking Trump to trial, much less convicting him, would do so much damage to our system of government and/or be so divisive that we shouldn’t go through with it. The question they don’t address, however, is what we should do about his co-conspirators who also broke fundamental laws—by, for instance, swearing falsely that they were their state’s electors and thereby depriving the voters of their state of their right to choose a president. Should people who violated the very laws on which the nation is based also be let go? And if not, how can we hold them responsible for such violations but exempt the person entirely responsible for their lawbreaking? This is the kind of thing that could give double standards a bad name.

If we’re to scrap the very idea of equal justice under the law, in the most glaring and democracy-eroding way imaginable, tens of millions of Americans are certain to conclude that our legal system is a (bad) joke and a fraud. (Those Americans who keep abreast of the Supreme Court may well have already done that, of course.) I can only presume that those legal eagles who counsel us to cease the prosecutions of our former president don’t wish that to be the consequence. If they don’t, however, they’d have to support dropping the charges not just against Trump but against every knave and fool who broke the law on his behalf, including those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

Of course, if we’re actually serious about equal justice under the law, we’d scrap the Electoral College and the Senate, but I digress.