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"If a president can get away with an attempted coup," wrote one columnist, "then there's nothing he can't do. He is, for all intents and purposes, above the law."
Amid a flurry of recent claims that prosecuting former President Donald Trump for various alleged crimes would be too dangerous for American democracy, progressive critics are pushing back forcefully to argue that the authoritarian threat will only increase if such lawbreaking is not held to account.
On Tuesday, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie delivered a cogent rebuke of the hands-off argument and declared that "fear of what Trump and his supports might do cannot and should not stand in the way of what we must do to secure the Constitution from all its enemies, foreign and domestic."
His column followed opinion pieces in the Times by Damon Linker and Rich Lowry warning that the U.S. Department of Justice or others pursuing Trump could set a "dangerous precedent" and provoke future unwarranted probes of Democratic elected officials.
Meanwhile, others have even proposed that President Joe Biden offer his 2020 opponent a pardon with the condition that he doesn't seek elected office again.
The argument that "American democracy might not survive the stress" of investigating or prosecuting Trump, Bouie wrote, "rests on two assumptions that can't support the weight that's been put on them." First, he pushed back against the idea that U.S. politics "has, with Trump's departure from the White House, returned to a kind of normalcy," and thus, "a prosecution would be an extreme and irrevocable blow to social peace."
"The most important of our new realities is the fact that much of the Republican Party has turned itself against electoral democracy," he argued, citing the ouster of U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and public support for Arizona and Pennsylvania's GOP candidates for governor, Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano, who both back Trump's "Big Lie" about the 2020 election.
"Big Lie" supporters "are actively working to undermine democracy for the next time Trump is on the ballot," Bouie emphasized. According to him:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...l-bullsht-let-trump-walk-save-democracy-crowd
Amid a flurry of recent claims that prosecuting former President Donald Trump for various alleged crimes would be too dangerous for American democracy, progressive critics are pushing back forcefully to argue that the authoritarian threat will only increase if such lawbreaking is not held to account.
On Tuesday, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie delivered a cogent rebuke of the hands-off argument and declared that "fear of what Trump and his supports might do cannot and should not stand in the way of what we must do to secure the Constitution from all its enemies, foreign and domestic."
His column followed opinion pieces in the Times by Damon Linker and Rich Lowry warning that the U.S. Department of Justice or others pursuing Trump could set a "dangerous precedent" and provoke future unwarranted probes of Democratic elected officials.
Meanwhile, others have even proposed that President Joe Biden offer his 2020 opponent a pardon with the condition that he doesn't seek elected office again.
The argument that "American democracy might not survive the stress" of investigating or prosecuting Trump, Bouie wrote, "rests on two assumptions that can't support the weight that's been put on them." First, he pushed back against the idea that U.S. politics "has, with Trump's departure from the White House, returned to a kind of normalcy," and thus, "a prosecution would be an extreme and irrevocable blow to social peace."
"The most important of our new realities is the fact that much of the Republican Party has turned itself against electoral democracy," he argued, citing the ouster of U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and public support for Arizona and Pennsylvania's GOP candidates for governor, Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano, who both back Trump's "Big Lie" about the 2020 election.
"Big Lie" supporters "are actively working to undermine democracy for the next time Trump is on the ballot," Bouie emphasized. According to him:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...l-bullsht-let-trump-walk-save-democracy-crowd