A Nation of Laws

Describing our nation as one built on laws – fundamental to a republic – implies some equal treatment under the law. Long a description that seemed to set the U.S. apart from many of the world’s less principled regimes, its continued applicability would require the government to behave within the law. And there are concerns with both abidance and uniformity.

We have what is likely a severe constitutional problem with the President refusing to faithfully discharge his duty to protect the national border while Texas, along with 25 other states, is standing firm, earlier described in What Can’t Go On, Won’t Go On. There have been threats from the White House, with the State of Texas firm in its belief in its justification, and other political developments have put the border situation in suspense for now. At this point, we don’t know what the outcome will be. Still, it is a situation developed from the Administration’s abandonment of existing law, putting the states in a lawless environment.

We’ll see where that goes soon enough.

On the presidential battlefield, the race still appears to be Trump versus Biden, although that could change before the election. With the lawfare circus swirling around Donald Trump generating much misinformation and opinion, the volatility of a subject seems to fertilize the spread of both. While much of the hullabaloo around Trump focuses on the January 6th protest in D.C., his legal problems stem from the handling of classified documents. Some sources seem to say he was cooperating with the National Archives to both protect the documents and return those he could not keep[1][2], while other sources indicate he has been recorded recognizing some transgression, possibly involving showing some to an unknown person, and that his troubles are a result of intransigence[3][4]. Legal proceedings will eventually arrive at some resolution of his 91 indictments.

Joe Biden, though, is acknowledged to have had multiple classified documents, both in his office (the same one he shared with the Chinese partner of his train wreck of a son?) and in his garage that date to his days as V.P. How he got them is immaterial; just the fact he had them violates the law, and that he stole them is implied by the nature of the security surrounding them. Now, it is purported that he shared some of this information with his ghostwriter, who did not have a security clearance. Apparently, the government will hold him unfit for prosecution because he’s an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

So we have political opponents who have seemingly both mishandled classified documents, and one is being flooded with indictments while the other is ostensibly going to skate. So much for equal treatment under the law. And not many have missed that selective prosecution seems to favor Democrats, remembering Hillary Clinton’s obviously illegal handling of classified materials on her insecure private server when she was Secretary of State. No recrimination followed for that or her obstructive destruction of 33,000 emails from that server.

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In a slightly different vein, but still reflective of the USA, Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of insane 15-year-old school spree killer Ethan Crumbley, has now been convicted of four counts – one for each of the fatalities Ethan harvested – of involuntary manslaughter and is headed off to up to 15 years in prison. I can endorse what has long been a common thought in the U.S. of holding a parent accountable for their progeny’s misdeeds, this case was a first that I know of holding a parent criminally liable, probably due in no small part to the egregiously poor parenting involved. America’s mass of feral children does need to be reckoned with.

Nevertheless, I cannot easily square holding parents accountable for their children while we simultaneously have nearly 6,000 US school districts whose policies prevent notification to parents of a child’s transgender status.[5] It seems to me that rights and responsibilities are intertwined, and these school districts are diminishing the rights of parents.

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Weakness has been the signal from the White House for three years now, and we can see the effects in Ukraine, the Chinese saber rattling over Taiwan, and the Houthi shutdown of the Red Sea. And now that same weakness comforts Venezuela in its hunger for Guyana’s oil lands.

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1 Reason https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/10/donald-trump-is-the-victim-of-selective-prosecution/ Accessed Feb 11, 2024

2 Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-asked-lawyers-add-padlock-office-before-fbi-search-2022-8#:~:text=Months%20before%20the%20raid%20on,order%20to%20secure%20the%20room Accessed Feb 11, 2024

3 Detroit News https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/09/biden-trump-classified-documents-investigation-different-endings/72539309007/ Accessed Feb 11, 2024

4 U.S. Justice Department https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump-Nauta_23-80101.pdf Accessed Feb 11, 2024

5 New York Post https://nypost.com/2023/03/08/us-public-schools-conceal-childs-gender-status-from-parents/ Accessed Feb 11, 2024