Just Punishment for Seeking to Overturn Election Results
4/7/22
The US divides between those who acknowledge the legitimacy of the Biden win in 2020 and those who continue to embrace the big lie that the election was stolen. What’s startling to me is the sheer size of the population that falls into the latter category, despite all of the post-election audits and judicial reviews; but what’s really disturbing is the pace with which the January 6th Committee and the Justice Department are dealing with these concerns.
The January 6th Committee’s stated objectives are to understand what happened on January 6, including what led up to it, and to enable Congress to take the actions necessary to assure that nothing like the assault on the Capitol will ever happen again. I expect the first objective to be satisfied, but I don’t have much hope for the second. It’s not at all clear that any prophylactic legislation would ever pass — by either this Congress or the next.
Even satisfying the first objective may be tentative. The likelihood that the Committee will change any hearts and minds falls somewhere between slim and none. Those who continue to champion the big lie will likely reject whatever the Committee puts out, claiming it to be fake news generated by an illegitimate conference of political hatchet men and women. (Their characterizations, not mine.). For critics of the Committee, those who’ve played an active role in overturning the vote will continue to be heroes, regardless of what the Committee has to say. The idea that a final report from this Committee will foster a unified consensus any time soon about our recent history is fanciful. Still, I endorse the effort for posterity.
With that mindset, I’m advocating speeding things up. The Committee should accelerate the timing for holding the public hearings with an eye toward an earlier release of the final report. If that report has to be filed without testimonies from those who refuse to cooperate, so be it. Every effort should be extended to compel that testimony, but reticence to cooperate shouldn’t delay the public’s access to a formal delineation of what has been learned so far. Despite the Nuremburg trials, holocaust deniers persist. I expect the same perseverance in connection with those who’ve fallen under the spell of the big lie.
With respect to the Justice Department, my patience is wearing thin. Trump and his accomplices have transparently sought to subvert or delay any and all efforts to hold them accountable, and the Justice Department seems to be accommodating to their shenanigans. At the very least, the Justice Department should be enforcing subpoenas issued by a duly elected Congressional committee without delay, and related trials should be scheduled expeditiously. Bannon was indicted for contempt of Congress on November 12, 2021, but his trial on this charge isn’t scheduled to begin until sometime in July, if then. Who knows if or when the cases against Mark Meadows, Peter Nevarro, John Eastman, or Dan Scavino will be adjudicated? Given the gravity of the issues at hand, can’t these and related trials get fast-tracked?
Whatever the holes are in terms of our knowledge about how the January 6th insurrection came about, given other testimony received by the Committee, there’s no doubt about Trump’s involvement and culpability in sabotaging our democracy. Aside from his participation relating to the rally before the Capitol assault, we know that Trump forcefully pushed Pence to reject the certification of the electoral count. We also know that Trump was directly involved with the scheme to replace legitimate electors with fraudulent ones; and even before that, he called the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to pressure him to “find” an additional 11,780 votes for the Trump column.
The idea that none of these acts crossed into criminality is hard to fathom. From a layman’s perspective, what’s known publicly at this point certainly seems to justify an indictment, where a jury of his peers should be tasked with evaluating the evidence; and if brought to trial and found guilty, Trump needs to bear the consequences of that verdict. While I’m perplexed as to why it’s taken so long to bring these charges to their logical conclusion, I’m taking Merrick Garland at his word that the Justice Department will do its due diligence, and I just have to wait it out; but I’m looking ahead and wondering what a fair punishment would be if Trump were to be found guilty.
This is a tough one. Despite the oft-quoted adage that no one is above the law, it appears that a competing consideration is the notion that, somehow, subjecting a former president to incarceration is simply too unseemly — particularly since, in this case, that ex-president still seems to command the support of such a large portion of the electorate. Moreover, a prevailing view in many quarters is that Trump’s fate should be left to the ballot box, rather than in a court of law.
I reject that alternative view. To my mind, the damage that Trump has inflicted on our democracy is hard to overstate. On some level, we’ve been lucky. We seem to have avoided a civil war, but perhaps we came closer than many might think. Given Trump’s role in trying to subvert election results, to allow him to go unpunished would make a mockery of the notion that no one is above the law. That’s a price too large to bear. Once we go down that road, there’s no going back.
With the reference to “civil war” in mind, I looked into the punishment for Robert E. Lee for guidance as to what might be a just resolution in this case. At the conclusion of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty and pardons to confederate soldiers, but Lee was among those expressly excluded from that treatment. He had to apply, individually, for amnesty, which he did; but he was denied. He wasn’t imprisoned, but he was stripped of his citizenship. Interestingly, his citizenship was posthumously restored in 1975, retroactively to June of 1865. (How did that happen?) This reversal notwithstanding, given this precedent, if Trump is ultimately found guilty, revoking his citizenship seems like a good idea to me. After showing such utter disregard for the sanctity of the vote, he should be prohibited from exercising it. Beyond that, I’m still open to prison time, but that’s just me. In any case, let’s get on with it.
