Thomas Hughes The only person aware of politics in the nation who was surprised by President Trump’s commutation of his friend Roger Stone might have been Senator Susan Collins. The Republican who backed the President during his impeachment trial said afterward that he had learned his lesson. Has she?
The United States of America has lost much credibility during the Trump presidency, both at home and abroad. The President commuting the sentence of Roger Stone sets this country into the ranks of the ungoverned, those countries where law and punishment are simply a tool of the well-connected to stifle opponents and reward loyalists. The man who eagerly campaigned as the “Law and Order Candidate” has openly shown that the law can be selectively applied, it just depends on who you know. It is corruption at its purest form.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has enabled the president to reshape the nation’s judiciary, confirming 200 appointments to the federal bench and two to the Supreme Court. We have seen Trump’s view of what he thinks those judges should do for him, for his friends, and people like them, who are part of the team, part of the club, I make a phone call and this goes away, because they owe us. When his nominated justices have voted against him he suggested it was because they don’t like him.
One would assume that perhaps not all of the 200 judges who now hold lifetime appointments will be so easily manipulated as to do the bidding of people they like, and strike down those they don’t, but why wouldn’t we assume that a good number will operate that way? Unless, in like every other case, the defense is: ‘Trump is too stupid to do something like that. He nominates judges that are totally in opposition to that way of thinking, his own way of thinking, all the time.’
No. That is this president’s view of the law. As a personal weapon for the wealthy, for the connected, for the elite controlling class whether they be in government or not, and there can be no defense or explanation otherwise. A corrupt president doesn’t nominate upstanding judges to implement his vision for the country. He looks for loyalists.
In Roger Stone, Trump found a loyalist, and he broke the law with impunity, proving that it’s alright to lie to congress if you don’t like their questions, you can obstruct an investigation into a powerful person without fear of consequence.
This has always been a country of the connected. Those with better lawyers and more wealth and resources already experience a vastly different justice system than the one ordinary people have to respect. But the brazen flaunting of any ethical grounds for simply letting a friend who was convicted off the hook leaves the supporters of the president in a position of not supporting a law and order president, but one who has obliterated the very concept. Trump supporters, and Trump judges, now find themselves championing a man instead of the law.
Justice is not so blind as Susan Collins, it turns out. Mitch McConnell’s justice project looks a lot like Trump’s loyalist seeding, and it’s been a long planting season. Let’s see how the crops harvest. This one is rotten.
