I was at a dinner event on Thursday night when the news came that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decided to throw a sop to the left. At issue was whether the Democrat activist New York judge and Joe Biden contributor Juan Merchan should be allowed to sentence Donald Trump in the magic bookkeeping-error-non-disclosure-agreement case in which a possible misdemeanor underwent a legal transubstantiation and the bread of misdemeanor suddenly became a polished thirty-four-count felony. Amazing.
Along the way, Merchan issued gag orders against Trump, interfered with his campaigning, and generally made it plain that he was singling Trump out for unfair treatment. Still, Roberts and Barrett joined the Court’s left flank to render a 5-4 decision against Trump. Merchan could proceed with the sentencing of the past and now future president of the United States.
Merchan found Trump guilty, guilty, guilty last May. Thirty-four times did he pronounce “guilty.” The world was amazed. The entire case was unprecedented. Not only was Merchan himself a Democrat activist, his daughter Loren has made millions from consulting for progressive candidates from Kamala Harris on down. The highly publicized case against Trump was a boon to her business.
What a long time ago May seems. Joe Biden was still running for president in May. Donald Trump had yet to be shot by a would-be assassin. And Kamala Harris was still cackling in the wings.
We’ve had a lot of legal decisions since then, most of which have gone decidedly against the anti-Trump, lawfare establishment. We also had an election, which Trump won handily, and a vast and sudden change in the emotional weather of the country.
When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, there was a surge of optimism and people said that it was “morning in America” again. The bad Carter years gave way to a period of enthusiasm and confidence. Gone was Carter’s gas rationing, his skyrocketing inflation, unemployment, and interest rates (what Reagan called “the misery index”). Gone too was the hostage crisis in Iran. Reagan jump-started a period of economic growth through which the developed world saw the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. Reagan’s philosophy of “we win, they lose” put the Soviet Union on the fast track to disintegration, which happened in 1991, just a couple of years after Reagan left office. The establishment loves Reagan now. How they hated him back then. “Warmonger.” “Dangerous ignoramus.” “Actor.”
Jimmy Carter’s administration is remembered as a period of “malaise” and waning American prestige. Because Donald Trump is not shy about repeating himself, everyone now knows that the Panama Canal, one of the great engineering feats in all of history, cost some 38,000 American lives. The transoceanic passage was built by Americans, paid for by Americans, and was undertaken to serve a vital national security interest. In 1977, Carter sold the canal to Panama for one dollar, thus marking one of the nadirs of his term in office.
The “vibe shift” that Trump’s victory precipitated is, first of all, a matter of feeling and emotion, not doctrines. As with Reagan’s “morning in America” motif, the MAGA moment involves policies. But it is fired by an uptick in energy, enthusiasm, and cultural confidence. From where I sit, it seems like “morning in America” on steroids. Donald Trump will not be sworn in for another week, yet already he has utterly changed the conversation on both domestic issues and, especially, foreign affairs. He has spoken early and often about retaking the Panama Canal, absorbing or otherwise laying claim to Greenland, and making official Canada’s status as a dependent of the United States. World leaders and various celebrities have flocked to Mar-a-Lago to receive his blessing or just to bask in the reflected glow of “the Trump Effect.”
All of which makes John Roberts’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s defection to the anti-Trump wing of the Court puzzling. Merchan sentenced Trump to—nothing. No fine, no jail time, no probation. Only the obloquy, such as it is, of having officially been found guilty by Juan Merchan. As the judge put it in delivering the sentence, “The only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching upon the highest office in the land is an unconditional discharge.”
“Unconditional discharge.” Is that what these months of harassment have been leading up to?
In passing sentence, Merchan indulged in a bit of stern-sounding legal persiflage about the rule of law, the gravity of Trump’s offenses, and the distinction between the privilege due to the office of the president and that due to an individual who just happened to be a former president as well as current president-elect.
Mike Davis of the Article III Project zeroed in on the bizarre nature of Merchan’s non-sentence sentence.
Q. If you really believe President Trump is a 34-time felon, why aren’t you sentencing him to prison?
A. Because you know this was Democrat lawfare and election interference all along.
“Third-world tactics,” Davis continued, “from third-world trash.”
Legal pundits across the ideological spectrum expect the sentence to be reversed on appeal. Moreover, the intended moral opprobrium is unlikely to materialize. Alan Dershowitz spoke for many when, noting that Trump would likely appeal to the Supreme Court, which would likely reverse Merchan, he said, “I’ll never call Donald Trump a convicted felon. He is a convicted innocent man. A convictively framed-up man.” Bingo.
So here we are, a week from Trump’s second inauguration. A patently biased and conflicted judge just attempted to sully Trump with the legal stigma of conviction. Trump will obliterate Marchan’s attempted maculation like a steamroller crushing an insect. The legal commentator Jonathan Turley, noting the fundamental “lack of seriousness” in Merchan’s case, observed that “It was more inflated than the Goodyear blimp, pumped up by hot rage and rhetoric. The sentence was the pinprick that showed the massive void within this case.” What can it mean that Merchan should thunder against Donald Trump and then conclude his remarks with this optative statement: “Sir, I wish you Godspeed as you assume your second term in office”? Translation: “For months, I tried my damndest to put you in jail. It didn’t work. So, have a nice day.”
Turley is right. “The verdict is in. The New York legal system has rendered it against itself.”
I’m glad Mr. Kimball chose to critically note the cowardice of justices Amy Barrett and John Roberts in ruling against Trump. Though Mr. Kimball trains most of his eloquent fire on hack judge Juan Merchan, Kimball appropriately condemns the appalling fecklessness (and thinly veiled partisanship) of Barrett and Roberts.
But to me, this condemnation highlights the systemic corruption and bias in not only our judiciary (local, state and especially federal), but in the entire legal profession.
A simple thought exercise will validate my point.
Suppose the politics of all involved were reversed. What if a hack Republican judge and prosecutor had cobbled together specious misdemeanors (some of which the statue of limitations had already expired), and then through legal prestidigitation, created an abomination of felonies (which they weren’t), imposed gag orders (unconstitutional), and used a heavily biased jury along with kangaroo court rules and judgements to convict a popular Democrat presidential candidate–now president-elect.
It only takes a little imagination and some honesty to envisage the abject fury and outrage that would have resulted.
Multiple state bar associations would have filed lawsuits and signed letters of outrage and condemnation. Ditto for the hundreds, no, thousands of active and retired state and federal judges who would have been up in arms over the gross abuse of the legal system.
The media would have been apoplectic. Hollywood and every bastion of leftist supremacy would have locked arms in solidarity and outrage at the violation of legal norms and traditions.
But it would have been the legal profession–especially judges and bar associations–that would have gone DEFCON 1 on the gross abuse of the law.
Now, did any of this happen regarding Trump? Of course, leftists will rationalize, dissemble, lie, and engage in all manner of tortured sophistry to excuse what Merchan and Alvin Bragg did. But deep down, we all know the truth–and Mr. Kimball politely points us in the logical direction.
Our justice system is deeply flawed and corrupt–from law schools right up to the demonic robes of Amy Barrett and John Roberts
Shame on Roberts and Barrett. Roberts has a record with the ACA. Without Roberts the ACA could not have been passed… at least not legally. Here is a man, a judge, considered the highest in the land, who advanced ObamaCare, not once but twice, totally on his own. It was he who took the trouble to go where the defendants never intended to go - to defend it as a tax. What type of tax was it? The tax on Income was a direct tax which required the 16th Amendment to eliminate prior Constitutional language. He went out of his way to plead for the advocates what they never pleaded. Till this day the Constitution gives no power to tax people to force them to purchase what they don’t want and even though this part of the decision was eliminated by legislation the decision, just like the original Roe v Wade decision, is not Constitutional.
This brings us to the recent Stay request. Roberts could have easily done what he did to enable the passage of the ACA. He could have done even more. He could have done his Constitutional job. He could have thrown the case out because it is a violation of the Supremacy Clause. The state violated the Ultra Varies Doctrine. It had no right to process the case any more than it does to process a case involving Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Now its back in the State of NY where the appellate division will be asked to enforce the very immunity decision which the SCOTUS, including Roberts, already ruled upon.
As in the Texas case in 2020 there is no real opinion so that if this issue rises up again there is no concrete precedent that can be used to prevent similar misuse of the law. In other words Lawfare, as a political maneuver, is still alive and can be used by other Soros funded anti-Constitution prosecutors which already have a record of violating SCOTUS opinions which are well written, very clear and unambiguous. If Lawfare will eventually be rejected, down the road, why would the Court wait to allow more of the same? Something is missing here that the real Conservatives had no difficulty seeing. It appears that these two justices are no different than what is occurring worldwide and most notably in Britain with Pakistani gangs. Authorities often prefer to live with the status quo rather than to suffer from the slings and arrows of criticism. Roberts is protecting his legacy.
Furthermore, what if the NYS Appellate division finally gets it right after realizing that the State permitted a most egregious kangaroo trial to proceed unrestricted which interfered with the speech needed by a Presidential candidate to campaign? The SCOTUS will then never rule until another similar case appears. The Court missed an easy opportunity to bury Lawfare. After all pretty much every aspect of Due Process, which goes back as early as the Magna Carta, was essentially ignored. That means that if Lawfare could deny Due Process to Donald Trump it could do the same to anyone else. Currently it represents a huge stain on the NYS judiciary. The appellate division is likely to overturn the verdict so as to save what’s left of their reputation. The whole case was about keeping the purpose of the 2020 coup alive. The SCOTUS failed to do its job in 2020 and again this January. But let’s be accurate. It was not the Conservatives on the Court that were responsible. It was the liberals - which was expected. However most of all it was Roberts and the judicial toady Barrett who acted as treasonous Judases and traitors. And it should not have been them. It was why Dante considered that such people deserve to occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell… the deepest place reserved for Satan himself.
Task, your last paragraph underscores my point: lawfare is permitted and approved by most in the legal community because it is a means to an end–it serves a political and ideological purpose.
But the moment these tactics are trained upon lawfare’s mercenaries and Democrat party brahmins who are in approval of the political weaponization of the law, there will be a swift and decisive termination–and all quite constitutional.
Make no mistake, lawfare as a blunt political instrument has been given the seal of approval by SCOTUS–so long as its used only on the enemies of the Uniparty.
That’s the rub. The fact this this despicable 3rd world tyrannical tactic was not immediately put to death on the American Alter of Truth and Justice is an abomination like no other.
Rarely is such an opportunity served up so serendipitously. These two should have jumped to the occasion but instead what did they do? They went out of their way not just to snatch Defeat from the jaws of Justice, which they did, but they also beat Justice down just the way prosecutor Brag went after Penny. They sanctioned Lawfare by resuscitating the case, allowing it to breath and linger in the media and become a celebratory occasion for out of control mendacious prosecutors to do great damage before being stopped.
Its not enough that the people have lost faith in the DOJ and the bureaucracies in the Executive Branch. Now they have to suffer even more despondencies knowing that even at the top relief for outrageous miscarriages,no one can be certain of.
It really makes a person think that perhaps your response the other day, as to what you would like to see happen, is rational and preferable in this climate of ubiquitous judicial malfeasance since what is expected based on millennia of western law can be massacred without an inkling of expectation based on what… Robert’s building his legacy and Barrett’s framing herself as a moderate centrist? This was a big deal. It tells us where we are culturally which is not a nice and rational place for us to be.
Mark Levin made it clear for many years. Use the same tactics on them! It has always been what Republicans can be relied upon not to do.