Guilty on all counts

[robosmith]

Guilty on all counts

Quote

Trump’s most loyal defenders have vied to denounce the New York Trump verdict most extravagantly. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida took an early lead by equating it to a  show trial  in  communist countries.  But Rubio has had plenty of competition: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas likened the trial to proceedings in  banana republics.  Senator Mike Lee of Utah has gotten about a dozen other GOP senators to sign a letter pledging to use procedural tools to snarl all action in the chamber to protest the verdict. House Speaker Mike Johnson has similarly promised to use  everything in our arsenal  against the decision; Representative Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, who has already launched investigations against all of the prosecutors who have indicted Trump, has demanded that New York prosecutors appear at a hearing on the case next week. Other Trump allies have insisted that state and local Republican attorneys general and district attorneys manufacture indictments against Democratic politicians in retaliation.

Strikingly, several of the Republicans denouncing the decision have argued that not only were Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan biased against Trump, but the Manhattan jury of ordinary citizens was as well.  The partisan slant of this jury pool shows why we ought to litigate politics at the ballot box and not in the courtroom,  Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, one of Trump’s most unconditional defenders, insisted in his statement immediately after the verdict.

Juries  have been sacrosanct in our democracy,  and the fact that so many prominent Republicans  are just prepared to treat them as Democratic operatives rather than members of a community that have judged Trump guilty of 34 felonies,  Fred Wertheimer, the founder and president of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, told me,  tells us even more than what Trump himself has told us about what will happen in a Trump presidency. These elected officials are wide open to accepting an autocracy.

The breadth of the Republican rejection of the verdict has been as emphatic as its depth. The criticism has come not only from reflexive Trump defenders such as Vance and Rubio, but from others who had previously kept somewhat more distance from the former president. They include several congressional Republicans, such as Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro, who represent House districts carried by President Joe Biden, as well as Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who voted to convict Trump after his impeachment over the January 6 riot.

Maybe the most revealing moment in the entire GOP eruption against the Trump verdict came last week, when Johnson reassured his Fox News hosts during an interview that he expected the Supreme Court to eventually overturn the conviction.  I think that the justices on the Court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are,  the House speaker said.  So I think they’ll set this straight.

Johnson later clarified that he had not personally spoken with any of the justices about the Trump verdict, but that only magnified the import of his initial words—revealing the extent to which he considered the GOP-appointed justices part of the Republican team, receptive to the leadership’s signals about the actions it expects. Right now, the clearest signal is that the leadership expects all Republicans to lock arms around Trump, no matter what he has done in the past or plans for the future.  "The guardrails," said Dach of the Congressional Integrity Project, "are gone. " 

Key to all the RepubliCONS' retaliation is: "no matter what they have done in the past or plans for the future." 🤮