Technically, this is true, but colloquially, due process usually means hearing people out and treating them according to clear and neutral rules. In the Franken case in particular, I was wrong in thinking it was possible to separate what was fair to him and what was fair to everyone else.
That was true in a practical as well as a moral sense. During the Franken uproar, Democratic female senators were constantly badgered about why they weren’t demanding that he step aside. At the time, I thought it was wrong that they had to pay a political price for his evident boorishness. If someone had to take a hit, I remember thinking, it should be him, not them.
But in the end, the absence of an investigation hurt them, too. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s 2020 presidential campaign was derailed in part by bitterness about the role she played in pushing Franken out. It’s a sick irony that fallout from #MeToo ended up hurting Gillibrand, one of the Senate’s most stalwart feminists, more than it did Donald Trump, but such is the country we live in, and short-circuiting the investigatory process did nothing to help reform it.
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