Jamelle Bouie is eagerly hoping for a blue wave next week, one that will hand both chambers of Congress over to Democrats. And in anticipation of that sweep, Bouie wants to remind his readers that there's one thing above all that those newly elected Democrats need to do once they are in office: Investigate Trump.
In order to justify this as the first and best priority, Bouie has to make the case that Trump is a special kind of lawbreaker, one backed by a corrupt Supreme Court.
Trump has no use for pretense, and he’s not interested in playing along. He thinks he is a law unto himself; that he holds sovereign authority over the entire country; that he can rule by decree and punish those who resist. As one would expect, his administration has been an exercise in breaking the law, exceeding its bounds and violating its spirit. His lawyers may dutifully argue that their client is acting within his lawful authority, but the character of his actions betrays contempt for the law itself.
His basic approach, in fact, is to ignore or break the law and hope that the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court will use his lawbreaking to advance its pet ideological projects. Chief Justice John Roberts, to use just one example, is preoccupied with the expansion of executive power at the expense of Congress. And it seems that in his view, an erratic, lawless president is a small price to pay for summoning the unitary executive into existence.
One important result of this interplay was the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States, which shielded presidents from criminal prosecution as long as their actions related to core duties and official acts.
Bouie offers all this anti-Trump and anti-Supreme Court boilerplate with nary a reference to an actual or alleged crime. The only thing he does mention is John Roberts' 2024 ruling about being prosecuted for official acts.
I understand that progressives, Bouie included, disagree with this view and with the Roberts court's view of Humphrey's executor, but that doesn't make these alternative views of the law criminal. Similarly, they don't like the Court's view that abortion is a state matter, not a right protected by the Constitution. That's too bad but there's no crime there.
So Bouie spends most of his text worried about crimes that he's certain Trump has committed but about which he has no evidence yet. What if Trump pardons people and makes it impossible to prosecute them for those secret crimes?
Trump has let it be known that he is considering a set of blanket pardons for subordinates in his administration. We don’t know for certain the extent of the lawbreaking in the Trump administration, but we know it’s there. If they win Congress next week, Democrats will investigate and perhaps, in the future, issue criminal referrals. Blanket pardons would preclude federal criminal accountability for anyone who broke the law at Trump’s behest. Worse, they would give subordinates an incentive to continue breaking the law — or enabling the president’s lawless behavior — secure in the knowledge that they, too, will walk away unscathed...
It matters a great deal then that Trump does not see himself as a steward of a democracy. The country, to him, is little more than a large and lucrative piece of real estate. And his obligations appear to extend only as far as his pecuniary interests. His ideological obsession with whitening the United States can be seen in terms of his fundamentally aesthetic preoccupations. What else is mass deportation than the effort of a lifelong landlord to remove the people he thinks degrade the value of the property?
Of course Bouie can only see the effort to close the border to millions of illegal aliens gaming the asylum system as "whitening the United States." The fact that the mass immigration during the Biden administration was a disaster for both red states along the border and for blue cities that received busloads of those migrants doesn't even rate a mention in his version of events.
For instance, Bouie doesn't seem to recall the emergency migrant center in Houston which was set up by Biden and then had to be shut down because of poor conditions.
The Biden administration over the weekend shuttered a Houston warehouse that housed unaccompanied migrant children following allegations that the nonprofit organization running the site failed to provide adequate living conditions for hundreds of young girls, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) opened the warehouse early this month in response to the surge of migrants arriving at the southern border...
Sources familiar with the facility's operation said the girls housed there, aged 13-17, were at times instructed to use plastic bags for toilets because there were not enough staff members to accompany them to restrooms.
Trying to end a situation that had teen girls pooping in plastic bags is, to Bouie, only about whitening America. There's no use in arguing with him. He's monomaniacal on this point. But I think most Americans can see that there are downsides to mass, uncontrolled immigration. Ending it was not a crime.
In any case, he wants investigations as far as the eye can see once Democrats can swing it.
We may well be less than a week away from a Democratic sweep of Congress. There are prominent voices within the larger Democratic coalition who think it is counterproductive, even foolish, to pivot to hearings, investigations and political accountability. In their telling, most Americans are tired of the noise. The only thing they want from Congress is good government.
I want good government, too. But good government, now or in the future, is impossible without accountability. To set that aside is to condemn the United States to another national exercise in corruption and authoritarian rule. And I would hazard that after nearly two years of abject lawlessness — including summary killings by agents of the state — there are many tens of millions of Americans who also want to hold the administration and its allies responsible for their actions.
"Summary killings by agents of the state" is a reference to the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I've written about both cases. I think the first shot fired by the officer who killed Good was justifiable and the third shot was not. The Pretti case seems like a mistake by officers over-reacting to him having a gun as he was struggling on the ground. Neither case was a summary killing or execution in my view and trying to escalate two instances into a reason to investigate the president of the country is a ridiculous stretch.
But there you have it. Bouie believes the future is investigations and trying to make people pay for crimes that may or may not exist. I suspect a lot of progressives will agree with him and this is exactly what will happen over the next two years until Trump leaves office.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy HotAir's conservative reporting exposing the radical left and woke media? Support our work so we can keep bringing you the truth.
Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the Conversation
VIP members get the ability to comment on articles.