New Rules

I have stated in a number of recent posts (e.g., here and here) that the indictments levied against Donald Trump have questionable legal merit, have established precedents that never should  have been established, have defined a new set of quasi-legal 'rules,' and will lead to political retribution down the road. I have also indicated that political retribution is bad for the country.

Yet ... if these indictments are allowed to stand, if the prosecutors are allowed to levy them against their political opposition without consequences to them and their political party, they will not stop. After all, state criminal indictments or RICO charges, no matter how spurious, create serious problems for those who are indicted.

Conservative firebrand Kurt Schlichter has a few suggestions concerning political retribution:

See, we can’t have one set of rules for one group and another set of rules for another. If you really like the Old Rules, you’re not going to get them back by empowering your enemy to violate the norms while, like a little submissive, you obediently continue to pretend that it is still 2005 ...  I understand the risks [of retaliating]. The risks of not retaliating here are much, much worse than the risk of going too far. And by retaliating, I mean (mis)applying the law to them [the Democrats] precisely as they are (mis)applying it to us [the GOP]. If you want to stop this nonsense, you have to make it painful.

Time to deal with pain.

Let’s look at the nature of some of these charges. They are vague and gauzy and ambiguous, like asserting there’s some sort of giant conspiracy out there to subvert the rights of people even though no people’s rights were subverted, nor would they have been subverted, and even if they would’ve been subverted, that subversion is within the scope of allowable political activity and the First Amendment.

A lot of these novel Democrat charges ...  are phrased as making illegal any attempt to prevent someone from exercising his rights. That’s pretty vague, which is pretty useful when you want to abuse the statutes. And a lot of states have these laws. A lot of red states have them. And guess what? A lot of people in Washington D.C. have been violating them, arguably, if you accept that we are going to apply these laws to political activity ...

Again, I think this is a terrible idea. This is not what these laws were designed to do. But there’s a thing called ‘precedent’, and they’re making it. They’ve established that you can use these laws to screw over your political opponents, and I say screwing is a two-way street.

So, for example, the attorney general of Missouri, or even a red district attorney in some red district in red Missouri, could go out and find a citizen who was forced into a mask and not allowed to make his living and denied the right to go to church ... during the COVID idiocy. And who was behind that? Well, that was Anthony Fauci and all his friends at the CDC and the NIH and all the other acronym places. So you indict them. All of them. Charge them for RICO on a conspiracy to defraud the rights of Missouri citizens or some such nonsense. I mean, most of these indictments are just a bunch of random words strung together anyway, so we need to do that too. But the important thing is to indict them in state court. And, of course, we will watch them seek to remove those cases to federal court and watch the hilarious 180 turns of all the legal morons on MSNBC who are mad because the defendants in the Atlanta frame job are doing the same thing.

I don’t think these laws were meant to prosecute dumb bureaucrats in Washington for saying stupid things that they knew were untrue and apparently getting rich off of it as well. Still, I made my opinion clear, and my opinion has been disregarded. The New Rule is that you do precisely that, that somebody out in the hinterlands who feels wronged by someone making a decision back in Washington can get his local constable to file charges and boom, welcome to court in Cowcakes County, rich men north of Richmond.

Schlichter discusses other possible 'over-the-line' indictments, but I'm sure you get the idea. The point is to use the New Rules established by the Democrats within the DoJ and at state levels and apply them equally. He continues:

[The Democrats] will scream and yell, and I think it will be funny. And I think it will be beautiful too. I am a big fan of symmetry. What they do to us, we do to them twice as hard. Suddenly, a whole bunch of them will be looking to the fed courts to 86 these nonsense cases, and, luckily for them, I think the federal courts will eventually throw out these nonsense Trump cases and create a precedent for throwing out theirs. Or not. So, they may beat the rap, but they will take the ride, just like thousands of good conservatives had to when leftists manipulated the legal system to screw over their political enemies. Like I said, screwing goes two ways.

And so ... what-goes-around-comes-around begins.

UPDATE-1:

It's beginning ... and it's well past time that it has. Athena Thorne writes:

At long last, Republicans have begun to embrace the New Rules bestowed upon our society by the Marxist Left. Just yesterday, my colleague Chris Queen reported on Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr following the example recently set by Fulton County DA Fani Willis and wielding the state’s RICO laws. But unlike Willis’s acrobatic interpretation of the statutes to go after Orange Man Bad, Carr is using them to bust up the passel of actual domestic terrorists who have been terrorizing Atlanta over its plans to build a public safety training center.

It seems only fair that the "police are white supremacists" crowd gets the same legal treatment as the "elections are corrupt" crowd.  

It's very important that the people who have established the New Rules come to understand that those rules can also be applied against groups who they support and sometimes admire. 

UPDATE-2:

It's continuing ... this time with more than a little justification.

Although the propaganda media is doing everything possible to bury the growing influence peddling/outright bribery scandal that has engulfed Joe Biden, it looks like the New Rules that the Dems established to destroy their opposition are yet again going to be used against them. Victor Davis Hansen comments:

In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.

Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.

Trump was impeached for one phone call. As Obama's VP, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid for Ukraine unless a prosecutor investigating Burisma (think: Hunter) was fired.  Hmmm.

The Dems created these new impeachment rules. Now they've gotta live with them. Payback is gonna a bitch.