A Trump arrest imperils the American Idea
A Trump arrest imperils the American Idea
An oral compact has been breached. And Republicans will have Biden & Son arrested soon enough while Hillary may yet pay for her emails.Op-ed
Rabbi Prof.Dov Fischer Mar 31, 2023, 8:15 AM
Peril awaits America now that the 45th President of the United States has been indicted. When a former American president is targeted by the politically despicable woke, we all face disaster.
There are rules in the American game. Most of those rules are set forth explicitly in the U.S. Constitution, its amendments, and two centuries of binding judicial opinions interpreting, adding to, or deleting rules. One might call those rules “America’s Written Law.” And then there are unwritten rules one might call “America’s Oral Law,” the traditions that have been handed down from generation to generation. How can Americans know what these Oral Laws of America are if they are not written anywhere? Americans just do.
This is the most perilous era in American history. Even the Civil War was less threatening to the American Idea than the time in which we now live. Slavery had to be eradicated, but both sides accepted deeper truths about freedom and right. Slavery was an evil abomination, and Dixie lost sight of what they had wrought. Even Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine was despicable and needed to be up-ended as it finally was by Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. America remained an Idea that had not yet been fully actualized.
The refusal to grant citizenship to Americans of Chinese descent until the 1940’s was another blight, and Asian immigrant exclusion was not repealed until 1952. Yet American society continued marching forward.
Numerus clausus quotas that barred Jews from colleges, from renting homes, from working in major law firms and from being admitted to practice in major hospitals and from working as executives at major banks and corporations remained a deep and ugly stain. But America still was great. It just remained for the country to become even greater — and it did. The Idea never waned.
But something tragic has unfolded since Obama rose to transform America’s culture and reverse its march forward, resetting its course back to racializing people and categorizing them by identity pigeonholes instead of as Americans. “Progressives” — the Woke — celebrate the deconstruction of America, imagining that their woke agenda rules the day and that they are closer than ever to imposing it on all. But theirs will be a pyrrhic victory. Their blind ambition and certainty that theirs is the only path is destroying all, them included.
And if President Trump is arrested or “just” arraigned, that will lead to a catastrophe even more terrible for America.
Let it be clear: No amount of progressive and woke social tyranny ever will succeed in reversing reality. They can cancel professors, drown out speakers, and falsify news. But Americans always have included a core that would not be bowed by tyranny.
Thus, for example, there are only two genders. If a man says he is a woman, so be it. If he wants a doctor to cut off his private parts and insert two silicone balloons in his chest, so be it. If a woman wants to have that guy’s resected parts sewn onto her, recycling to preserve the climate, and take testosterone to grow a beard, and act so masculine that the woke condemn transgender female toxicity, so be her gender dysphoria.
But when the woke seek to coerce others to adopt their paradigm, they forget that the American Idea contemplates that everyone else also is entitled to free thought.
Americans may be forced to alter their language if they lack determination to stand their ground and fear being canceled from a job for stating reality and asserting the truth. But facts transcend politics and even America. The American Oral Law always recognized that there are only two genders. “Male and Female He created them.” B’reishit/Genesis 1:27.
The American Oral Law also always accepted, with a brief interregnum in the 1950’s amid a Red Scare, that people may believe as they like and may speak as they like. Those who believe in flying saucers, ghosts, Rothschild lasers, or other conspiracies may do and even say so without endangering their jobs as long as they do not disrupt the workplace with their beliefs. It always has been the American Oral Law that the U.S.A. allows people to remain employed as long as they do their jobs and keep their feelings and beliefs to themselves or articulate them in non-imposing, non-disruptive ways. Americans may boycott the products of people they choose not to patronize, but they historically do not fire or cancel people simply because they personally hold odious or insane views.
And it always has been part of the American Oral Law that Americans do not take into custody or arraign their presidents or former presidents or presidential contenders or former contenders.
In 2016, so many Americans chanted or secretly whispered about Hillary Clinton: “Lock Her Up.” Donald Trump and his Justice Department could have locked her up. She perpetrated at least one federal felony, spoliating evidence sought in a federal criminal investigation. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 1519:
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11 [Bankruptcy law], or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
American sheriffs have been arrested for tampering with evidence. FBI agents have been. Marines have been. Judges have been. Even Martha Stewart. But Hillary, a woman who destroyed 33,000 emails supposedly about yoga classes and wedding dresses was not, despite tens of thousands chanting “Lock Her Up.” Why did she escape prosecution?
Partly because the FBI was in cahoots with her election campaign, even maintaining an FBI “workspace” in her attorneys’ law offices. But in greater measure because of America’s Oral Law: Americans do not arrest presidents or presidential contenders unless they have perpetrated a felonious crime so egregious that no choice is left but to cuff them.
Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused women as Harvey Weinstein did. Weinstein will be watching his Miramax movies in prison for life. By contrast, Clinton will watch them in freedom. He was not arrested, not even for what he did to Kathleen Willey in the White House during his presidency. According to Willey, during an early afternoon meeting on November 29, 1993, in the private study of the Oval Office, Clinton had embraced her tightly, kissed her on the lips, grabbed her breasts, and forced her hand on his private parts. Nor was he even arraigned for raping Juanita Broaddrick as she insists he did. Not even for perjury during the Paula Corbin Jones matter while he was in office. He faced — and beat — impeachment, never was arrested or even indicted.
Donald Trump had every right and the influence to have his Justice Department lock up Hillary. But for all his bluster on that front, he never actualized that slogan. If he had, he would have broken the social compact and Oral Law by which Americans live. He would have opened a door to a political abyss. And yet now the woke, led by a George Soros District Attorney in an extreme left one-party Democrat county where Trump could never get a fair jury, would arrest President Trump.
If this fiasco plays out, the American Idea itself will descend into new peril. When the woke decided to bar Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her rightful place on Congressional committees and Rep. Paul Gosar from his two House committee assignments, they brazenly enjoyed flexing their despicably despotic muscle. And what had they wrought? The moment the gavel changed hands from a Democrat majority to Republican governance, the despicable Jew-hating Ilhan Omar, the pathological lying Adam Schiff, and the national security threat Eric Swalwell all were ejected instantly from their House committees. That is how it works. It has to work that way. Republicans cannot allow the woke to deny conservatives’ rights with impunity when payback time comes.
And so it will be now. The American Oral Law will be broken, and the woke will behold and experience a whirlwind such as they never could have imagined when Schumer threatened Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Politics is cyclical, and Republicans again will have the White House and both Houses of Congress, maybe as soon as 2024.
If Trump is arrested, the compact is breached. In response, the corrupt venture of Biden & Son will be arrested soon enough — the whole gang of Biden Family crooks from the one with lap dancers on his laptop to the “Big Guy” making his laps in China. Perhaps Hillary, too, may yet get her day to pose in orange prison garb. Statutes of limitation are tolled when fraud impedes discovery of the underlying crime.
Once America starts arresting presidents based on secondary issues that gave rise to allegations that were published but never were prosecuted for years, not even pursued by fiercely anti-Trump prosecutors like former Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance, Jr., not even originally by Soros’s woke Alvin Bragg himself, America’s problems will take on a far more pernicious turn, threatening the equanimity of the Republic. Trump has survived two impeachments and one January 6 kangaroo court.
America may not be so lucky.
And it is a good time for Americans in the White House to think twice before lecturing Israel on how to administer justice.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/369472
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