In a recent speech to new citizens of the United States, Attorney General Merrick Garland delivered warnings about some of what Donald Trump and many Republicans are peddling as the midterm elections approach. He didn’t name Trump, but his speech’s implications are obvious.
Besides Trump’s incitement that originally drove the Capitol riot, he has since raised the prospect on multiple occasions of (if he becomes president once again) issuing pardons to members of the mob, who are accused — among other charges — of assault on law enforcement, seditious conspiracy, and felony obstruction. Participants in the riot targeted top officials in the federal government, and in certain instances, they came very close to these public figures. Who could say what would have taken place if rioters actually got a hold of Mike Pence and Chuck Schumer? The gallows put up outside the Capitol aren’t exactly reassuring regarding the possibilities. The rioter who received what so far is the longest sentence for anybody in the mob tackled an officer to the ground and grabbed onto the struggling cop’s gear. These are the kinds of people Trump is interested in pardoning, providing as explicit an acceptance as any of political violence.
“The Rule of Law is not assured. It is fragile. It demands constant effort and vigilance,” Garland said Saturday. “The responsibility to ensure the Rule of Law is and has been the duty of every generation in our country’s history. It is now your duty as well. And it is one that is especially urgent today at a time of intense polarization in America… Overcoming the current polarization in our public life is, and will continue to be, a difficult task. But we cannot overcome it by ignoring it. We must address the fractures in our society with honesty, with humility, and with respect for the Rule of Law. This demands that we tolerate peaceful disagreement with one another on issues of politics and policy. It demands that we listen to each other, even when we disagree. And it demands that we reject violence and threats of violence that endanger each other and endanger our democracy. We must not allow the fractures between us to fracture our democracy.”
Earlier in his remarks, the attorney general also spoke of the nature of the rule of law. “The Rule of Law means that the law treats each of us alike: there is not one rule for friends, another for foes; one rule for the powerful, another for the powerless; a rule for the rich, another for the poor; or different rules, depending upon one’s race or ethnicity or country of origin,” he told his listeners. This concept obviously applies to Trump, who apparently faces possibilities of criminal charges in connection to investigations including the Georgia probe into post-2020 election meddling led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and the Justice Department examination of the handling of classified and generally highly sensitive documents from Trump’s administration. Some have expressed concerns about the potential political ramifications of charges against a former president. What about the implications of letting a former president live by essentially different legal standards than millions of Americans?
