Earlier: ”Criminalizing Politics”—We've Been Experiencing It For A Long Time (And Now It's Personal)
Megan McArdle, more or less a libertarian, and no fan of Trump herself, Tweeted this, in response to an AP article about how selective the prosecution of Trump is:
It's emotionally satisfying for Trump's political opponents to see him teeter on the edge of insolvency, but this prosecution looks political and abusive, undercuts legitimacy of other prosecutions for more serious crimes, and gives him incentive to cling to office no matter what
A much smaller account made the point that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had gone to jail after being investigated, to which she replied that his real crime was apparently being Trump-adjacent.
And she’s reposted this reply:
”far too many things are criminalized, prosecutorial discretion is a mistake, reform is needed”—once a left-libertarian view—moved over to the mainstream right because they elected a guy who really likes doing crime
And I have receipts, as they say, starting with Peter Brimelow's December 11, 2000 article The Death Of Due Process, an interview with Paul Craig Roberts (Reagan's assistant secretary of the Treasury) originally published in Forbes.
This was about The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice, which Roberts co-authored, and which may fairly be called right-libertarian.
You might also check out Charles Murray's book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, which is about defending ordinary citizens against prosecutorial overreach.
And speaking of overreach, the case of Martha Stewart, jailed for saying something untrue to the FBI was covered in a speech by Sam Dickson that we published here in 2015: Unequal Justice: Martha Stewart Jailed For Lying To Police—But Ferguson “Witnesses” Not Prosecuted.
The other point is that it's not that Trump, or previous Republicans, ”really like doing crime,” it's that the Left, and specifically the Democratic Party, as represented in the House, the Senate, and most recently the New York Attorney General's Office, really likes criminalizing political differences.
This is what was happening with the prosecution of Michael Flynn and the whole Russia Hoax investigation, but it's also what happened with Oliver North and Elliott Abrams in the Iran-Contra prosecutions, as well as what happened in Watergate—see Brimelow On Watergate—The First Deep State Coup.
In fact, it goes back to FDR and the Old Right: FDR’s Sorry Domestic Spying Record, by Justus D. Doenecke, Daily Beast, May 10, 2015.
So yes, we've had this problem for a long time.
