It’s time, once again, as a UK citizen whose primary understanding of the US legal system comes from TV shows, to wade into the murky waters of events in the US. You are, therefore, adequately forewarned to take my comments with a salt mine.
Let’s start with a pic I lifted off Twittocks which, as we all know, is 100% accurate and true, 100% of the time.
Even if, as there undoubtedly is, an awful lot of context missing here, it would seem that there’s something of an, erm, shall we say, an imbalance in the justice system.
Even if this is the usual Twittocks ‘accuracy’ here, there are lots of similar (true) examples like this. We have them in the UK, too, although I’m not aware of a discrepancy quite this large.
Now, with the rather important proviso that I’ve watched far too many US legal dramas, it seems to me that the last thing any lawyer wants is a truly objective, rational, and intelligent jury. They want partisan people, people who can be easily swayed, and people who can be bamboozled with legal and ‘scientific’ razzamatazz.
Their interest is not, primarily, in justice or truth, but in winning the game in court. This is one of the big failings with an adversarial system of justice.
It’s a lottery. If you can afford decent representation then you have, at least, half a chance.
It shouldn’t be like this - it’s a shitty system. Factor in things like ‘plea’ deals and you’ve got the potential for all sorts of miscarriages of justice.
Am I being too ‘elitist’ and dismissive of jurors and the fine, objective, upstanding members of the legal profession?
Possibly. But recall the number of people who thought that the blithering idiocy of “nobody is safe until everybody is safe” made any kind of sense. These are the people who may well end up on juries.
What are we to make of the array of charges levelled against The Democracy Destroying Don of Doom™?
We might wonder whether it is even possible for him to get a fair trial.
They should ship in a bunch of judges and jurors from, I don’t know, somewhere like Singapore to give a better chance of objectivity and justice being served.
Always assuming they’re actually interested in things like justice or objectivity, which is highly doubtful.
If they secure a conviction against Donnie boy, and they will on something, what’s the betting the sentence will be eye-wateringly bonkers?
We’ve already seen politically-motivated ridiculously extreme sentences being dished out for the J6 inch erection.
I cannot bring myself to use the term ‘insurrection’ to describe J6. I think anyone who does so is being dishonest, or would lose a game of noughts and crosses to a bowl of porridge.
As erections go, it was a crushing disappointment. Having to get out a microscope in the bedroom is a real passion killer.
But that’s what the US legal system has done - they’ve viewed the events of J6 through a microscope and, sure enough, it looks like an impressive tumescence.
It was a case of “is that an inch erection in your Capitol building, or are you just pleased to see me?”
As far as I understand it, the US was set up so that the three branches of government could be balanced and, to some extent, operate to moderate the excesses of any other branch. It seems (again from the outside looking in) that this system has been well and truly broken by the horrendously mis-named “Democrats” who, at the moment, appear to be anything but democratic.
The judicial branch is now acting as an arm of the executive as far as I can tell.
I don’t actually think it would be good for the US to have a second bite at Donnie’s cherry - it would be worse still to have the Alzheimer’s patient back in charge. It’s time, in my view, to give us all a rest from these two. There are many more capable and rational people on both sides of the divide who would do a better job, I think.
But the persecution of Trump has been nothing short of extraordinary. The term TDS was coined for a very good reason. He’s not the Messiah, he might even be a very naughty boy, but some demonic Hitler-like tyrant he was not.
It has now got to the point where there are so many charges levelled against Trump, with so many of them seeming to be utterly frivolous (the principle of throwing enough shit so that some might stick is in operation here) that my view, now, is to dismiss all of it.
I just don’t believe any of the charges any more.
It’s the covid effect all over again. They banged on and on and on and on about all sorts of crap during covid - and it had the opposite effect on me than the one they intended. I started to think it was all nonsense.
And it was all nonsense. I can’t think of a single thing our government in the UK got right on covid and the response to it. Literally, not one thing.
The way I interpret the huge surge in Trump’s popularity since his legal persecution, which is so obviously politically motivated, is that many people in the US think like this too. There has to come a point for any but the most hardened of Democrats where they realize that what looked like a Cumberland sausage was just a mini-wiener viewed through a microscope.
Let’s suppose we do end up with the bombast vs the bumbler and that Trump’s popularity is maintained. Let’s suppose he loses to the duplicitous dribbler once again. What do you think is going to happen?
I don’t even want to think about it, because it’s not going to be pretty.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, and there’s still a long way to go (and a lot of postal ballots to prepare) before that day.
Is it possible the Democrats have overplayed their hand here and backed themselves into a corner? If Trump’s popularity continues to grow as a result of the obvious persecution, then the Democrat’s only option is to cheat on a larger scale than they clearly, obviously, completely without question, definitely, didn’t do before.
I pray we do not ever come to that.
The whole J6 narrative, such as it is, is, as we say in the UK, “completely arse about face”. The J6 protesters were not trying to undermine democracy, but to uphold it.
They may have been wrong in their perception of election fraud, but the protest was about wanting a fair result and not a skewed one. We can think of them as ill-informed, ignorant, mistaken, or whatever, but it is not correct to think of them as un-democratic.
It is not un-democratic to question the results of an election that had clear and obvious security flaws - quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a cry for a fair election process that is transparent and with demonstrable integrity.
It used to be the case that the judicial system stood as a kind of playground monitor against the bullying of the state. However imperfectly it operated, ordinary citizens had some recourse against state injustice - they had, at least, some chance.
All I can see at the moment is that this is being undermined and eroded by the actions of governments. I’ve focused on the US because the cases of J6, and Trump, are so clear-cut and obvious - but it’s happening elsewhere, too.
I don’t have a lot of optimism for the future. Paradoxically, I might be wrong about Trump being a bad choice for the next US President. He might, for all his faults, be the only person who is capable of reversing the trend. The same character flaws that make me think he’s a bad choice, also make him a great person to tackle the system as it stands.
Dunno - I’m not wise enough, or know enough about how things work in the US, to be able to do anything but make wild speculations.
But the direction we all appear to be heading in isn’t the right one. Less freedom and more tyranny - that’s where we’re going. If not Trump himself, we definitely need a few more “Trump-like” characters to enter the fray.
Every nation has laws like that, you'll find. No matter the court-system.
Take my nation: our law regulating riotous assembly (its real name, literal translation, comes out as: "violent uprising", which should tell you something) has a range of punishment starting at a minimum fine of about £200 to life in prison without parole.
It's written that way precisely so it can be used for political reasons, as has been the case with the thousands of moslems that tried to burn alive swedish firemen, ER-workers and police during the Koran Riots. About a dozen got arrested, after we had elections in 2022 - the preceding Socialist Democrat governement ordered (backroom-style, no records) the chief of police not to make arrests. The courts are under the control of the Socialist party, so they first fined about a dozen moslems, and the next court one jump up in the hierarchy threw the case out.
Meanwhile, the artist Dan Park was some years back sentenced to two years in prison for politically incorrect art; art which pointed out the racist hypocrisy of the feminists, greens and socialists. Hence, his art is criminal.
Political control over courts is simply too powerful a tool to let go of, and neither the UK nor the US have ever been exceptions to this; only in media and the mind of the populace has this exceptionalism been real. To your rulers, the courts have ever and always been their tool to wield as they see fit.
However, they do use to against each other too, just as they use media to try and clamber upwards over the backs of their compatriots.
Apply logic: who makes the laws? Politicians. Who appoints judges? Politicians. Who writes the regs for judges and prosecutors? Politicians.
So how could the law and the (aptly named) criminal justice system be anything but political?
I think us of the germanic-slavic traditions re: courts and laws and how they work have a much more realistic view of such matters, than does the english, french and their colonial offspring. Sometimes, the velvet glove comes off, simply put. We know this, loathe it as we do, but we do know it as a fact. Americans seem to be especially vulnerable to the notion that courts and laws are some kind of freely floating thing existing beyond the political, and I say that not to scoff and scorn but as an observation and as advice:
The law is the will of power written down, and that's all it is.
As nice as it would be to have options, we don't. Trump is the only one with enough momentum and backing to have a hope in hell of displacing a fourth term of Barack Obama. And, considering all the crap they have rained down on him, I think he is the one needed to try and reel in the Blob. Sadly, I think the corruption is so deep that another term of Trump will be subverted much like the first term. I also think Trump makes some bad decisions, even though by and large his first term was surprisingly good. Unfortunately, we here in the US are fucked, and no president can save us.