Nobody Claiming to Respect Rule of Law Is Convincing

Every four years on January 20, America gets to have two presidents in one day. This year, the day ended as it began—with a raft of controversial pardons.

Partisans of the former President Joe Biden will say his preemptive pardons were necessary to protect their recipients from President Donald Trump. Many Trump supporters will similarly defend his January 6 pardons as justified protections against real political persecution by Biden’s Justice Department and former Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It’s hard to view either set of actions as particularly likely if not for actions undertaken by the other administration. “Larry’s had as much time as me to think about why he’s under indictment and some other people ain’t,” Junior Soprano said during the hit HBO series. Trump entertained, and expressed, similar thoughts as the charges against him began to pile up.

Whose chants of “lock him/her up!” came closer to fruition?

In the span of just a few hours, many Democrats relearned the importance of limits to executive power. Trump, like Biden, plans to push presidential power to its limits to implement his ambitious agenda. Unlike Biden, many of Trump’s moves will be about unelected parts of the executive branch submitting to its elected leadership—some might call it democracy—rather than usurping legislative powers. And Trump, unlike Biden, has and will appoint judges who will constrain his more constitutionally dubious impulses.

Just as any good progressive tut-tutting from the Resistance sidelines suggests, Trump occasionally chafes at constitutional constraints that prevent him from keeping his promises easily. He does not always play by the rules.

It was nevertheless difficult to take Biden seriously when he talked about rules and norms and constitutional checks and balances since he was so selective, to put it mildly, about observing them himself. Here MAGA channeled Christopher Moltisanti: “You preach all this wiseguy s–t, and meanwhile the only ones who gotta play by the rules are us!”

Liberals would contend that Biden wanted to bend, even break, the rules to help deserving people while Trump was only out for himself. Thus Biden tried to offer student loan debt relief and stop evictions without any clear constitutional authority to do so, while Trump was trying to remain in office.

Except that some of what Trump wants to do to control immigration, for example, would clearly benefit other people more than himself. It may not occur to Episcopalian bishops attempting to speak truth to power that working-class Americans, and sometimes immigrant communities themselves, get more out of a secure and orderly border than a real estate developer does. Trump could probably find some uses for the cheap labor.

It does not help the rule of law that the people pushing to use the 25th Amendment and 14th Amendment in novel ways to prevent Trump from retaining or regaining power bestowed by the voters are mostly the ones crowing the loudest for the disbarment of attorneys floating constitutionally cockamamie pro-Trump schemes. And, of course, many progressive policies have been as much about the retention of raw political power as altruism and the public good.

The rules exist because even noble intentions can lead to the aggrandizement of the political class and the consolidation of power. Weapons you don’t want in Trump’s hands shouldn’t be given to Biden and vice versa. 

In the first term, at least, there were plenty of guardrails for Trump. For Biden, it was mainly the unpacked Supreme Court, at least until he outlived his usefulness to those counting on him to keep Trump from returning to the White House. 

Well, Trump is back in the saddle again. He’s sitting at the Resolute Desk, or on stage at Capital One Arena, signing some good executive actions as well as some real doozies. 

The good news is that Trump fights back. The bad news is that in a politicized norms business, we may all be in a race to the bottom. 

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