The wisdom of the US founding fathers

Politico reports:

The administration’s use of the Justice Department to intimidate President Donald Trump’s political opponents and stifle dissent reached a remarkable new low last week, when federal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. tried and failed to prosecute six Democratic lawmakers who made a video urging military personnel to refuse to carry out illegal orders.

The disturbing stakes and implications of the effort were partially obscured by the clumsy execution of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and her prosecutors. A grand total of zero — zero — grand jurors agreed to return the proposed indictment. As a former federal prosecutor, I have never heard of this actually happening before.

This is indeed unheard of. The saying or joke used to be that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. As the threshold is basically just that there is probable cause for a case to answer, indictments are returned in 99.996% of cases. A grand jury doesn’t even hear from the defence. They just hear the case from the prosecutors.

For that reason I always thought having a grand jury involved in issuing charges was stupid, and a waste of time. Better to have it like NZ where juries decide guilt, but not whether charges get laid.

However the US founding fathers have a great belief in the common sense of their fellow citizens, and worried about one day a Government that would become authoritarian. So they were almost unique around the world in having such a system. And today we see how right they were.

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