Folks are starting to weigh in on the topic of holding Trump accountable with elites in law saying that we should let history judge. In one way they are correct, history will judge us for not holding Trump and those who enabled him accountable. And not doing so will have severe repurcussions. When a law professor from Harvard says, “Let history judge,” I hear, “those who hire me don’t want to be held accountable.”
If Trump and others broke the law, they should be held accountable, period. No one gives the rest of us a pass if we break the law, and no one should be above the law. We’ve played this game before. Nixon pulled most of the stunts that Trump pulled and he got a walk. Part of the reason that the same tactics are showing up again is because no one was held accountable. It wasn’t enough that history held Nixon accountable. Because there were no legal consequences, the same folks who ran Nixon’s scams — Roger Stone to name one — pulled the same stunts this time around.
Corporations talk about this all the time. They call it moral hazard. They appply it to poor folks. The argument is that if you let poor folks who have gone bankrupt out of their debt, then they don’t learn a lesson and will be repeat offenders. Keep in mind, they never talk about predatory lenders or those who took advantage of the poor debtors.
It is clear that moral hazard is at play with the powerful. Because Nixon, and Reagan, and other Republican leaders were not held accountable for breaking the law, they have learned that they can ignore the law with impunity. The only way you fix this problem is by showing them that if they break the law they will be prosecuted and have to pay a price. “Yes Virginia, moral hazard is real.”
The rest of us, the working class, the non-riche, we need to send a lesson. Being a multi-millionaire or a billionaire doesn’t mean you’re above the law. We expect that if you break the law you will pay a price, just the same as we do.
No, we don’t want our politics to become Trump’s politics, where the winners prosecute the losers. Easy enough, the commisson isn’t a legal body, it is a fact finding body. What our legal system does with that information is on them. The folks over such a commission should be apolitical. They should not be from the Justice Department and they should not be associated with Biden’s administration.
The simple fact is that Trump and his ilk have used every tool to corrupt our system and to pursue his political enemies. He has revealed the weakness in our system, weaknesses that will not be fixed without a full investigation and revelation of what has occurred. You don’t need to throw folks in jail, but you need to know exactly what happened so the problems can be addressed.
If for no other reason, you need a full investigation to reveal how social media was used to undermine our democracy. If you don’t, Russia will continue to attack the West. By understanding the threat, you can put tools in place to prevent it’s reoccurance.