Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Above All Else

 (Update: It turns out that Kate Cox, the pregnant woman I wrote about yesterday, left the state of Texas to obtain an emergency abortion elsewhere. It is lucky she did because after she left the Texas Supreme Court rejected her request for an exemption from the state’s strict ban on abortion. This is therefore a shameful day for the once-great state of Texas. I just wish the late Molly Ivins was still here to comment on that.)

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When Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court Monday for an expedited ruling on the question of whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for the alleged crimes he committed while president, he cited as precedent a ruling from the Watergate scandal half a century ago.

Back then, the court rejected President Richard Nixon’s claim of presidential privilege, forcing him to turn over the secret tape recordings he had made in the Oval Office. The court’s unanimous ruling helped lead to Nixon’s resignation.

As part of the deal for him to leave office, Nixon received a pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford. That pardon guaranteed that Ford would lose his re-election bid in 1976 against a little-known governor from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.

People my age remember all of this stuff vividly, but people my age also need to recognize that fully two-thirds of our fellow citizens had not yet even been born at the time of Watergate.

We considered it the biggest political scandal imaginable, but one that in the end strengthened our belief in the democratic system because it reaffirmed the principle that no one — not even a president — is above the law.

That was four decades before the rise of the would-be dictator Donald Trump, however. And of course, Trump now claims that he is and was above the law, although luckily for now at least that is not his decision to make. Perhaps he thinks he will prevail in the matter because the body that will decide his fate is stacked with three of his own appointees, plus three other conservative partisans, one of whom’s wife is a prominent election denier.

And maybe he’s right or maybe not. This Supreme Curt is not the quality of the one that judged Nixon, but it’s still a group of individuals who consider themselves the final arbiters of all things Constitutional. And they will not want to get this one wrong in the eyes of history.

All of this elevates the stakes to the highest level since Watergate, as the man who literally co-wrote (with Carl Bernstein) the book on the matter, Bob Woodward, recently confirmed.

The rest of us, old or young, can only hope that like Watergate, this one also has a happy ending.

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