The day the Democrats Putinized America | Eastern North Carolina Now

Sven R. Larson, writing at the European Conservative, reports:

On Thursday, May 30th, a jury of 12 New Yorkers erased the last distinctive line between Biden’s America and Putin’s Russia. With their verdict against Donald Trump, finding him guilty on 34 counts of forging business records, they verified that the Democrat party—the party of the sitting president—can organize a trial with its party operatives as judge and prosecutor, and get their political opponent found guilty.

The judge in the case, Juan Merchan, is an entrenched Democrat who has been selected to prosecute more Republicans than just Donald Trump. In the America that we all knew before Biden came into office, judges were selected randomly; from now on, ‘random’ means a Democrat when the defendant is a Republican.

The prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, was elected to the position as District Attorney of Manhattan after having campaigned on a promise to prosecute—more appropriately persecute—Donald Trump. In the America that we all knew before Biden came into office, a DA had to first investigate a case before he could judge whether or not to file charges against anyone. 

The crimes that Bragg charged Trump with all fall under federal law. Back in the America we all knew before Biden came into office, a state district attorney like Alvin Bragg had no jurisdiction to prosecute under federal law.

When Judge Merchan sent the jury off to deliberate, he told them that they did not have to all agree on what crime Trump was guilty of. The 34 counts were all one and the same crime, but Merchan told them that they could pick and choose: some jurors might think that Trump had violated federal election law; some could find him guilty of tax violations; others could select the “falsification of business records” option.

The judge also—amazingly—told the jury they did not have to be unanimous in their decision.

Back in pre-Biden America, the jury would have to find the defendant guilty of one and the same crime—not different crimes for different ‘guilty’ verdicts from different jurors. They would also have to be in full agreement, all 12 of them.

The whole case was tried in Manhattan, in a Congressional district where Trump won about 5% of the votes in 2022. How hard would it be for Democrat operatives Alvin Bragg and Juan Merchan to secure a jury that was unanimously anti-Trump? 

Back in pre-Putinized America, if a defendant felt he could not get a fair trial where his case was going to be tried, he could file—and often get—a change of venue. The reason, shocking as it may seem, was to make sure the defendant got a fair trial. 

In Joe Biden’s Putinized America, the concept of a fair trial has taken on a very different meaning. ‘Fairness’ means that Democrat operatives charge, preside over, and judge a case against one of the party’s opponents. A trial no longer means a proceeding in a court of law where two sides, the prosecutor and the defendant, are equally matched and the judge is impartial. From here on, a trial is a place where political dissidents—be they a presidential candidate or participants in a political rally—are given punishments for disagreeing with the Biden regime and its operatives.  (our emphasis)

The New York trial against Trump is a watershed moment—in more ways than one. To begin with, this is a moment of fulfillment for Democrats who want to politicize America’s legal system. They have been working hard for decades to politicize every corner of American society, from public schools and higher education to the media and laws regulating elections. They have managed to get their operatives into key positions in the election system where they can control vote counts and modify rules and regulations to the point where the principle of ‘one voter, one vote’ is no longer guaranteed. 

They even pushed the envelope in the cases against participants in the January 6 rally, to the point where an outside viewer got the impression that those charged with being at Capitol Hill on that day were treated more harshly than actual terrorists. 

But never before has America had a court case where operatives of the sitting president’s party have orchestrated a case against the sitting president’s opponent in an upcoming election—and done so solely for the purpose of reaching some kind of ‘guilty’ verdict. 

This is the kind of politicized jurisprudence, or lawfare, that we have associated with countries like China and Russia. How many American Democrats and Biden supporters have at some point referred to Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian who used the court cases to get rid of Alexei Navalny, his most prominent election opponent?

Today, May 30th, 2024, the Democrat party formally Putinized America’s legal system. They officially demonstrated that they can get any one of their political opponents charged, tried, and convicted of any crime they want. This raises a host of questions, of course, one of them being what moral authority any Democrat has to criticize Vladimir Putin for the way he governs Russia. 

It is now incumbent upon every elected Democrat, everywhere, to explain why Trump’s conviction was fair and Navalny’s was not. It is incumbent upon President Biden to let us all know why he holds any moral authority to lead the ‘free world’ in any campaign against Russia’s war in Ukraine. When Biden’s party machine can go after his foremost political opponent and make him a convicted felon, in a case loaded with Democrat operatives and sympathizers, what makes Joe Biden a more ‘democratic’ president than Vladimir Putin?

Trump still has options. He can appeal the verdict, and he most certainly will. The problem with his appeal is that it will go into the appeals court system in the very state—New York—that Democrats chose to get Trump convicted in the first place. Why? Because after having ruled New York unchallenged for decades, they have littered the state’s legal system with their own operatives. They have card-carrying, campaign-donating Democrats everywhere they need, in order to make sure that Trump’s appeal is not evaluated on its legal and constitutional merits. 

Their job will be to make sure his appeal is delayed—and eventually denied. 

At that point, Trump can appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. Once there, the case will be thrown out, but it can take a year before it gets there. Maybe more, if the appeals system in New York does what the Democrat party machine wants it to do: make life as hard as possible for Donald Trump.

Which brings us to the second reason why the verdict in the case against Trump is a watershed moment for America. The campaign by Democrats to politicize the legal system is not pushing for a goal in itself. The reason why they want courts to be run entirely according to their preferences is instrumental. Just like in the former Soviet Union—and to a large extent in Putin’s Russia—the Democrats want the courts to be weapons against opponents of the Democrat party.

However, politicizing the courts is not enough. If you really want to secure your party’s hegemonic rule, you have to rewrite the constitutional structure according to which the country is governed. 

So far, the Democrats have not been able to do that. For this reason, they also have not been able to politicize the entire legal system in America. In states that they do not control, a court case is still a court case in the traditional sense. In the federal system, the traditional fairness of a court case now depends entirely on which U.S. Court district a person is tried under, but overall the federal system still holds a reasonable reputation for impartiality. 

If the Democrats get the chance, they will do everything they can to change that. They would like to subjugate all federal courts to their political will, with the selection of judges for court appointments increasingly based on their political opinions and affiliations, and less on their jurisprudence. 

This most certainly applies to the Supreme Court as well. The Democrat party wants four more judges, or justices as they are called, on the highest court of the country. In doing this, they have taken a page out of Hugo Chavez’ playbook in Venezuela, where the authoritarian leader packed the country’s highest court with judges loyal to him. By also putting term limits on Supreme Court justices, the Democrats would have a firm political grip on the judicial branch of government. 

In reality, there is only one way that the Democrats can get their ideological supremacy imposed on the entire legal and political system: by abolishing the one institution that holds the key to appointing federal judges, including Supreme Court justices. That institution, of course, is the United States Senate. This is why many Democrats want to abolish the U.S. Senate. 

This would turn America into a parliamentary ‘democracy’. If they also count the votes, there will be nobody to stop them from—as Barack Obama famously proclaimed—fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

The verdict in the Manhattan courtroom today, May 30th, 2024, was a big step forward for the Democrats in their efforts to fulfill Obama’s promise. Lawfare is now an established, official method of jurisprudence. Judges and prosecutors no longer have to conceal their party affiliation and the politicized nature of the cases they try. Going forward, Democrats can openly and unabashedly declare their intentions to politicize the legal system.

Trump did not get a fair trial. Will he have a fair election in November? Probably not. In fact, most certainly not. But regardless of that: now that the Democrats’ political cat is out of the bag, it is more important than ever that all of us who still believe that America should be America—not some bleak copy of Putin’s Russia—vote in November. 

Voting for Trump is not a moral option. It is a matter of civic duty. It is an act of democratic defiance against a political system that has become dangerously, structurally, morally corrupt.
 
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Sven R Larson, Ph.D., is an economics writer for the European Conservative, where he publishes regular analyses of the European and American economies. He has worked as a staff economist for think tanks and as an advisor to political campaigns. He is the author of several academic papers and books. His writings concentrate on the welfare state, how it causes economic stagnation, and the reforms needed to reduce the negative impact of big government. On Twitter, he is @S_R_Larson

Hat tip to Steven Rader for sending us this link.