There is no justice under today's GOP

During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, on the verge of our nation’s birth as we know it, Benjamin Franklin was thinking about death.

He was trying to convince the other delegates to include an impeachment mechanism for removing the new country’s presidents. With remarkable frankness, he argued that a really, really bad president, one who had “rendered himself obnoxious,” would simply get assassinated unless there were a legitimate, fair way to remove him from office when deserved — and to protect him when removal goes too far.

Put another way, removal through impeachment offers a political death instead of a real one, Cornell Law School Assistant Professor Josh Chafetz wrote in a 2010 analysis of Franklin’s argument: “A president who is impeached and convicted is deprived of his continued existence as a political officeholder.” Evidently Franklin convinced his colleagues.

I’ve mulled over this story many times after a suspected gunman charged into last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which included the president and most of his top officials. The suspect has since been charged with attempted assassination, and before the incident he wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Everyone, including Donald Trump, knows who he meant.

Right-wingers love to twist things out of context, so let me be explicit before any get the chance: It’s a bad thing that this happened to the president, whom I loathe, and it’s a bad thing that it keeps happening. A society where politics becomes synonymous with violence and death is bad for us all, even for those imbeciles who imagine otherwise. But it’s also a predictable, explainable thing. It’s so predictable that good old Ben foresaw it almost 240 years ago. And it connects to the larger problem of our times.

A parade of injustice

The Trump era is one of violence against him and his political opposition alike, most notably including the Jan. 6 riot of his supporters in the U.S. Capitol.

Every time something like this happens, Trump et al. always blame Democrats for their accurate rhetoric about him as dangerous, unhinged and authoritarian (it seems to slip their mind whenever Democrats are attacked or killed). Without fail, their solution is for Democrats to shut up and just let Trump do everything he wants.

Trump’s opponents come back by citing his own extensive pro-violence statements. There's little doubt that his words have an impact. But this well-trod back-and-forth around word choice has never felt like a satisfactory explanation. This isn’t all happening just because of the words we’re saying or not saying.

Like so much of Franklin’s wisdom, his words on impeachment contain a deeper lesson: Justice — of which impeachment is just one aspect — is the antidote to political violence. And Trump and his political party, from the Supreme Court to Congress to state governments like Arkansas’, have been working very hard to destroy justice in this country.

• We have the impeachment process, but it’s paralyzed. This Republican Congress will never stop him from ruling like a king, making everything cost more and waging an illegal war that kills innocents and causes suffering worldwide. This Supreme Court of “absolute immunity” won’t stop him in any meaningful way, either.

• Speaking of the Supreme Court, our so-called justices are undoing the Civil Rights Movement, one of the greatest acts of justice in the last century, and red southern states literally cannot erase Black representation fast enough as a result.

• Jan. 6 rioters actually received justice in their hundreds, but then Trump pardoned them, allowing them to hurt the rest of us all over again.

• Elon Musk illegally obliterates foreign aid spending, saving us nothing at all in terms of spending but dooming millions to preventable starvation and disease. Yet he goes about his days without being shunned and denounced every second of the rest of his life. Meanwhile, millions flee war and persecution, but the only refugees we let in are white South Africans like him. It’s an obscenity.

• A soldier's recent arrest for betting on his own mission in Iran is downright comical when the president and his family are using their offices and stations to rake in billions. Only the big guys get to do that, silly!

• The Department of Justice defiles its namesake daily, dropping tens of thousands of real criminal cases and slow-walking the Epstein files so that it can pursue ordinary immigrants and bullshit political persecution instead.

• Trump makes noise about fraud but pardons its heavyweight champions and tries to pay himself $10 billion of our tax dollars for no reason.

• At the state level in Arkansas and elsewhere, Republican governments act powerless amid these and other horrors, instead doing their utmost to ignore and disenfranchise their own voters and escape accountability for their failures.

All of this is not only injustice, it’s anti-justice — not only failing fairness, the rule of law and accountability to the public, but actively destroying them.

Justice says that the rules mean something and they apply to us all, whether in a criminal context or a political one. When people get away with things they shouldn’t, or when they get punished but don’t deserve it, justice has broken.

Researchers around the world have found that violence follows. When people get used to corrupt leaders looting their government, they’re less upset about violence. When law enforcement is weakened and corrupted, violence starts to look more like another option. When people lose faith that the rules matter and will settle disputes fairly, they stop relying on them.

I’m not making an original observation — Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, famously wrote that “true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” But this conceptual framework is useful for me in a few ways. First, I’ve finally realized that it is the indestructible core of all of the rage, disillusionment and loss I’ve been feeling and writing about for the last year and a half. This is an anti-justice regime through and through.

Second, this framework illustrates some of the dangers of lying and misinformation more clearly, because what do lying and misinformation accomplish? They redirect our sense of injustice, or create it where there is none, as a way of generating and aiming violence like Jan. 6. A regime that lies and misinforms while also taking away real justice is encouraging violence, not preventing it.

Third, it spotlights what we must demand of our leaders and for ourselves. Justice means impeachment and removal. It means tearing down the legacy of those who inflict injustice, both legally and literally. Remaking our highest court and neutering or removing the bigots who run it. A nationwide ban on legislators choosing their own voters instead of the other way around. A tax and budget system that doesn’t endlessly coddle the rich while leaving the poor in the dirt. I could go on and on.

And fourth, this framing reveals a paradox. Trump, who has been both victim and cheerleader of political violence, in fact has the power to correct this situation — to his own benefit! It would just require something that this man is thoroughly incapable of providing.

One last note

I’m a movie-lover, so besides the 1787 Franklin story, I’ve also been thinking back to a Sydney Pollack movie that came out 21 years ago, “The Interpreter,” which is one of my quiet favorites.

Nicole Kidman plays a U.N. interpreter who one day overhears (literal) whispers of an assassination plot. The threat is against a fictional African dictator whose forces ruthlessly kill political opponents, including, we later learn, all of Kidman’s character’s family. Sean Penn plays a U.S. Secret Service agent assigned to investigate the threat, and to probe Kidman’s character’s motives, after she reports it.

In an exchange that might have made Benjamin Franklin proud, the agent asks the interpreter about her feelings toward the dictator:

The distinction, I now understand better, is justice.