A Low Bar That Must Be Cleared

President-elect Biden has nominated Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, to be Assistant US Attorney for Civil Rights Under Law. Last summer, responding to protests of the killing of George Floyd, Clarke wrote

This is a moment like none other in our nation's history. We are literally witnessing the emergence of one of the biggest racial justice movements that we have seen in modern time. For the first time, we are talking openly about white supremacy and racism.

If a researcher for Fox News' Tucker Carlson has the story right, Clarke certainly knows a lot about supremacy and racism. It's personal for he, or at least it once was because reportedly

In 1994, Clarke wrote a letter to The Harvard Crimson in her capacity as the president of the Black Students Association to explain her views on race science.

"Please use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites [sic]," Clarke wrote. "One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the 'locus coeruleus,' which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin -- that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

"Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

"Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities -- something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards"...

After an outcry on campus, Kristen Clarke suggested that she didn't necessarily believe what she had written.

Just a month later, however, Clarke invited the noted Trinidadian anti-Semite Tony Martin to speak on campus. Martin, then a professor at Wellesley College, was the author of a self-published manifesto called "The Jewish Onslaught." In it, Martin chronicled the "escalating Jewish onslaught" against Black people.

For Martin's fans like Kristen Clarke, his speech at Harvard did not disappoint. He attacked both Jews and Judaism as a religion. Martin, who retired from Wellesley in 2007 and died in 2013, spent his final years giving speeches to Holocaust denial organizations on topics such as "tactics of organized Jewry in suppressing free speech."

Kristen Clarke strongly approved of Tony Martin, telling The Crimson: "Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact." According to Kristen Clarke, Tony Martin's anti Semitism was based on "indisputable fact."

These remarks may have been taken out of context. Or they could have been merely the intellectual ramblings of a young Harvard University student. Presumably, that will be determined at the confirmation hearings of the highly accomplished nominee, whose parents emigrated from Jamaica and sent their daughter to Choate Rosemary Hall, a preparatory high school in Connecticut.

No one should be denied a critical position in a presidential administration simply because she is a child of privilege nor supported supremacy (white or black) twenty-six years earlier. Clarke will presumably be asked about the remarks and whether she'd say the same things now.

Of course, she will express her deep regret for them- whether or not they were accurately transcribed and reported. If nothing else, they will make it more difficult for her to gain confirmation.

But more is necessary. Clarke needs to state definitively that she was wrong at the time and no longer believes what it appears she wrote.  After four years of an administration headed by Donald Trump, a summer of protests of racial discrimination, and a recent attack on American government motivated in part by racial hostility, there is something that Democrats and Republicans should demand of our leaders: racists need not apply.

Kristen Clarke, Biden's choice to lead the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has some truly wild theories about racial differences:

"Melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured by Eurocentric standards." pic.twitter.com/l0W4gteGFL

— August Takala (@AugustTakala) January 12, 2021

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Actors Act

The reviews are in, and they're mostly glowing.

-Thank you sir for your words of strength! God bless you and your family.

- I wish Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eloquent & poignant words were played on the floor of the House & Senate. He spoke from experience about the dangers of tolerating creeping totalitarianism

-Arnold Schwarzenegger understands what happened and why.  As he says, "It all started with lies, and lies, and lies, and intolerance." This is the world we live in - & it can lead to fascism.  LGB Alliance supports free speech & tolerance.  Thank you 

-Arnold@Schwarzenegger such a honest, humble amazing human being for showing that we as humans CAN become better the harder we try, wise words from a great guy! After biden becomes president of USA Arnold should be next!

-My God what a patriotic and an emotional message by @Schwarzenegger. I must confess I was moved to tears at the later part of the video where he said "those who seek to overturn our constitution will never win". What a message. This should be an eye opener and a lesson to those

-Wow what a profound and powerful  message it even brought me to tears it was soo moving thank you Arnold.

There are more where these came from; much more. The most accurate was "Arnold Schwarzenegger captures this moment in American history with perfection is his oration."

Well, he was an actor, a very popular one; a politician also, and oration is his bag. It took Californians a few years to catch up with the empty suit with the great accent, artfully honed after 52 years of residence in the USA. Beginning at 2:26 of the video below, the California Republican correctly noted "President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election and of a fair and safe election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies and "is a failed leader who will go down in history as the worst president ever." He continued

But what are we to make of those elected officials who have enabled his lies and treachery? I will remind them of what Teddy Roosevelt said, "Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not man to stand by the president."

"Members of my own party," he added "are complicit with those who carried the flag of self righteous insurrection."

"Right on the money," as one of the tweets had it. Unfortunately, the former governor had led with

I grew up in Austria. I'm very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 198 by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys. Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol.

One tweeter remarked "Arnold Schwarzenegger comparing the storming of Capitol Hill to Kristallnacht is my fave moment of the year." It shouldn't be, unless one is a fan of false equivalences and trivialization of historical events.

   

 Michael Berenbaum recalls

Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram to all police units informing them that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent “Aryan” properties.

In two days and nights, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or otherwise damaged. Rioters ransacked and looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The attackers were often neighbours. Some 30,000 Jewish males aged 16 to 60 were arrested. To accommodate so many new prisoners, the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen were expanded.

After the pogrom ended, it was given an oddly poetic name: Kristallnacht—meaning “crystal night” or “night of broken glass.” This name symbolized the final shattering of Jewish existence in Germany. After Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime made Jewish survival in Germany impossible.

Well over 7,000 businesses were damaged or destroyed, 91+ people killed, and 30,000 people arrested- all in a major action to eliminate people of one religion or, as the Nazis twisted it, race. Fortunately, President Trump's government last Wednesday did not order an invasion of Hamtramck and Dearborn, Michigan, destroy every business they could, kill over 90 people and arrest 30,000 people.

By invoking Kristallnacht to condemn what took place last Wednesday, Arnold Schwarzenegger sadly opened the door to mass trivialization of the Holocaust. Last night, former Iowa Congressman Steve King called the current deplatforming of MAGA rioters "cyber god's Kristallnacht." https://t.co/FEZ7dQdcU2

— MF JEWM (@JewishWorker) January 11, 2021

Yet the inaccurate and dangerous parallel wasn't the biggest problem with Schwarzenegger's message. Ironically, that was captured in the adoring tweet "Well spoken from someone who can see beyond the partisan politics and to the heart of the matter. Thanks @Schwarzenegger."

Schwarzenegger makes a classic mistake, one which has been made for a few years now and will become more prominent in the coming years. You can catch it in the words of Never Trump Republicans but more glaringly from Joe Scarborough and others in the media, those who want us to believe that it all began with Donald Trump. 

The GOP, the myth goes, was on a right and righteous path (synonymous to some of them) before candidate/President Trump came and perverted it. It's as if the anti government, hyper-chauvinistic and bigoted ethos began with the billionaire from New York City and not long ago.  Many of these Republicans- and naive members of the media- continue to revere two-term president Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), who poured the gasoline on the ground being set ablaze today.

Trump has made it much worse, of course, an aberration in the country and its government. Nonetheless, the ground for him was seeded and fertilized over four decades ago, history that is forgotten or ignored at our peril. 

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Race, And A Whole Lot More

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

— Joe Biden, describing fellow candidate Barack Obama. The remark was made the same day Biden filed the official paperwork to launch his presidential campaign. Biden later apologized and said the remark was taken out of context.

The author of that quote of January 31, 2007 would be swept to resounding victory by African-Americans (in South Carolina) thirteen years later, leading to his nomination by the Democratic Party for President of the United States of America. Irony abounds.

Fourteen years almost to the day after that controversial statement, President-elect Joe Biden would remark

No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday that they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol. We all know that's true — and it's unacceptable.

It is fitting that the two statements would both come on the same date, January 7.   They are both technically accurate- and very misleading.

No one, not even his critics at the time, argued that Barack Obama was not "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" (to run for the presidential nomination of a major party).  However, it was awkward and minimized the accomplishments and qualifications of the constitutional scholar and ex-state senator from Hawaii by way of Illinois.

Surely a group of Black Lives Matter protesters would have been treated differently. But they would not have been treated differently primarily because they were black. They would have been treated as were the white protesters of January 6, 2021 had those BLM protestors posed as great a threat as the others.

People look at the chaos, lawbreaking, and violence of the white crowd at the Capitol and expect that police response will be swift and overwhelming. By contrast, BLM protestors posed relatively little threat and hence police response would be more measured.

In a just world, yes; in the real world, no. Ironically, in the real world it's not unlikely that the reverse would occur.  University of Texas criminologist and sociology professor Michael Sierra-Arevalo explains

Tactically speaking, it would be really hard to make an arrest happen when you're by yourself. That explains why you didn't see an escalation of force, until later on, when we saw an influx of law enforcement personnel.

Law enforcement personnel were overwhelmed, for which there probably are several reasons, which a thorough investigation presumably will determine. However, they were outnumbered and overwhelmed, lost control, and had no choice but to back off, with their own lives in danger.

This is what the pro-Trump mob did to American law enforcement officers after the President incited a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol

(warning, graphic video) pic.twitter.com/4RNsZQAYbh

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) January 9, 2021

It's not only Joe Biden who has instantly implied that race is the reason, even the sole reason, for the disparity in treatment of the summer of '20 protestors and the January 6 mob.  And when Biden and others emphasize race to the exclusion of other factors, police and their allies come to the reasonable conclusion that they stand accused of being racist. Irony again rearing its serendipitous head, it comes from a President-elect who- wait for it- has emphasized the need for unity.

Eli Mystal, among those who attribute the differential police response to racial bias, legitimately tweets (emphasis his) in part "I don't want 'unity' or 'healing' or 'comity.' I WANT JUSTICE. I WANT FAIRNESS." 

Justice and fairness are critical. But honesty and accuracy also are important. Where racial hostility or support for right-wing Trump supporters motivated individual police officers or policymakers, let it be known and addressed, severely.  When there almost certainly are other factors, designating race as the only cause is, well, unjust.

Joe Biden made a stupid statement about race fourteen years ago. Joe Biden always has been eager to be carried along to reflect the prevailing biases of his political party at any particular stage of his career,. He made a stupid statement about race fourteen years ago. He has done so again, and it's not helpful.

 

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Handing Trump And Pence A Gift

This is an interesting argument by Will, whose last name is not "Bunch sign up for my newsletter":

The thing that's driving me crazy about the impeachment coverage on TV cable news is that the primary goal isn't getting him out of office these last 12 days (although that would he helpful). It's all about banning him from running in 2024 and removing him from public life

— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) January 8, 2021

Surely, as Bunch suggests, the primary goal should not be getting Donald Trump out of office in the last few days of his presidency. That's especially true given that President Pence's first act would be to pardon Donald Trump in what would be for once, a President actually doing something on "Day 1."

Unless the US Constitution was, unbeknownst to the public, changed overnight, neither Donald Trump nor anyone else can be "removed from public life" except by incarceration.

Donald Trump could be impeached for a second time or be removed via the 25th Amendment, the latter highly unlikely, though it would let congressional Democrats and Republicans off the hook.

Yet, there is little chance Democrats will be officially in charge of the Senate before January 20 and thus there will be no conviction, if even a trial, of the President before that date. Obviously, then, he would not be banned from running in 2024 because he'd first have to be convicted by the Senate; nor removed from public life, whatever that phrase means.

Once he leaves office, Donald Trump could be impeached and tried in the Senate. The former may well happen; the latter will not, given that conviction requires a two-thirds majority and the distribution of power in the next Congress between senators Schumer and McConnell is yet to be determined.

If the Senate were to convict and- as is uncertain even in the next Congress- then rule that Trump could not again run for public office, it would be a punishment akin to that rendered upon more than 99.9% of Americans. Donald Trump could not enter another presidential race, just as you, I, and virtually every other individual will never even sniff the presidency.

This would not be a fate worse than death, the latter a far more likely condition for what in 2024 would be a 78-year-old man who has made at least two trips to the hospital in the past 14 months.

Nonetheless, there is an action which Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic officials, and much of the media realize holds greater peril for Donald J. Trump. That is prosecution, and not of the variety being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office nor the New York State Attorney General but that which would be pursued by the Justice Department.

Joe Biden- and probably Merrick Garland, the presumptive upcoming Attorney General- would like to go in another direction. It would be easier for them to fulfill their fantasy of moving on or "not looking backward" were ex-President Trump to be impeached, thus "punished enough already," as we might hear.  Paradoxically, that may be why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her caucus, many Senate Democrats, and Democratic-leaning legal analysts see impeachment, if the 25th Amendment is not invoked, as the easy way out.

 

 

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Thank Goodness, No Deplorables

One of these has been proven wrong and one was right. Can you guess which one is which?

In her column in The Washington Post on November 4, 2016, Kathleen Parker wrote

If Trump wins, he’ll be held more or less in check by the House and Senate because that’s the way our system of government is set up. Not even Republicans are eager to follow Trump’s lead....

The same, alas, can be said about both Clinton and Trump. Whatever they’ve projected or promised won’t be reflected in the reality of the presidency. It never is. Whatever they may wish to be, the president is only one-third of the equation — granted, with an armed force.

On a happier note, either way — cue Gloria Gaynor — oh, yes, we will survive.

Eight weeks earlier, another woman had commented

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

Virtually no one stood up to agree with Hillary Clinton. Either folks didn't agree with her or, well, it's Hillary and you know those emails. Right?

Clinton wasn't completely accurate- she did make up the word "generalistic." However, after the events of January 6 in the nation's capital, this appears particularly prescient:

.... there’s so much more than I find deplorable in his campaign: the way that he cozies up to white supremacist, makes racist attacks, calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities — you can’t make this up. He wants to round up and deport 16 million people, calls our military a disaster. And every day he says something else which I find so personally offensive, but also dangerous.

In the four years since, many people had found offensive Donald Trump, his actions and his words- but particularly his words, because that's where we are.  The culture of outrage focuses nowadays far less on behavior than on the spoken word, sometimes even from 15-year-old private citizens.

The multitudes of protesters- all were protesters, a significant minority something much worse- gathered at the US Capitol yesterday aren't all deplorable.  A few do not suffer from the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamaphobic attitudes toward which Clinton pointed.

But many of them do, and they were present at the Capitol to protest a free and fair election and to support someone openly racist, sexist, xenophobic, and Islamaphobic. (He deserves a pass on the homophobic, for all we know.)  And make no mistake about it: most of these folks are not stupid. When they tell pollsters that the election wasn't fairly held, they do not necessarily believe the election was rigged. Their response is a proxy for their support (and love) for Donald Trump and firm conviction that too many people dangerously erred and harmed their country by not giving him another chance to make America great again.

"Let's call Trump. He'll be happy. We're fighting for Trump." then continues, "We need to get our boy Donald J. Trump into office."pic.twitter.com/WIy0sUwKIO

— Cleavon MD (@Cleavon_MD) January 7, 2021

A side, but analogous, note: when a pollster once asked me whether I approved or disapproved of President Barack Obama, I asked her if there were a follow-up question in which I could indicate my reasoning. She said there was not, and thus I noted approval of an insufficiently bold President because disapproval inevitably would be cited as opposition to a Democrat routinely denounced as a dictatorial liberal.

Deplorable acts are committed by deplorable people. After many years as a reality show host (successfully) building a radically false image of himself, Donald J. Trump now has spent five years telling us who and what he is.  And so a tremendous number of people protested in Washington to overturn a democratic election in which voters decided to turn the guy out of office.

Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic or whatever, they consciously made a decision. "Deplorable" seems pretty mild now and the many wise men (and women) who reviled the candidate who warned us over four years ago about her opponent should concede error. Perhaps they would, too, but you know, it was Hillary.

 

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Not The First Time

It didn't start yesterday.

George Will is accurate and being celebrated on left Twitter after noting "on Wednesday, the members of the Hawley-Cruz cohort will violate the oath of office in which they swore to defend the Constitution from enemies “foreign and domestic.” They are its most dangerous domestic enemies." And you can't beat (emphasis Will's) "Hawley — has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to accomplishment?"  (Hawley is right about $2,000 stimulus checks but the push by him and Sanders hasn't succeeded.)

Nonetheless, Will is trying to blow smoke up our posteriors when he advances the notion that there are three discrete parties in politics:

America’s three-party system — Democrats, Hawley-Cruz Republicans, and McConnell-Sasse Republicans — will continue to take shape on Wednesday. Watch how many of these Republican senators who might be seeking reelection in 2022 have the spine to side with the adults against Hawley-Cruz et al. and the Grassy Knollers among their constituents: John Boozman, Richard Burr, Mike Crapo, Charles E. Grassley, John Hoeven, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Richard C. Shelby, John Thune, Todd C. Young.

Today, they are assuring what was already assured, that Joe Biden will be inaugurated President on January 21, 2021. However, each one has sided with the authoritarian on nearly every vote in this regime. All of them delivered a stunning rebuke to the rule of law and American democracy when they ignored the overwhelming evidence against President Trump in order to vote not guilty at his impeachment trial.

During the impeachment hearing early this year, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned 

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can't. You can't trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can't. He will not change and you know it.

What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.

After the President was impeached, all 15 of those GOP senators, though (or maybe because) aware that Trump would cheat, then not go quietly if defeated for re-election, voted for acquittal.

This isn't the GOP's first rigging rodeo. CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer recalls

On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court authorized manual recounts in four counties and set a November 26th deadline. The next day, the Miami-Dade County canvassing board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet the deadline. To hunker down and avoid the media frenzy that had descended on Miami, the officials decided to move to a smaller room on the 19th floor so they could be closer to the ballot-scanning machine, according to an account in Salon.

But Republican operatives, congressional staffers and lawyers had organized a group of protesters to fly to Florida, and the mob of "50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermes ties," as described by the Wall Street Journal, gathered in the high-rise building where the recount was taking place.

When New York Congressman John Sweeney, who was working for the Bush campaign, learned that the recount had been moved to another room, he ordered, the troops to "shut it down."

The protesters yelled and screamed, accusing the canvassers of trying to steal the election. The chants became fiercer and the demonstration increasingly raucous as they directly confronted the county officials. "Stop the count. Stop the fraud," they chanted.

Miami-Dade Democratic County Chairman Joe Geller bore the brunt of the protesters' ire. When someone handed him a sample ballot to test one of the voting machines, the protesters surrounded him and demand that he desist, accusing him of stealing ballots.

"This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me. At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death," he recalled. The police escorted Geller so that he could safely leave the building. Republican organizers denied that the situation ever became violent.

The strategy worked. Hours after the riot, the board decided to shut down its operations and the manual recount in Miami came to an end. (David Leahy, one member of the canvassing board, told the New York Times, "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process. That weighed heavy on our minds." But days later he denied the protests played a role in ending the manual recount.) The Supreme Court later handed the victory to George W. Bush, and a number of the participants in the Brooks Brothers Riot went on to serve in the administration and work in conservative politics.

Nor did the lying about the election process begin in 2020 as

“This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” recalled Geller, who is now a state legislator. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.”

Brad Blakeman, a Bush campaign operative who proudly admits to coordinating what he prefers to call the “Brooks Brothers Rebellion,” denies that things got violent.

“That’s all bulls---,” he told The Post. “There was no violence. There was no threatening behavior.”

Although senators Hawley and Cruz are straight-up authoritarians, their GOP colleagues chose to condone the President's crimes when they had the chance to shut them down.  Assaulting democracy is how Donald Trump rolls. But it's also how the Republican Party rolls.

 

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There Is A Reason For The Legal System. Use It.

This is what I'd expect from a Senior Adviser to the Lincoln Project:

The President of the United States is threatening the Georgia Secretary of State in order to flip an election and reverse the votes of the citizens of Georgia.

This is an impeachable offense and for anyone enabling it, a criminal conspiracy.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 3, 2021

There are sixteen (16) days left in the Trump presidency. He will not be impeached again, and Nichols knows it. Nichols has another  idea, which is to

shroud these seditionists in silence and opprobrium in perpetuity: no television interviews, no sinecures at universities or think tanks, no rehabilitating book tours, no jokey late-night appearances, no self-serving op-eds.... and must not be trusted ever again with political power.

Amen to the first but as long as there is a First Amendment, government can neither prevent those self-serving, generally paid opportunities, nor the right to run for political office. 

Lawyer and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, whom no one would mistake for a Republican, is more disappointing:

It would be nice if we could finally stop getting stuck on the “Was it a crime?” question. Was it? Maybe. But not committing a crime is the floor, not the ceiling. The bigger picture is that Trump has NO place holding a position of public trust and should never, ever, do so again

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) January 3, 2021

Donald Trump will never be appointed to "a position of public trust" or to anything, nor does he want to be.  He will not be elected to anything (again) either, but it's not within the purview of anyone to deny him the opportunity to try.

Nonetheless, there are two things the federal government can do. One is to establish a sort of truth commission, which would investigate the Trump Administration. Inevitably a bi-partisan group, it would conclude that, in the words of then-President Reagan, "mistakes were made" and in the mode of the Iran-Contra commission, no specific individual was specifically responsible or could be held accountable.

One suspects that Rangappa, Nichols, and others outraged by extortion and other efforts of President Trump to overturn a free election represent those whom David Frum recognizes as 

The sensible American majority (which) surely wants an end to Trump controversies after Inauguration Day, a return to normal governance and the crucial work ahead: overcoming the pandemic, restoring the economy, and renewing U.S. leadership of the world.

Holder of a law degree while a veteran, practicing journalist, Frum continues

But Trump gets a say too, as he got a say in the impeachment crisis. Trump is abusing the power of the presidency until his last hour in office. And his nonstop abuse seems likely to force a reckoning even by those most eager to move on. Trump will not be ignored; he will not let the chapter quietly close. Show him a red line, and he will cross it. And if the country’s red lines are to be reestablished, Trump will have to face the law he violated and violated and violated again.

Perhaps because, though a veteran, practicing journalist, Frum holds a law degree, he understands what the lawyers serving as contributors and pundits on cable news don't. Courts love to declare an issue "moot."

Biden wants to leave Trump's fate to the states and to civil litigation. But if Trump self-pardons, the next administration must contest the pardon's validity - and to do that, they must prosecute Trump, because courts won't answer theoretical questions. https://t.co/FniEg9tKAh

— David Frum (@davidfrum) January 4, 2021

Once Donald Trump leaves office, there is no reason he cannot be prosecuted. The incoming Biden Administration must not make a mockery of justice at the highest levels of government by condoning flagrant lawbreaking. Its duty is clear.

 

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