America can’t have one law for Democrats and another for Republicans. Except that we do.
As I discuss in this video, we’re a nation with two sets of laws, one written and one unwritten.
The written laws are selectively enforced. And the unwritten laws of politics are the only ones that truly matter.
Can we have a country where only Republicans get tickets, but Democrats don’t? That’s what prosecutorial discretion and selective prosecution amount to. An equal justice system is one in which prosecutions are determined by laws, not by a desire to punish your political opponents.
And yet it’s transparently obvious that is how things work now.
A totalitarian state doesn’t have to be a place with a whole bunch of new laws aimed at suppressing the political opposition. All that’s really needed is the politically selective enforcement of existing laws.
But back to the question of “Can we have a country where only Republicans get tickets, but Democrats don’t?” The short answer is that we can and we do. Civil rights law has largely displaced the Bill of Rights so that the only selective prosecutions that are scrutinized tend to be those affecting minority groups.
And yet selective prosecution makes a mockery of the First Amendment. If political prosecutors can simply find a crime to charge political opponents with that they would never charge anyone else with, there is no longer a meaningful right to maintain a political viewpoint. And then the First Amendment is dead.
Excellent points. Selective Prosecution is the short, easy road to Tyranny.
Selective prosecution is only intended to apply to individual cases. For instance, you might not want to prosecute a shoplifting charge against a 94 year old who took a loaf of bread from a store. It was never intended to apply to whole classes of cases or to groups of offenders. For leftist prosecutors to declare there are entire classes of cases they will not prosecute is not selective prosecution. It is a usurpation of the legislative power in which a single official substitutes his or her judgement for that of the people’s elected representatives. How it has been allowed to get to the current stage is beyond my comprehension and is just another illustration of the utter collapse of our institutions and their willingness to defend our society.
Indeed it was not.
Announcing that no drug offenses will be prosecuted or selectively prosecuting people for ideological reason is a grotesque abuse.
Republicans were too slow on the ball to react and too indecisive to take a clear stand on issues like DACA or drugs, and now they’re up against the extension of that into targeting political opponents.
There have been some efforts at a pushback at a state level, e.g. DeSantis’ action against a Soros prosecutor, but there need to be legislative solutions.
Prosecutors cannot be a law unto themselves.
Bigger issue though is the lack of protection for viewpoint discrimination in civil rights law.