As the current regime does what it falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, the problem of how to investigate and prosecute elected officials and partisan political appointees joins the clamor in the news cycle.
Political scandals that slop over into criminal behavior are nothing new in this country. Watergate was huge in its day, and has resonance even now. Richard Nixon resigned because his own senators told him that they would convict him after the House impeached him, which would then cut him loose to face criminal prosecution for his part in the actions of his minions.
Those were the good old days, when members of Congress recognized their power and responsibility, and respected their office enough to exert its Constitutional powers even against a member of their own party. Cynically, one might wonder if they would have been as diligent during Nixon's first term, rather than when he was already a lame duck with poll numbers that would reflect badly on the re-election chances of all of them, but regardless of that, they did carry out their duty.
The hyper-partisanship that reasserted itself in the 1980s and ramped up in the '90s has reached the point of complete breakdown. There has always been ugliness, but easy access to ugly opinions via social media has given it vastly more reach. An older Republican acquaintance of mine told me back in the 1990s about a Republican coworker of his who came in right after John F. Kennedy's assassination, saying, "I'm glad that son of a bitch is dead!"
If "the enemy of your enemy is your friend," political violence becomes a convenience. You may say that the assassin should not have committed the murder, but you freely admit that you're glad they did. It's partisan warfare pushed beyond rhetoric.
In that climate, when it comes to criminal investigations of people who happen to be in the opposite political party to the one in power, it ceases to be an earnest search for truth and justice and becomes, "they investigate one of ours, we investigate ten of theirs." A cynical public, saturated in propaganda for decades, doesn't really trust either side. Researching the details seems like more trouble than it's worth.
Unfortunately for the jaded public, one side is right. In this instance, it's the "left." Not to say that the Democratic Party doesn't have its scammy sleazebags like Bob Menendez. But they have not been dealing in a broad campaign of targeted persecution toward an extensive menu of marginalized communities. They haven't engaged in the obvious, persistent collusion with extreme wealth and foreign autocrats that the Republicans have. Not so much lately, anyway.
Because unelected civil servants are members of political parties, and these affiliations are known, their ostensibly nonpartisan actions on behalf of their responsibility to the Constitution get skewed by partisan media outlets as sinister or virtuous depending on the D or the R associated with the lead investigator and the target of the investigation. Long before anything comes to trial -- if ever -- the court of public opinion has heard and reheard the case dozens of times and issued conflicting verdicts. While that should not have an effect on the speed and efficiency of the justice system investigating genuine infractions, the political component looms over the proceedings.
Because power is gained and retained through elections -- at least until the current regime succeeds in turning them into a meaningless piece of theater -- prosecutors know that their actions will have a direct influence in the publicity campaigns leading up to the actual voting. The partisan loyalty of the prosecutor may not influence a jury, but it will influence voters. One of the best ways to hide out from criminal prosecution is to become a political candidate and condemn the "partisan witch hunt" coming after you. Maybe you only get as far as George Santos did*. Maybe you end up dragging a right-wing authoritarian cabal into the executive branch twice. Maybe you serve as the Attorney General of Texas for ten years despite beginning that phase of your career by negotiating away fraud charges and later surviving impeachment for bribery, and go on to be a candidate for US Senate.
The saying goes that power corrupts. Power corrupts the corruptible. It also attracts the already susceptible or criminal. Elections are sales campaigns. The majority of voters are not digging deeply into political philosophy and the myriad details of each candidate in every election presented to them at local, state, and national levels. Who has time? When things are good, the problem doesn't seem acute. When things are bad, average citizens are busy surviving. In either case, they vote from the information that comes easily to them.
Information is everywhere these days. From three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers in the late 20th Century, we now have broadcast and cable TV, hundreds (or more) of online journalists, the remnants of print journalism, and the online versions of corporate media. The truth may be out there. You might even see it flit by on one of your devices, but you don't have time to capture and verify it.
People end up in information silos because it's convenient and comforting. Their biases are upheld. The choice is simplified. Even in the old days with less media, you had to buy the newspaper, and the television news only covered what fit into the half-hour slots morning and evening. When longer format news programs emerged, like The Today Show and Good Morning America, the stories often repeated during the news portion, before the show then switched to vapid pap for its second hour. Whatever you got "in depth" was edited for space and time. What got cut would subtly -- or not so subtly -- reflect the bias of the management. The bigger the corporation, the more the bias favors corporate interests. The business side of media overcomes any commitment to journalistic or artistic integrity in the news or entertainment divisions.
In the early days of consumer Internet, those of us with computer geek friends heard that you could knock together a rudimentary website or go to one of the emerging free blog hosting sites like Google's Blogspot, to post your thoughts for anyone in the world to find, read, and pass on, building international readership and perhaps fame and fortune as your previously obscure voice gets lifted worldwide. It's true: in the decades that I have been posting to my blogs, more than a dozen people have seen my work as far away as Australia and Russia, according to my stats.
Today there are many more platforms offering much more sophisticated production values, mostly in the much more popular video format. The basic service may be free to content creators and their audience, but the infrastructure and personnel that allow this to happen are owned by very wealthy people and corporations. Your free, independent web journalism is seen, judged, and managed by a profit-driven corporation. That influence might be more obvious on some sites and less intrusive on others, but it's in the background everywhere, ready to shift the influence to protect its own interests. Any site could go the way of Twitter if the right wrong billionaire takes it that way.
That brings us around again to the primary impediment to prosecution of political figures: for every educated and informed commentator explaining the nature of the crimes and the threat they pose to the basic freedoms promised by the Constitution, there are dozens of presenters insisting that the prosecutors themselves are the threat. Or maybe the prosecutors are the threat, as we're seeing now, and the loud voices of obfuscation are drawing a false equivalency between the unconstitutional abuse of power now and the actual exertion of constitutional power in the previous administration's investigations.
It seems as though the government is tasked with regulating itself, and it's true. So is the watchdog suspect because of who holds the chain and fills the food bowl? It's possible, because the only powerful independent entity to demand decency is a unified American public. So far in history, we have never had that. We've only had temporary majorities -- sometimes significantly large -- that manage to hold power to account through the actions of elected representatives. Movements come together to right wrongs like slavery, improve working conditions and food safety, advance civil rights and women's rights, end the Vietnam War, pay lip service to the environment... and then dissipate when the battle seems won enough, momentum established. It will take care of itself from here. And of course it does not.
*Written before Trump commuted Santos's sentence.
