Does Trump Really Face Jail Time?

"While discussing whether a sitting president can be indicted, former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told CNN that President Trump knows he faces “some pretty strong criminal liability” when he leaves office and suggested Trump’s future 'looks like it’s behind bars.” 

And that's not even the conspiring with Russia thing. 

The big question for me (and so many others) after these past two years is this: How can the Trump supporters continue to pretend that he is telling the truth while the bulk of the news media say otherwise? 

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Indicting Sitting President

Some in the news media and the Trump organization continue to claim that a sitting president cannot be indicted. This does not seem to be established law, but rather a claim that goes back to the Nixon days. I wonder how many people remember the career of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who pled guilty to felony tax evasion and almost immediately submitted his resignation as Vice President. 

Agnew took bribes from contractors as governor of Maryland and continued to accept payoffs while Vice President. The investigation of state level corruption eventually implicated him. Like Trump, he began by denying everything, but Agnew eventually had to agree to a plea deal. 

Whether the office of the President is significantly more protected from prosecution than the office of the Vice President (or if either is protected at all) remain as open questions. But we do have a strong precedent in the history of Spiro Agnew that a constitutional officer of the United States can be investigated, charged, and convicted while holding office. 

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Dems are Milksops

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones asks why Democrats are such milksops. In this case, he is referring to the moves by the Wisconsin legislature to weaken the office of governor before the newly elected Democrat can take office. Kevin has a point. We've gone through a couple of decades where the Republicans and their shills have managed to raise a ruckus over just about anything and everything that Democrats do. We've now seen multiple attempts by lame duck Republican legislators to throw a wrench in the works while they still have a few weeks of power left. 

Well, governors have lots of power. The governor-elect of Wisconsin has so far been polite and oh-so-measured in his response, but as Kevin suggests, he needs to make clear that he does not accept such partisan and anti-democratic acts. 

He should make sure that just as soon as he takes office, he should inflict pain on the members of the legislature who stole his legitimate power. There are lots of ways to do this starting with the ability to withhold favors to any and all of their districts. In the same way that Republican legislatures have frozen the federal government a couple of times in recent years, the governor of Wisconsin can put the legislature in a bind -- let them either compromise on their previous dirty work or face the consequences of dealing with their own constituents. 

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Ballot Counting

As the ballot counting winds down, we face a new day in which Democrats hold 46 out of 53 congressional seats allotted to the state of California. When you consider the entire House of Representatives, A little arithmetic shows us that California Democrats hold eleven percent of all the seats. 

This should open the door to rescinding the punishments that the previous Republican congress inflicted on Californians as a whole, in particular the changes in the federal income tax structure. 

The only thing standing in their way would be that they act as milksops. 

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Year End

As we approach the end of another year, it's traditional to consider what has gone before and how we might have done things differently. Ignoring for the moment that mistake our country made in 2016, I begin to muse on a mistake that was made a century and a half ago. There is an analogy with what we did right in 1945. 

In the aftermath of WWII, the allies engaged in a program called denazification. It obviously wasn't perfect, what with the number of German officials who escaped to South America, not to mention those who were absorbed into the American rocketry program. 

Still, the policy in postwar Germany became anti-Nazi. Children were taught about the past in school. Over the years, the German people learned to deal with their crimes and have been trying to avoid similar mistakes in the present. 

That leads us to the current era in which it is still acceptable in some parts of this country to raise the confederate battle flag and to spout neo-confederate rhetoric. This behavior is the tip of the racist iceberg, but it is real and it is not without its numbers. The fact that the current southern United States continues to vote for candidates who espouse a thinly camouflaged version of the old Jim Crow is just one more bit of evidence for our failure in the 1860s and 1870s. 

I have family friends who explain that in their upbringing (in places such as Louisiana), the war we call the Civil War was taught in school as "The War of Northern Aggression." 

For a century after that war, southerners loyal to their heritage built up a storyline about "The Lost Cause," implying that the Civil War (excuse me, "the War Between the States") was a battle to preserve -- something. 

Maybe it was southern pride, the landed aristocracy, a treasured way of life, or just the desire to be independent of northern, urban lawmakers who preyed on the rural economy of the old south. There were lots of romantic excuses to avoid the issue of race. 

And in spite of the evidence to the contrary, the southerners somehow managed to avoid admitting that the war was about -- and only about -- slavery. The fact that 3 million human beings had been enslaved, and the fact that the net monetary value of slaves was the bulk of wealth in that place and time is something that was politely ignored. 

During the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (i.e.: the 150th anniversary), there was a resurgence of discussion about the war, ranging from the conduct of the military conflict to the actual cause. One of the best popularizations of that discussion was carried on the website of the New York Times as the blog called Disunion. Let's just summarize one conclusion to be drawn from those discussions: The Civil War came about because the south was wedded to slavery and slave culture. The north was dedicated to preventing the spread of slavery into new territories which would ultimately become new states. The evidence even shows that southerners were aiming to spread their system of slavery into the Caribbean and into lands south of the United States. 

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The Great Failure 

Our great failure as a nation was that we didn't enforce a prohibition on teaching The Lost Cause and The War of Northern Aggression in the schools of the south in the postwar years. We failed to teach the real truth of the prewar south and to stress the utter depravity of that system. We also failed to preserve the rights of former slaves and failed to make reparations of any sort. 

We are consequently about a hundred years behind where we should have been. It's a painful truth to accept, but it is one we should begin to come to terms with. The rest of the country should reject everything about neo-confederate thought.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw