Rule of Law vs. We the People

To the Editor:

The American judicial system is at a crisis crossroads. Within the ongoing litigations involving former president Trump is an issue argued for thousands of years, and at the heart of deliberations by Plato and Socrates: Where does the buck stop — with the voted will of the people, or the tyranny of absolute power vested in either monarch, dictator or Supreme Court Jurists?

Until now, laws and juries were largely excluded from political conflicts. The exceptions being the resolution of disputes in voting procedure laws and recount machinations. When in 2015 Donald Trump announced he was running for President of the United States, whatever decorum left in politics evaporated into a war that would resolve to whether an oligarch-like bureaucracy or a majority of voting citizens would have the last call on all issues of government.

As President, Mr. Trump had difficulty keeping the massive U.S. Government working whole-heartedly for agendas defined both by new law and the exercise of his presidential prerogatives. But in the wake of 2020 election fraud allegations, and the populist reactions and demonstrations supported by then President Trump, political warfare has gone full bore for the weapons of total litigious annihilation that reside within a decision soon to be before the United States Supreme Court.

At the heart of it all is this question: Can a sitting President be legally charged with anything, civil or criminal, and does this indemnity for in-office actions extend for the duration of his life after he leaves office? There could be no more dramatic way to define what a self governing republic really means than by the Court’s delegation of this decision to us.

If the Supremes instead rule in favor of charging Trump, the chilling effect on the office of president will disrupt the Founders’ balance of powers design and turn the country closer towards history’s pre-USA legacy of corrupt and cruel tyranny, ever at war within and outside their borders.

The Founders chose to side with an all powerful presidency held in check solely by the threat of impeachment. They must have believed that this was the lesser of these two delegations of executive power, which, combined with the threat of impeachment, would largely restrain the inevitable lurching of human proclivities towards the tyranny of unchecked dictators and monarchies.

Let all Americans, left or right leaning, pray the wisdom of resolving this tricky question — for the collective wisdom of voters acting as the ultimate jury — is the only certain way to save American style democracy.