Another day, another indictment of former President Trump. This one, out of Georgia, would criminalize election challenges.
Jonathan Turley observes that in this fourth indictment, “every call, speech, and tweet appears a criminal step in the conspiracy. District Attorney Fani Willis appears to have elected to charge everything and everyone and let God sort them out.”
This is the kitchen-sink, banana-republic approach to “justice.” Facts? Plausibility? Irrelevant when the would-be one-party regime has a target in view.
In masterful understatement or point-missing, Turley writes that the “greatest challenge for Georgia is to offer a discernible limiting principle on when challenges in close elections are permissible and when they are criminal.”
But how can it ever be criminal simply to challenge election results or call for a recount or plead for further investigation of the flimsiest of allegations, even via imperfect phone call?
The “limiting principle” operative here is obvious. Is the challenger on our side or the other side? Our side, the challenge is legal. Other side, it’s illegal, prosecutable. This is Willis’s “principle.”
Per Turley, it’s important for campaigns to seek judicial review of an election “without fear of prosecution.” Yes, important. But from the perspective of those who want to prevent other-side campaigns from seeking recourse when an election is close or seems pockmarked by fraud, what’s important is making sure other-side campaigns do fully feel this fear.
The bad guys already understand what’s at stake, what Mr. Turley is so carefully explaining as if they are perhaps only a little confused.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “Election Challenge Criminalized?”
State Senator Colton Moore, of District 53, has called for an emergency session of the Georgia Legislature to examine whether Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s office ought be at a minimum defunded, and possibly her removed from office, as has now become legal for the Governor to do.
Fani has just announced her re-election campaign to continue as DA in what has become the most criminally dangerous county in Georgia. Seems she should have more actual work to do rather than chasing political kudos for the Democrats.
Perhaps anti-Trumpism is the last refuge of an incompetent scoundrel.
Easy to dismiss the incompetent scoundrels. The problem is the COMPETENT ones, the ones just as corrupted by the absence of consequences and willing to continue to seek personal money and cred at the expense of the country’s liberty. The founders expected them and tried to set up ways to turn them out without the necessity for shooting them. But the entrenched eventually undermined those mechanisms. Which brings us to today.
Maybe “Trumpism” is the last refuge of incompetent scoundrels.
Do any of the counts in the Georgia indictment assert, as a crime, seeking judicial review?
Does anyone believe that if all Trump and friends had done was “seek judicial review,” they’d have been charged with crimes?
Should only seeking judicial review be legal? Are you just grabbing for a formula that, without examination, seems plausible?