America Needs to Prosecute Its Presidents

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America Needs to Prosecute Its Presidents https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/29/america-prosecute-presidents-pardon-trump-nixon/:

chamerionwrites https://chamerionwrites.tumblr.com/post/634258945186398208/america-needs-to-prosecute-its-presidents :

The American political system has no tradition of official disgrace or damnatio memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae. All presidents are honored, even those who were awful or, in the case of President John Tyler, disloyal. Tyler, the tenth president, not only ran a disastrous administration but ended https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/john-tyler-traitor-well-yes-actually-/2013/02/24/a387eece-7d29-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html his public life as a congressman in a brief-lived treasonous slave power. And yet even Tyler receives official remembrances, including a presidential dollar coin https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-medal-programs/presidential-dollar-coin/john-tyler featuring his image.

That coin illustrates the natural arc of American political culture: institutional ignoring of the misdeeds of the powerful in the name of “healing.” Yet this norm does not heal; it harms. It makes a mockery of Americans’ belief that they have a government of laws, not of men, if those laws do not apply to the men who enforce the laws. It constitutes a denial of justice and an amnesty granted only to the powerful. Left unchallenged, this norm will protect Trump from the reckoning that the country needs.

Consider how the system dealt with Nixon.

Time has so effaced the details of Nixon’s malfeasance that he has regained a patina of statesmanship. Thus, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, could recently tweet https://twitter.com/RichardHaass/status/1308928396752293888?s=20 a favorable comparison between Nixon and Trump, arguing that that “Nixon, for all his flaws, was a conservative who abided by norms.”

Haass’s viral tweet reflects an irony that, in death, Nixon has finally been accepted by the sort of institution whose rejections kindled https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BORMIRG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 in him a lifelong resentment of the Eastern Establishment he tried to join. In doing so, it reflects a general amnesia about why Watergate was so bad that illustrates how far elite culture will go to forgive the crimes of the powerful.

The signature moment of Watergate is the June 17, 1972, break-in https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/watergate/watergate-break, when a team of burglars were caught in the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Reporting and investigations soon uncovered ties to the White House. But that was just the tip of a very dirty iceberg. Subsequent prosecutorial and congressional investigations broke apart not just the Nixon administration’s frantic, illegal cover-up of its ties to the burglary but uncovered an entire panoply of what Attorney General John Mitchell called https://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/13/archives/white-house-horrors.html the “White House horrors.”

These included use and the attempted https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2020-06-25/spying-americans-new-release-infamous-huston-plan use of government agencies like the IRS https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/johnnie-walters-irs-commissioner-under-president-richard-m-nixon-dies-at-94/2014/06/26/e6ae4906-fd3d-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html to go after the president’s political enemies. The administration sought to persecute its enemies, leading to abuses like an attempt to steal the files https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/daniel-ellsberg-nixon-white-house-wanted-shut-me-assault-n774376 of dissident Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The president directed https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/22/us/tapes-show-nixon-ordering-theft-of-files.html his aides to retrieve classified papers from the Brookings Institution by any means necessary, including stealing them or firebombing the think tank. Even the Watergate break-in turned out to be the second one—the first https://www.history.com/topics/watergate-scandal-timeline-nixon, on May 28, 1972, had been undetected.

And Nixon was not above using his position to enrich himself. He used government agencies to improve his private residences. And he evaded taxes, including by improperly claiming deductions https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/45978/MA26_1_2.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y related to his gift of his vice-presidential papers to the government. Far from abiding by norms, he broke them with abandon…

Ford’s pardoning of Nixon was unpopular at the time, with 53 percent of https://news.gallup.com/vault/218198/gallup-vault-pardon-took-decade-forgive.aspx Americans rejecting it. It has since become conventional wisdom among America’s institutional elite that Ford’s act was merciful and correct. In 2001, a panel of eminences https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/news-and-press/press-releases/president-gerald-ford-and-civil-rights-leader-john-lewis-named-recipients-of-2001-profile-in-courage recruited by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation honored Ford’s pardon of Nixon by giving him its Profiles in Courage Award.

At the awards dinner, Senator Ted Kennedy praised https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/profile-in-courage-award/award-recipients/president-gerald-ford-2001 the wisdom of Ford’s decision. “I was one of those who spoke out against his action then,” Kennedy said. “But time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right. His courage and dedication to our country made it possible for us to begin the process of healing and put the tragedy of Watergate behind us…”

The healing myth has become part of a bipartisan catechism even though its central premise—that the pardon healed the country—is unsupportable. In the long run, as Holtzman said, “the Nixon pardon has had terrible ramifications.” It set the stage for later pardons related to executive self-interest, including George H.W. Bush’s pardons of many figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal.

If U.S. political culture can congratulate itself for rehabilitating Nixon, then the temptations for a Biden administration to do the same for Trump will be powerful. Doing so will let the administration move on to other priorities, sensible centrists will argue. And the next election is only two years away—do you really want to have Trump still in the news by then?

Advocates of a pardon or other forms of clemency will point to other factors as well. They will argue that, in a polarized country, the specter of politicized prosecutions will raise the possibility that vengeful Republicans will retaliate later. And indeed, it would be disastrous for democracy were each administration to misuse prosecution against its political enemies.

Yet given what we already know about the president’s finances and conduct in office, an investigation of the Trump administration is unlikely to be politicized in any meaningful sense. It is only a refusal to prosecute that could be politicized, in the sense of being guided by political calculation rather than a commitment to the rule of law. (That would apply doubly to the idea that a pardon could help ease Trump out of the White House without strife.)

More sophisticated observers might caution that even potentially justifiable prosecutions could have deleterious effects on U.S. politics and the country’s standing in the world. The prosecutions of Brazil’s most recent presidents—Lula, Dilma, and Michel Temer—did much to clear the way https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/brazil-lula-carwash-corruption-temer-due-process-dilma/552056/ for the election of the country’s disastrous current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Similar concerns have been raised about other prosecutions elsewhere, like Ecuador’s conviction https://www.france24.com/en/20200408-ecuador-s-former-president-rafael-correa-found-guilty-of-corruption of former president Rafael Correa, which barred him from a return to politics.

But it’s strange to argue that democracy depends on not prosecuting those who commit crimes. In France, even a prime minister caught misusing public funds may now go to jail https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53217298 rather than retire to a villa. And although some have criticized https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/asia/south-koreas-troubling-history-of-jailing-ex-presidents/ South Korea for prosecuting its ex-presidents (over half of whom are now in prison), measures like the Varieties of Democracy index show that Seoul’s record on liberal democracy https://www.v-dem.net/en/analysis/CountryGraph/ is stronger than that of the United States.

It should not be surprising that democracy and prosecutions of former officials can go together. That is, after all, the entire point of the rule of law. Holding officials to account forms a critical part of strengthening democratic institutions. And the ballot box is only one way to do that.

That is why Biden must not waver. If a former president has never been prosecuted in American history, that’s because the last time the country had a chance to do so it was denied that opportunity. Far from being bad for democracy, a sober, lengthy, and deliberative investigation would be good for establishing a record of the rot in the Trump administration. And it would be a major boost for liberal democracy and anti-corruption efforts by demonstrating that in mature democracies, officials face consequences.

Having a president who committed crimes is not unprecedented in American history. What would be unprecedented would be to end this long national nightmare by letting them face the same justice that any other American should.