Republican desperados

The Republican Party, which has long prided itself on its law and order stance, is now a criminal enterprise. That leaves Democrats, by default, as both the party of the rule of law, and the party of common decency.

The Robert Mueller investigation has now demonstrated that Donald Trump and his associates worked with Russia to throw the 2016 election. The indictments, convictions, and guilty pleas are overflowing, but the Republicans are doing everything they can to help Trump escape prosecution, and to hold on to their own political power.

The latest developments in the case led CNN to ask Senator Orrin Hatch whether he was worried that Trump was implicated. He went first with a political argument.

"The Democrats will do anything to hurt this president."

Hatch was reminded that the charges were made by federal prosecutors. He then took a Rand Paulian libertarian tack.

"I don't think he was involved in crimes but even then, you know, you can make anything a crime under the current laws if you want to, you can blow it way out of proportion, you can do a lot of things." (Said the man who has spent his career fashioning "the current laws.")

The Republicans have invented a new term, process crimes, which we used to call coverups: lies that people tell authorities to hide their crimes. The Republicans would have us believe that being prosecuted for lying is no big deal in the overall scheme of things, and the prosecutors are therefore taking cheap shots instead of prosecuting the crime that gave birth to the lie.

Well, it's a new era, isn't it? Once upon a time, Bill Clinton had sex in the Oval Office with a White House employee. If a Democrat complained that it was a bit of a stretch to impeach a president for getting a blow job, Republicans could be counted on to retort, "Not because he got a blow job, but because he lied about it." That is now what is called a process crime by the same people who leveled that charge against President Clinton.

Here is what Orrin Hatch said back then.

"This great nation can tolerate a president who makes mistakes, but it cannot tolerate one who makes a mistake and then breaks a law to cover it up."

The Trump administration is an overflowing cesspool, but the Republican legislators don't care. It's one law for Republicans, and another one for Democrats.

Nowadays "law and order" applies only to people who are not rich, powerful, white, Republican males.