Cannonball Run

Limits? We don't need no stinkin' limits! Arbitrary and capricious enforcement of the law is tantamount to lawlessness.

There is a lot of legitimate discussion about the lawlessness of the current regime these days.

The interesting part of it is how they do it under the auspices of “the law” when it is anything but.

With the recent Hunter Biden plea debacle, the DOJ colluded with Hunter’s lawyers to try to slide what amounted to a lifetime pardon for Hunter under the nose of the judge, mostly to protect his father, the sitting president. That outrage was followed immediately by an announcement that the DOJ made a mistake in not telling the Bahamians that they needed to prosecute Sam Bankman Fraud for millions of dollars of illegal campaign contributions to the Biden campaign and other Democrats so, oops, can’t go after him for THAT, can we?

Holy hell, this is true lawlessness. It also raises the question of whom or what is responsible for keeping them in check. The answer to the “what” is easy, it is the restrictions written in the Constitution – the “whom” is a bit more complex.

In the Hunter case, had this been in DC instead of in front of a skeptical judge in Delaware, the public would not have found out that Hunter couldn’t be charged or compelled to testify about any of the shady deals with the Big Guy until Merrick Garland announced that, oh my, they made another mistake, a pure oversight, you see – but it was blessed by a judge, so everything is just fine. Hunter is off the hook.

We see just the opposite with Hack Smith (oops, I meant Jack Smith), heaping charged on anyone withing spitting distance of Trump – no doubt trying to scare them into rolling on the President. On the one hand, Democrats are being let off the hook without consequence where GOPers are being hung on streetlamps by the dozen.

It’s lawful, but at the same time, it isn’t.

Imagine that it is 10 p.m. and you are on Interstate 80 in the middle of Wyoming – from experience, I can tell you that late at night, the traffic on the stretch from Rawlings in the east to Rock Springs in the west is a lonely stretch. Assume that the speed limit has been set at 80 mph. You are driving along, your fuel injected, twin-turbo, 577 horsepower Mercedes SL63 AMG is running smoothly, weather conditions are good and there’s not another set of headlights or taillights for as far as your eye can see. You just topped off the tank with go juice in Rawlings and you are Burt Reynolds and this is your Cannonball Run, so why not?

What stops you from cranking the good old cruise control up to 95, 105 – or even 135, dropping the top and pointing the German engineered land missile toward the last point in the horizon where you saw the sun and launching?

The answer is nothing and nobody - but you. No law can stop you. A law enforcement officer can temporarily reduce your speed with an autograph session - but once he is out of sight, you are free to go right back to being Burt Reynolds.

Whether you fear punishment or not, the only thing that really can stop you is your respect for the law, a belief that adhering to the speed limit is the right thing to do.

What of limits? Once the 80-mph barrier is broken, the functional limit is only what you feel safe in getting away with. If you believe that your AMG can outrun anything on the road, why not 135 mph? You are already outside the law, right?

This example is to propose that laws do little to restrain people or constrain government without the people in charge respecting those limits. I know that I have quoted it before, but John Adams wrote:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

Woodrow Wilson said the office of the president was only limited by the man holding it. Obama practiced a Wilsonian president and Biden learned well from Obama, someone for whom the law was meaningless if it was in his way. Obama was worse than Woodrow Wilson and Biden is worse than Obama.

If the Constitution is the “what”, the “whom” are the people with whom we have entrusted control of government – they have a responsibility not to stretch the Constitution to make it fit their political desires, they must endeavor to protect and abide by is as is required by their oath of office.

There is also another “who”. That “who” us – “We, the people” as designated by the Constitution. We have a duty to refrain from electing people to office without the requisite character to hold to the limits and as much a duty to defeat those in office who seek to “reinterpret” the Constitution.

I think Hunter’s deal was at risk the minute the Congressional GOP and the insurgent right-wing media began getting the word out. People were watching.

The lawless respect no laws and their attempts to trick us into believing they do is the greatest of insults.

Illegitimacy has its roots in a disrespect for lawful controls; therefore, it is not illogical to consider a lawless administration to be illegitimate.

Samuel Adams would be shooting by now.