Coyote Blog

I don't know who this is, but this X post by Cynical Publius has been quoted by a number of Conservative sites.  This represents a VERY common attitude among Conservatives and deserves to be quoted in depth.  In regards to the prosecution of Letitia James he writes:

You see, for many years now Democrats have believed that they could do basically whatever they wanted to Republicans, whilst Republicans were still bound by the Old Rules of comity and respect.

Those were the New Rules. (Hat tip, Kurt Schlichter.). They thought we would never adopt the New Rules.

We did.

The James indictment says to Democrats: “You no longer can assume that we will let you do whatever you want to us. We will do to you what you did to us. And we will be merciless until you prove you will never do it again.”

The particular beauty of the James indictment is that she brought the most scurrilous and ridiculous of charges against Trump, while the record shows that James clearly committed the basic federal crimes she has been charged with.

Here’s the other thing. Federal laws are so complex and capacious that pretty much every one of us breaks a federal law every few months without knowing that we did. There has long been a tacit understanding in this regard that politicians would not take advantage of this with regard to mere “footfaults” on nonsense laws. But Democrats decide to abandon that too. New Rules. That we now follow. Suck on it, Democrats. You get what you paid for.

(But to repeat; James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.)

That last part is likely true, though it is not clear that very many people are prosecuted for it.  It is certainly NOT true for the Comey prosecution, which as currently charged is a total crock [update:  this is not to say that Comey is guilty of abuse of power charges -- it is simply to say that the current charges are cr*p].

Whatever the case, Mr. Publius appears to be working from the assumption that getting tough on the Left with actions like this is the only way to de-escalate all the lawfare -- I suppose the logic being that bullies back down when challenged and forced to face accountability.  This is clearer in some of the comments to the post:

This is the FAFO (f*ck around, find out) stance being taken by many Republicans, reflecting the decision-making rules of playground and bar fights. But for all that we overuse fight analogies when referring to politics, the correct behaviors in a Constitutional Republic which emphasizes the rule of law are different than in a bar fight.  Precedents really do matter, and even more so precedents that are repeated and reinforced by the political opposition get set in stone.  Mr. Publius is correct in saying that any person is likely guilty of something given the web of detailed, illogical, and self-contradictory Federal and state laws and regulations.  That is all the more reason to avoid degenerating into tit for tat lawfare as this legal environment makes lawfare all too easy -- against most anyone.  Our out of control regulatory state creates an environment like a dry overgrown southern California ravine on a hot day during a drought.  The Biden administration started some fires but ultimately they were contained -- Republicans should remember that despite everything (maybe because of all the lawfare end the sympathy and anger it engendered) their guy was elected.  The response now should be to exercise great care until the fire danger is reduced.  Instead, Republicans want to whip out the flamethrower.

I get called a simp or a cuck or worse for wishing turn back the clock on lawfare.  But historically we revere people who did just that.  The best examples of this occurring are from the early history of the US, such as in the election of 1800 when Jefferson just edged out Aaron Burr in a contentious election.  I am sure the Federalists were mighty pissed at Mr. Jefferson -- hell, their anger still resonates today in an extremely popular modern Broadway musical -- but they honorably turned over power to their hated rival. Looking farther back into history, Mr. Publius has adopted a nom de plume presumably from on interest in Roman civilization, or at least in how our founders admired the Roman republic.  But he needs to go back and re-study how the Roman republic died, a victim of 150 years of steadily escalating precedents that eroded the norms of the old republic.  I suggested in the online comments he might want to change his online name to "Graccus" to acknowledge the similar path he is pointing towards in this country.

Or perhaps even better historical examples are the famous blood feuds like between the Hatfields and the McCoys.  At what point in this feud do you think that retaliation and escalation by one party "taught the other a lesson" or caused the other to back down and de-escalate?   Never, which is why such feuds ended only when everyone was dead.

But an even better way to refute this Mr. Publius's position is to, for a moment, accept the author's premises about the Democrats.   There is an old political joke that goes like this:

This is sort of funny, but there is actually a better meta joke associated with this I will come back to in the postscript.  But I think we can confidently ascribe this position to the author Publius and to many other Republicans.  They are convinced that the Democrats are evil and that Republicans are well-intended but stupid because they always let Democrats get away with everything and are always to civilized to really fight back.  Just read the comment thread above.

But let's assume this is true for the moment.  If the Democrats are really always historically evil and law-breaking, what the hell makes one think that being more bare-knuckled is going to change them?  If they are evil, are you really expecting them to say "hey, you got me, we went too far, let's dial it back" or are they just going to respond by going to 11 the next time?  The author's strategy fails based on his own assumptions.  Unless his strategy is to turn the US into a banana republic.

Postscript:  The meta joke embedded in the joke quoted above is that believing this statement is one of the few bipartisan political beliefs that exist.  Republicans and Democrats BOTH will agree to this statement with a smile ... with the one small difference that Democrats will assume it was written by one of their own and thus that Republicans are the evil party and Democrats are the stupid party that play the game too genteelly.  And both the Republican and the Democrat presented with this passage would be shocked and outraged that their opposition would believe its the other way around.

Which brings us back to the case in question.  Let's generalize the last line in the Publius post above as "the charges against our guy were a politically-motivated crock, while our charges against their guy are just and fair."  Both R's and D's believe this absolutely from their perspective right now.  Their lawfare is righteous, the other guy's is evil.  So how is escalation of the lawfare going to achieve anything except a degeneration into banana republic politics?

Postscript #2:  I am not a Republican so I am probably not an appropriate source of advice to them.  But the Republican opportunity in my mind is to drive a wedge between mainstream traditional Democrats and the increasingly crazy, sometimes violent far-Left progressives.  This is something Trump seems pretty good at, when he can avoid chasing some new squirrel.  But I can tell you that one thing mainstream traditional Diane-Rehm-listening Democrats are NOT going to like is anything that feels like undermining the rule of law.  Republican bare-knuckle lawfare is not going to sit well, and is going to drive them into the arms of the crazies, no matter whether the Republicans think Democrats "started it" or not.  Republicans are actually winning the PR battle on the shutdown (first time in my whole life that has happened) and Trump has been pretty good at painting Democrats into defending extreme positions on 80-20 issues.  Taking immigration as an example -- where I am a strong supporter of increasing immigration limits so this is frustrating to me -- Progressives have made the whole immigration cause about protecting a few named, obvious felons from deportation.  And thus losing the PR battle.

Against this backdrop of Progressive own-goals, arresting violent rioters and serial felons will likely get grudging approval even among some Democrats; putting Comey in jail for contempt of Congress is only going to feel good to Republicans and can do nothing but hurt their popularity in the middle.

Last week I spent a bit of time looking at the indictment of James Comey (not hard, it's barely a page long).  At first I thought I must be missing some pages.  The indictment is for lying when Comey told Congress that he had not "authorized" an employee to leak the Hillary Clinton investigation to the WSJ.  But everyone agrees, apparently even the prosecutors, that Comey did not even know about the leak or intention to leak before it happened.  It looked to me like the whole case was built on the argument that Comey "authorized" the leak by not opposing it after he found out about it.  Could that really be the case? Seriously, that is flimsier than even some of the NY prosecutions of Trump.  As it turns out, to their credit, a number of prominent Conservatives are rallying to mock the indictment.

I get it that Trump and his supporters have some reasons to be frustrated by events over the past 8 years or so.  The Russian collusion charges that turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party.  The prosecutions by the NY AG for (at best) borderline victimless crimes for which no one in history had ever been previously prosecuted.  The over-prosecution of rank-and-file January 6 protestor-rioters. The "election denier" prosecutions in multiple states that look a lot like attacks on political speech (particularly when similar statements made by Democrats in 2016 went un-prosecuted).

But there are two possible responses to this frustration:

1. Hold public hearings to publicize the evidence of any wrongdoing.  Fire people in law enforcement who violated the rules or abused their position.  Work hard to change the rules, controls, and accountability mechanisms so it is much harder for such abuses to be duplicated in the future.  And trust the process to work (after all, Trump overcame most all the various legal proceedings against him).
2. Go the opposition one better by doing all the same stuff, just harder

Approach number 1 holds out some hope of de-escalating abusive practices in the system and prevent further degeneration into banana-republic style political retribution after every election.  Approach number 2 is fraught with risks of spiraling out of control and creating precedents that Democrats will gleefully use when inevitably back in power.

Of course, Trump and his FAFO (f*ck around, find out) crowd have chosen #2.  They strongly believe that the far Left is violent and lawless and that Republicans have historically been far too genteel in how they play politics and that only by extreme responses can they get, uh... I don't know what.   Do they expect the Left to back down?  If Trump's supporters are characterizing the Left accurately, by Trump's own assumptions it is unlikely the Left will back down.  Republicans are risking a further devolution of the American polity -- is it for revenge only?  For the feelz of it?  What is the endgame they envision, or do they even have goal here other than watching the other side burn?

Postscript:  All of the above is also true in the realm of speech and cancel culture.  Conservatives have clearly born the brunt of cancel culture and speech limitations over the last 10-20 years (just as the Left bore the brunt in the 1950s and 1960s).  The Kimmel firing was a great example of Trump's ability to score an own-goal when he has the lead.  The initial reaction to Kimmel's reality-defying statement created sympathy for the Conservative cause, at least until Trump's FCC head lawlessly issued threats to ABC's broadcast licenses, threats echoed later by Trump himself.  Suddenly a story that that should have been about Kimmel's absurd statement and falling ratings became about the Trump Administration's lawlessness.  Had this Administration just STFU, the Leftish late night hosts would have continued their downward spiral and been an object lesson to programmers that maybe they do not want to program for just 30% of their audience.

I am sure Republicans want to send a message about cancel culture but Executive threats are just not going to work.  Of the hundreds of media articles on the whole Kimmel mess, I did not see a single one (excepting the explicitly Conservative press) that mentions Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano.  Using retribution to highlight past injustices is not going to work when the media will not acknowledge or mention past injustices -- in the media Republican retribution is portrayed instead as a first strike.

I will leave the last words on this to Ted Cruz, someone I think is very smart but with whom I often disagree.  This is from the WSJ

Mr. Carr “says, ‘We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,’” Mr. Cruz told his listeners, quoting Mr. Carr. “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

The Senator added that he’s no fan of Mr. Kimmel, but he warned conservatives that government power abused in this way won’t hurt only the left. “What [Mr. Carr] said there is dangerous as hell,” Mr. Cruz continued. “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Exactly right.  I am not sure that Trump's supporters understand the damage they may be doing to our political environment (and if you are reading this and saying "the other side started it", then you don't get it either), but they are also damaging their future selves.  Remember Coyote's Law.

Postscript #2:  I will offer Republicans a piece of advice I often give to other business people: If you are in a dispute with another person or entity, be satisfied if you get what you want.  Do not hold out for sorrow or contrition because you are never, ever going to get them to feel guilt or honestly admit error.

Postscript #3: In thinking about it, the Comey prosecution is similar to some of the Trump prosecutions in that in both cases, I think the prosecutions are effectively acting as proxies for suspected real crimes committed that no one could prove.  Almost everyone discuss this with (depending on if they are Red or Blue team) will say about one or the other that a certain prosecution may be weak but the person is clearly dirty.  Sorry, but this is not how the US legal system is supposed to work.  I grew up in the South when it was still possible that a cop who killed/arrested/prosecuted/jailed a black man for something they did not do could argue that "yeah, but I am sure he was guilty of something."

Postscript #4:  I will remind everyone that both parties equally think the other party is lawless and their own party is too genteel. I have many times seen writers of the Left and Right lament this about their sides in writing on the same day.   I guarantee anyone from the Left reading what I wrote above about Republicans thinking themselves too genteel are saying "Republicans are the violent, lawless ones, not us!"

Some follow-up thoughts on this post about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

• Pam Bondi has proven herself unqualified to be America's lead attorney.  First she talks about a hate speech exception to the First Amendments which does not exist.  Then she threatens to prosecute service providers who refuse service to someone she disagrees with.  I understand that there is an enormous gulf between laymen's understanding of the First Amendment and settled law (and her boss is one of the worst offenders, at least in his understanding of libel law), but there is no excuse for the US Attorney General to be reinforcing public myths and misunderstandings on this critical topic.  It is particularly incredible to see a Republican AG take these positions, as Republicans have for years fought Progressive attempts to make hate speech illegal and have defended any number of service providers (eg bakers who won't make a cake for gay weddings) who have refused service over matters of conscience.  I will give her credit though for rallying even Progressive MSNBC to attack the notion of a hate speech exemption.
• I have been critical of Republicans for going overboard on cancellation demands (eg so-and-so should be fired) over reactions to the Charlie Kirk shooting.  But I have to give them kudos for almost as one coming down on their own party and hammering Pam Bondi's ignorance.  I had thought that Republicans seemed ready to eat whatever dog food the Trump Administration served, but it is good to know there is something they will send back to the kitchen.
• For all the over-the-top invective I have seen this week, most people (whether they admit it or not) assume there will be no rioting this weekend as Republicans tend not to riot, loot stores, and burn buildings when they are upset.  To some extent I think January 6 was notable because it was such an exception to this.  I live in Phoenix where the Charlie Kirk funeral is this weekend and -- unlike in some past national explosions on the Left -- no one is boarding up the stores in Scottsdale this week (after the 2020 riots caused millions of dollars of damage in Scottsdale Fashion Square, we had prophylactic boarding up several other times after, including around the 2020 election when store owners feared a violent response on the Left if Trump were to win).  It should go without saying, but violence is not speech and is not First Amendment protected.  Maybe we can get Pam Bondi to say that violence is protected by the First Ammendment to get Progressives to finally accept that it is not.
• With all the words spilled this week over this terrible event, I still think what the Utah governor said was the best:  "We need to learn to disagree better."  Which actually is an initiative he has been pursuing for several years.  I have not looked at his program, but I always have some skepticism on such efforts.  Like tax harmonization which always turns out to have all taxes set to match the highest one, calls for cooperation across political divides often boil down to giving more power to the state on the issues the Right wants and giving more power to the state on issues the Left wants.
• The last time there was some violence against Conservative speakers on campus, many universities responded by instituting onerous security rules and fees on Conservative groups trying to bring their speakers to campus.  I hope universities don't go down this road, but it would be typical of them.  Universities have trained their students and faculty for decades that Conservatives are beyond the pale and thus should not be engaged as doing so would legitimize them.  It's like a 19th century English Duke being encouraged to sit down and share a meal with his long-time butler -- it just is not going to happen.
• My wife really likes the Left-Right-Center podcast / radio show.  I confess I have not listened to it as I don't listen to radio and have mostly eschewed non-history podcasts.  I feel like the information rate in audio is too low for my patience level (I listen to audio books at least at 1.5x and don't even get me started on how much I hate voicemail).  But I do think given how on-point the show's concept is to what I think we need more of, I will have to give a listen.  I have always loved Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turning Test concept and try to force myself through the exercise when I get overly angry about some issue.