Trump held the biggest rally in Wyoming’s history, as the crowd overflowed a 10,000-seat arena. That is an immense crowd in the sparsely populated state where a total of only 267,000 voted in the last presidential election. Trump rightly claimed credit for Ken Paxton’s 68-32% victory over George P. Bush in the runoff for Attorney General of Texas, which puts another nail in the coffin of the Karl Rove-Bush era in the GOP. Trump pointed out at the rally how weak George W. Bush was in failing to pardon a high-profile victim of a political prosecution, Scooter Libby, the top adviser to Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney.
Trump himself had to correct that injustice by pardoning Libby in 2018, a decade after Bush should have done it. Bush’s effete record on political prosecutions may have weighed down George P. Bush in his race against Paxton in a state called home by two presidents named Bush and a large Houston airport bearing the Bush name. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tried to help George P. Bush by criticizing Paxton for being under indictment, but that tactic only seemed to backfire. Voters realize now how politicized prosecutions are, and the indictment of a Republican may simply mean that he is being effective.
Bush and Cheney also refused to pardon two courageous border patrol agents, Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, and merely commuted their prison sentences after a Bush-appointed prosecutor locked them up for decade-long terms for defending our border. The Biden Administration continued the abuse of border patrol agents by wrongly accusing horseback agents of using whips to corral illegal aliens. Phyllis Schlafly was highly critical of the prosecutions of border patrol agents Ramos and Compean, who were punished based on a confrontation in 2005 with an illegal alien who was smuggling a million dollars-worth of illegal marijuana across our border. Trump granted those border patrol agents the full pardons that they deserved, and they never should have been prosecuted in the first place.
Capitulation to unjust political prosecutions is the hallmark of bad Republican leadership. If we want to change the political outcomes, we have to change the players in the game.
