The indictment of Donald Trump highlights how politically motivated prosecutions are a punishment in themselves that serve as an affront to our justice system. In Mitchum v. Foster (1972), without dissent it shut down a state court proceeding for threatening to close the doors of a bookstore, much as the New York City district attorney’s state court prosecution is disruptive to Trump’s presidential campaign. This decision by the Supreme Court in halting a state court proceeding has been favorably cited by more than a thousand decisions since, including dozens of invocations by the Supreme Court itself. In Pulliam v. Allen (1984), it likewise ruled in favor of a federal court shutting down a state court process, which a federal court should do now with respect to any county-level prosecution of Trump.
Federal courts are empowered by these and other decisions to protect presidential candidates against harassment by state officials, as being done now to Trump. A presidential candidate must be allowed to devote his complete attention to his campaign without interference by a county prosecutor. This unprecedented prosecution could further divide red from blue states, as conservatives feel strongly that the People rather than a handful of liberal prosecutors should be picking our next president. “Texit” legislation was filed earlier this year in Texas to assert independence from control by New York City and Washington, D.C.
Former President Barack Obama was all too willing to declare in 2016 that “In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents. We have fought against those kinds of things.” Yet now Obama’s Democrats are doing precisely that: threatening to imprison Trump. As patriotism declines in polls and millions of immigrants fail to assimilate into our traditional culture, the glue binding our vast country together may have lost some strength. Politically motivated prosecutions will not bring Americans together. This will only drive us further apart, and all Americans lose when we cannot come together with confidence in our most time-honored institutions. For the unity of the American people, politically motivated prosecutions against leading candidates for office cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.
