The Payback for Mar-a-Lago Will Be Brutal. By Kimberley Strassel.
To read the left’s media scribes, Monday’s search was a ho-hum day in crime-fighting. The Beltway press circled the wagons around Attorney General Merrick Garland and primly parroted Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s piety that “no one is above the law.”
“The Mar-a-Lago Raid Proves the U.S. Isn’t a Banana Republic,” pronounced the Atlantic, clearly worried readers might conclude the opposite. It is “bedrock principle” that those who “commit crimes” “must answer for them,” it lectured. …
If you have doubts about all this, you’re unhinged and lawless. The Washington Post quoted “extremism trackers,” who explained that any GOP statements “delegitimizing the government” were “nudges toward violence.” …
The consequences are so obvious, but go unmentioned on the left:
A Democratic Congress enacted, and Jimmy Carter signed, the first independent counsel law in 1978. Two decades later it led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
If anything, a perceived political persecution of Mr. Trump could help him to a second term. And he would be even more unrestrained as the 47th president than he was as the 45th. A second Trump administration wouldn’t have the caliber of grown-ups who signed up for the first tour. [Because the left have been persecuting and bankrupting anyone who helped Trump.]
Mr. Garland’s raid has made even the highest political figures fair prosecutorial game, and the media’s new standard is that the department can’t be questioned as it goes about ensuring “no one is above the law.” Let’s see how that holds when a future Republican Justice Department starts raiding the homes of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, James Comey and John Brennan.
Payback could come even sooner. Democrats set a new low with their Ukrainian impeachment circus, and a GOP House next year might be up for a reprise. Get ready for a few more select committees — perhaps excluding the minority party, as the Democrats effectively did with the Jan. 6 committee — to investigate Mr. Garland’s politicized department or Hunter Biden’s finances. …
All this tit for tat will further undermine our institutions and polarize the nation — but such is the nature of retributive politics. Which is why the wholesale Democratic and media defense of this week’s events is so reckless.
Both parties long understood that political restraint was less about civility than self-preservation. What goes around always comes around. What went around this week will come around hard.
Either the left has gone tactically stupid, or they don’t think they will lose any more elections. Rigging could account for this, but we cannot rule out short-sightedness.
