"No one is above the law!" That's what the GOP (and some Democrats) are bellowing, [View all]

[Ocelot II]

in high dudgeon and paroxysms of pearl-clutching over Biden's pardoning of Hunter. Leaving aside the weapons-grade hypocrisy of any GOPer daring to say a goddamn word about how nobody should be above the law, the sad fact is that the statement is, and always has been, false. It's limply aspirational and only that. It would be nice if it were true, but for all the chest-beating and virtue-signaling, it's a load of bullpucky. The law is said to treat everyone the same, and the way the laws are written - neutrally on their face - we can at least to pretend to believe that to be so. Anatole France once said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” But the wealthy and well-connected and politically favored are almost always above the law; we just act like they aren't, pointing to the occasional rich person who does suffer some consequences - Bernie Madoff, for example.

I was in law school in the late '70s/early '80s, and in those days, when I only knew legal theory and case law, I really believed in The Law as a thing you could believe in; that most of the time it really was applied fairly and justice was done. At that time, though, there was also a school of thought called Critical Legal Studies (Critical Race Theory developed out of this), which explained in almost incomprehensibly recondite academic language that the law has inherent social biases that support the interests of those who create the law; favoring the historically privileged and disadvantaging the historically underprivileged. The law thus becomes an instrument for oppression in order for the wealthy and powerful to maintain their place at the top of the social hierarchy. I thought this was Marxist-adjacent nonsense. After actually practicing law for awhile, though, I wasn't so sure. A lawyer I worked with, who was also my mentor and one of the most excellent humans I have ever known, and who had a cynical streak, used to ask rhetorically, "How much justice can you afford?" After about 20 years I burned out on the whole business of law (not in small part because I started to think the CLS scholars might be right) and went into another line of work, though I kept up with the interesting, scholarly part of it.

So anyhow, when I hear politicians and others getting up on their high horses to insist no one is above the law, I cringe a little. I don't know how they can sincerely believe it, all evidence being to the contrary. Now in Trump we see CLS made flesh, the richest and the most powerful wiping their asses with the Constitution and making a mockery of the law and proving the absurdity of the notion that nobody is above it. And those same iniquitous shitters on the law (and the poltroons in the media who need something to be outraged about) have the gall to suggest that Biden's pardoning Hunter is of the same rule-of-law-pissing-on magnitude as Trump stealing classified documents, sexually assaulting women and inciting an insurrection. Hunter, they say, is an example of the inequity of the law - a president's son being pardoned for a crime only because he's the president's son. Unfair! they howl. Hunter was spared from the consequences of his misdeeds because his father had the power to spare him, they whine. Yet the only reason Hunter was in that jam in the first place was because his father was the president! A guy named Hunter Dingleberry who did what Hunter Biden did would have been given the benefit of the plea deal that fell apart - if he'd even been prosecuted in the first place. So yes, the law did not treat Hunter Biden the same as it would have treated anyone else because he was the president's son - it treated him worse; and it treated him worse because powerful people wanted him treated worse, and bent the law to be sure that happened. The law is not neutral and justice is not blind. Swear to God, if I hear one more pompous dickhead of a politician, whether a GOPer or a Democrat, or one more censorious douchebag of a media pontificator, insist that NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW I will throw a kitchen implement, maybe a toaster or a teakettle, through my TV screen. Do not tell me that ever again. It's bullshit.