The Law is King
Shownotes
November 8, 2026
Trump's posts suggest that any plans to investigate the administration are crimes, Congressional Democrats are hiring former career prosecutors to join the investigative staffs of committees, After the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant allowed Confederate soldiers to go home, a humanitarian gesture that was also practical, Northerners believed that it was the political leaders who should be punished, But President Andrew Johnson pardoned many those leaders, who would not face accountability for their attack on the US, They claimed Grant’s clemency was proof that the Confederate ideology was right all along, Racism and rebellion carried forward for more than a century, The same partisan reworking of history took place after Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after Watergate, Nixon never accepted responsibility, saying “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” During Ronald Reagan’s administration, the theory of the “unitary executive” took this further, It claimed that neither Congress nor the courts could check the president, While serving as head of the Office of Legal Counsel for President George H.W. Bush, William Barr, who later was the attorney general in Trump’s first administration, warned of “legislative encroachments” on the president’s authority, In Trump v United States, the Supreme Court ruled that "a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution" for actions deemed part of his official responsibilities, Now, with the prospect of investigations into behavior that might fall outside his official duties, Trump is arguing that enforcing the rule of law is a partisan attack, It is the opposite, and is the fundamental rule under which the American government was conceived.
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