A Test Case For Equal Justice Under the Law
The Left is creating an America in which, whatever their actions, if they are sufficiently high in the progressive pantheon, they will escape responsibility, no matter how facially guilty of violating a law. The latest test case for this will be the criminal liability of progressive icon Alec Baldwin for negligent homicide.
The left is creating two Americas, one where they are never liable, and one where non-progressives are presumptively guilty. I blame Donald Trump for this. As I said at the time, his greatest mistake will be if he fails to make equal justice under the law his single highest priority.
Examples of unequal justice abound. That said, I think it is the three most high-profile cases between 2016 and 2018 that provide the foundation for all else that we are seeing.
When, in 2016, I first heard that Hillary Clinton had conducted all of her business as Secretary of State across a private server, it was immediately obvious — to the point of being my first thought — that this woman had just committed the worst violation of our security laws, short of intentional treason, in our nation’s history. This was not only true beyond a reasonable doubt, it was true on its face beyond the shadow of a doubt. Any other person in this nation who did what she did would have rightly been jailed for life. And yet, she and all around her were whitewashed in what amounted to the worst acts of serial obstruction of justice by the DOJ and FBI likewise in our nation’s history.
When in 2016, I learned that Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, Democrat “super-lawyer” Marc Elias, had destroyed the servers on which resided all of her e-mails, my first thought was that this man had just committed the most bold-faced act of spoliation of evidence then subject to an existing subpoena that I had ever seen. That is a crime punishable by twenty years in prison. He should have been put into a jail cell and the key melted down. To the best of my knowledge, no one, ever raised even the most minor objection to Elias’s action. It was as stunning and brazen as it was sickening.
When in 2018, we watched Joe Biden take credit for strong-arming Ukraine to fire the state’s prosecutor while at the same time his grifter son was placed on the board of directors for a Ukrainian energy company of dubious legality, it was obvious that any Republican would have been investigated and likely prosecuted for that. Instead, we watched the entire Democrat party and their allies in the media cover for Biden and support bringing impeachment against Trump for seeking to have that investigated.
And those are only the big three of our recent history. Below that are hundreds, if not thousands, of politically motivated prosecutions being brought by progressives against their political enemies. For but one example, compare the federal prosecutions of people for misdemeanors on Jan. 6, 2021 with the actual acts of riots, looting and insurrection by Antifa and BLM over the past two years. It is night and day.
The latest test of how blatant the unequal application of the law has become in post-Obama / post-Constitutional America is now upon us. Several days ago, progressive darling and anti-gun nutter Alec Baldwin was on-set of a movie in which he was both actor and producer. Taking the facts as Baldwin’s PR team would have us believe them, Baldwin was handed a gun by the on-site armorer who told Baldwin, explicitly and wrongly, that it was unloaded. It was in fact loaded with one or more live rounds.
Baldwin was practicing his draw of the weapon when the gun “misfired,” striking and killing one, wounding another. Someone will have to explain the mechanics of that. The only way a gun fires is when the trigger is pulled and the striker or firing pin hits at the primer on the bullet. Bullets don’t magically discharge.
It is a universal and uniform rule of gun safety to always assume any gun that you touch is loaded. Indeed, when a person picks up a weapon, the first thing every recognized safety course, including the NRA, teaches is to “immediately engage the safety device if possible, and, if the gun has a magazine, remove it before opening the action and looking into the chamber(s) which should be clear of ammunition . . .” That is a personal responsibility, not one that can ever be, pardon the pun, discharged by the person handing you the weapon swearing it to be unloaded. There is simply no way Baldwin can rid himself of responsibility.
Attorney Andrew Branca has done a full legal analysis of the facts and law at Legal Insurrection. His conclusion, absent any new facts, is that this is a prima facie case of manslaughter. I concur and will go one further. If this were an act of any person on the right, and certainly an unknown such as you or I, we would be booked for the crime of manslaughter so fast our head would spin.
So now we will soon find out whether we are continuing down the path to becoming a full-fledged banana republic. Does the law matter to progressives? Will Baldwin be prosecuted and pay the price for his crime? I would put the odds of that as less than one in two. Where this leads our nation I can not be a good place.
