As I write this, I’m watching live coverage of former US president Donald Trump’s pending arraignment on charges related to his payment of “hush money” to cover up a sexual encounter with porn star Stormy Daniels.

Coverage of Trump’s legal troubles ranges from a focus on how “unprecedented” it is for a former president to be charged with a crime, to his other legal entanglements — a defamation lawsuit filed by a woman who alleges he sexually assaulted her and a Georgia grand jury investigation into his attempts to swing the 2020 presidential election results — to, among Republicans at least, cries of “witch hunt” and “banana republic.”

I find that last bit somewhat odd. While, technically speaking, “banana republic” mainly refers to dominance of a country’s politics by outside business interests, it also implies the exact opposite of what’s happening here.

In a “banana republic,” the political class generally considers itself immune to the laws binding mere serfs. Absent a coup and firing squad, no matter how criminal or corrupt a major political figure is, he or she need not fear prosecution.

While I’m skeptical of the details — district attorney Alvin Bragg seems to be reaching for a significant criminal offense to prosecute (keeping in mind that the indictment’s details haven’t been unsealed as of this writing) — I’d personally like to see the “unprecedented” become regular, and to be handled at the federal level.

Here’s my proposal:

On the day of each president’s inauguration, a grand jury will be sworn in to look into the year leading up to his or her election and any crimes he or she may have potentially committed during that time frame.

On each anniversary of that president’s inauguration, the existing grand jury will dissolve and a new one will be sworn in, again to examine his or her actions during the prior year.

The final grand jury will be sworn in on the day the president leaves office, and examine the outgoing president’s last year of office (even as a separate new grand jury greets his or her successor).

Each grand jury will be empowered to issue indictments where it believes a crime was committed by the president or anyone in the president’s administration.

In the case of subordinate administration figures, the indictments can be prosecuted immediately. Indictments of the president will remain sealed until he or she leaves office — but will be shown to the  Speaker of the House so that he or she can, if warranted, initiate impeachment proceedings.

EVERY president should live in constant fear of  future prosecution for crimes committed while in, or seeking, the office. Don’t want to do time in the Big House? Don’t do crime at the White House.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

A group of people dwindling at nameless hands for unrevealed reasons is a great setup for suspenseful fiction like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It’s not so entertaining when it happens in reality.

Christie is back in the news nearly half a century after her passing. Dozens of headlines in media outlets worldwide announce revisions to her classic mysteries which prune vocabulary described as anywhere from “potentially offensive” to outright “racist.” (The original title of And Then There Were None was undoubtedly the latter, while some of the other altered verbiage didn’t actually offend anyone.)

With current editions exhuming past authors from Ian Fleming to Roald Dahl, putting new words in their mouths (while not consulting such collaborators as nonagenarian Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake), it may seem like the only British book that won’t be more like George Orwell’s 1984 by 2024 is, well, 1984.

In Christie’s Death on the Nile, Hercule Poirot noted the need to “clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth.” Yet the author’s retroactive editors should heed her detective’s warning in the same novel against lapsing into shortcuts “to escape the strain of having to think.”

As Eric Frank Russell put it: “Nothing can defeat an idea — except a better one.” Like Christie, Russell used the title “And Then There Were None” to convey a relentless erosion of governmental enforcement of order. Russell’s tale was set on a distant planet where an invading spaceship crew steadily declines, not from deadly weaponry but via peaceful resistance crumbling their resolve. No furtive mastermind is the culprit; that world’s egalitarian society has no clearly designated ruler, and turns out to not require political leadership at all.

Escaping the Thought Police doesn’t require travel to the isolated island of Christie’s And Then There Were None, let alone following Russell out of the solar system. It doesn’t even require mandates to preserve textual integrity. It’s enough to make a stand on the right to use our brains to solve the perplexing problems of our times as freely as Christie’s sleuths employed theirs.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The Mysterious Un-Flair of Style” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 3, 2023
2. “The mysterious un-flair of style” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], April 6, 2023

Global Internet Access. By Wassim Benki 0690. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

On March 23, Axios reports, Utah governor Spencer Cox signed two bills “aimed at limiting when and where anyone younger than 18 years old can interact online, and to stop companies from luring minors to certain websites.”

The laws require social media companies to “instate a curfew for minors in the state, barring them from using their accounts from 10:30pm to 6:30am” and “to give a parent or guardian access to their child’s accounts.”

Even ignoring the blatant unconstitutionality of both laws — both vis a vis the First Amendment and the reservation of the power to regulate interstate commerce to Congress, not state legislatures — making it likely they’ll be quashed in court, I have to wonder just how Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection intends to enforce these incredibly dumb ideas.

The bills are titled “Social Media Regulation Amendments,” but if Utah has truth in advertising laws they really should be titled “Amendments to Encourage Minors to Lie About Their Age and Learn to Use Virtual Private Networks to Hide Their Locations,” which pretty much describes the effect they’ll have if there’s any real attempt to enforce them.

Unfortunately, Congress also seems to be tip-toeing through the tulips of “social media regulation” in similar ways, from prospective app bans (if you think a successful TikTok ban would be the last such action, think again) to various measures for suppressing “disinformation” (read: Stuff politicians don’t want you to see).

And it’s not just an American thing. Globally, various regimes (including supposed “democracies” like India) increasingly arrogate to themselves the power to just shut down the Internet any time they find public communication inconvenient.

While there are workarounds for all this nonsense, and while each such episode encourages more people to learn about those workarounds, what the Internet really needs is a country of its very own.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a NEW country. Any existing regime with robust telecommunications capabilities — perhaps a Caribbean or Pacific island nation? — will do, if it’s willing to put enforceable “separation of Internet and state” provisions in its constitution, set a nice low tax rate, and watch the revenues roll in as existing tech giants and ambitious start-ups abandon nosier and costlier jurisdictions (and those jurisdictions’ regulations).

Users would take care of the rest.

Short of shutting down Internet access entirely — and likely finding themselves overthrown — the busybodies couldn’t do much about it.

Get this done, Big Tech.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY