In case you haven’t heard (oh, yes, you’ve heard), former US president Donald Trump faces  criminal charges in various jurisdictions, relating to everything from his business practices to his handling of classified documents to his conduct regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Comes now special counsel Jack Smith, in one of those prosecutions,  asking judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a “gag order” under which Trump would be forbidden to publicly make “certain prejudicial extrajudicial statements.”

I tend toward a dim view of “gag orders” in general, but this proposal is particularly silly and counter-productive. It embodies the same level of evil as any other demand that someone’s public speech be curtailed, but it’s also likely to be ineffectual, or even actually damage Smith’s efforts to convict Trump. To steal a quote incorrectly attributed to French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord concerning an 1804 trial and execution, “it’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”

Smith doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know in attempting to justify the request.

Trump, prosecutors claim, “knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets.” His “extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individual — the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors.”

Anyone who’s followed Trump’s career in general or his recent legal troubles in particular knows all that to be true.

“Gagging” him, even if he complied with the order (don’t bet the ranch on that happening,  if you want to keep the ranch) wouldn’t end, or even reduce, the threats or attempts to intimidate.

Trump has plenty of proxies, most of whom he  wouldn’t have to personally ask (and probably doesn’t even personally know), to keep that kind of thing up on his behalf.

Why give him plausible deniability? And why try to prevent him from “tainting the jury pool,” when any such “tainting” will likely be to the prosecution’s benefit rather than his?

Trump never shuts up. Many people believe, with good reason, that he CAN’T shut up. Every time he’s accused of something, he proudly owns it, pronounces it not just non-criminal but “perfect,”  whines that he’s just the little guy facing persecution, and issues open threats against anyone and everyone involved.

How are those chosen as jurors likely to take those threats? As evidence that he should be sent on his merry way to keep doing the same things he’s been doing, or as evidence that perhaps a stiff set of iron bars between him and them is called for?

Because these cases are all inherently political, he’s almost certain to hang any jury anyway —  at least one out of every 12 Americans uncritically buys whatever “AS SEEN ON TV!” goop he’s selling.

But sweeping those threats under the rug will give some otherwise reasonable people time to forget about them. And it’s always better to err on the side of free speech anyway.

Let him talk.

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

“The leading decongestant used by millions of Americans looking for relief from a stuffy nose is no better than a dummy pill,” the Associated Press reports, citing the unanimous vote of a US Food and Drug Administration advisory panel.

Phenylephrine, the best-selling over the counter “decongestant” in the US, just doesn’t work, at least in orally ingested form and for that purpose (it has other  uses — if you’ve got hemorrhoids or a priapism, you might want to talk to your doctor about it). For nearly two decades, you’ve probably been taking what amounts to a placebo for one of the most common cold and flu symptoms.

Why? Because of the war on drugs.

Pseudoephedrine is a fantastic decongestant. It’s cheap — or at least it WAS cheap — and it clears those clogged sinuses right up. But starting in 2006, it disappeared from OTC cold/flu medications and got moved behind pharmacy counters. You could no longer buy it without showing ID, you could only buy limited amounts, and if you bought “too much” (by visiting different pharmacies) or “too often,” the police might just pay you a visit.

Pseudoephedrine was, at one time, commonly used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. By making it difficult to get pseudoephedrine,  drug warrior logic ran, the difficulty of cooking meth — and the price of the final product — could be driven up and its availability severely curtailed.

That worked exactly as well as one might expect.

Meth cooks just hired people (referred to, at least in the hit television show “Breaking Bad,” as “smurfs”) to drive around to pharmacies buying pseudoephedrine.

One morning on trash day, I walked out of my home in St. Louis and saw little white pseudoephedrine boxes — hundreds or thousands of them — scattered across yards as far as the eye could see. For some reason, instead of just shredding the boxes, the meth makers had decided to fill people’s dumpster carts with them in the windy pre-dawn hours (I get the impression meth makers may not possess fantastic judgment skills).

Suppressing pseudoephedrine did eventually start “working” in the sense that the market cap of Kimberly-Clark (maker of Kleenex brand facial tissues) has more than doubled from then to now.

As for methamphetamine, its use has also more than doubled, as have methamphetamine overdose fatalities, since the pseudoephedrine pseudo-ban. Production largely moved from rural mobile home labs to industrial cartel facilities in Mexico.

Now the drug warriors want to escalate to literal war with the Mexican cartels. What could possibly go wrong?

I’d like to tell you this whole saga is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s had you needlessly sneezing for 17 years now,  just another example of how dumb the war on drugs really is.

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

“Speaker Kevin McCarthy returns to Washington this week,” CNN reports, “confronting a twin set of challenges: avoiding a costly government shutdown and addressing growing calls on the right to impeach President Joe Biden, despite resistance from the party’s moderates.”

Fans of DC theater may get a fall double feature!

“Shutdown” situations have become so popular and perennial that you might think they’ve been on the marquee pretty much continuously since the days of Washington and Jefferson.

In reality, all ten of the US government’s actual “shutdowns” (federal “funding gaps” that resulted in furloughs of government employees) have occurred since 1980. Even the 14 “funding gaps” that HAVEN’T closed the Smithsonian’s gift shops for a few days didn’t start happening until 1976. But the whole thing has certainly become the standard — the last time Congress passed a budget on time was 1996.

Congress got a much earlier start on impeachment theatrics when it attempted to bring down Andrew Johnson in 1868, but they’ve only done it three times since — all three in the last 25 years and two of them in the last four. If those are enough data points from which to discern a trend,  we may see at least one impeachment in every presidential term from here on out. And every one will be about as serious as … well, as the budget process.

When it comes to theater, modern Washington rarely does tragedy (1963 and 2001 are notable exceptions). Our politicians try to stick to comedy, and specialize in farce.

The important thing to remember about political theater is that it’s exactly that: Theater.

With control of government always split between the two “major parties” — arguably just factions of a single state party, in complete agreement on the only things that matter, which are preserving their monopoly and getting their rake-off from your paycheck — real issues of importance are almost never even addressed, let alone resolved by principled debate on cogent arguments.

American government these days is more like professional wrestling, with multiple teams — all beholden to the same league — switching off soap opera style between “face” and “heel” roles, then pretending to put each other into painful holds and through devastating body slams until the countdown to a predetermined (and hopefully surprising) outcome finishes. Which is what makes professional wrestling theater rather than sport.

I, for one, approve of the move toward this double feature paradigm. It’s the least we deserve given the insane ticket price.

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