The Law Is Not Perfectly Just
The Law Is Not Perfectly Just
But to disregard it to convict a political opponent would be the greater injustice
I want to piggyback off of Matt Taibbi’s coverage of the new Trump controversy where he’s supposedly claiming that the president has the power to have SEAL Team Six assassinate their political rivals. Taibbi does a great job debunking the neurotic coverage of this controversy from the corporate media, which, not uncommon for Trump, is almost the opposite of the truth, by using direct quotes to show that neither Trump nor his lawyers made this argument, but were arguing against Judge Florence Pan’s hypothetical argument against their position.
Screenshot from Racket News:
Taibbi’s point was to show how much of the coverage of this exchange has been dishonest in an attempt to once again paint Donald Trump as a unique threat to American liberty and democracy, despite the fact that, if anything, it was the Trump team trying to point out why a president could not use SEAL Team Six to assassinate their political rivals. I want to make a point about Judge Pan’s argument itself.
Trump’s team was arguing that the proper, lawful procedure for criminally prosecuting a president for what they’ve done in their official capacity must, per the U.S. constitution, start by them being impeached by the House of Representatives and then convicted by the Senate. You can say that that argument is wrong, and I’m not certain I agree with it entirely myself (It’s not a topic I’ve spent much time thinking about), but that’s the argument. Negative consequences that happen as a result of that interpretation of the law are, essentially, irrelevant to whether or not that is the objectively correct interpretation of the law. You can’t say it’s not the law because you can imagine a scenario where a bad outcome occurs because that is the law.
If this is the correct interpretation of the law, then yes, it might follow from Judge Pan’s hypothetical that that president would get away with murdering their political rival by having them assassinated by SEAL Team Six because the proper procedure of impeachment by the House followed by conviction by the Senate did not occur. Again, this does not disprove Trump’s lawyer’s interpretation of the law. Just as a person who murders another person and is never convicted because they were not read their Miranda rights when they were arrested disproves that the Fifth Amendment or Miranda v. Arizona is the law.
We might argue that the purpose of law is to lead to the greatest possible amount of justice in a society, but there is no law so perfect that it could not lead to an outcome of injustice. Judge Pan’s argument here is not to disprove Trump’s lawyer’s legal theory, which may objectively be incorrect, but to point out that their legal theory could have negative implications. The logical conclusion to draw from Pan’s argument is that if the law leads to an outcome that she doesn’t like, she’ll simply disregard it and substitute her own judgement for the law. Unfortunately for Judge Pan that’s not how the law is supposed to work; unfortunately for the rest of us that is probably how the law actually works. The United States has long since abandoned John Adams’s dictum of “a government of laws; not men.”