LET THE PUNISHMENT CYCLES CONTINUE.

There's another election coming up, and Craig "Streetwise Professor" Pirrong, who knows a thing or two about game theory, is apprehensive.

It is indeed possible that the Democrats generally and the Biden administration specifically will reap in November what they sowed in May (and in fact for many, months before that, and it many places beyond New York): the decision has sparked outrage, and not just among Trump’s existing supporters, or Republicans. But it remains to be seen whether this outrage will outweigh the burden of running for president as a “convicted felon.”

Alas, I believe the entire country will reap what the regime and its apparatchiks have sown, and for many years to come. The by-any-means-necessary use of lawfare has violated all pre-existing norms, and has set a precedent that will cast a shadow over American politics forevermore. There is no going back.

Yes, once the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome begin, stopping them is hard.  Mr Pirrong continues,

I was always astonished that during the Trump impeachment circuses that the Democrats smugly believed that this could not be used against them. They are similarly smug in their belief that they are immune from the type of lawfare they have waged since Trump left office.

Yes, their entrenchment in the deep, middle, and shallow states (to use the insightful desription of Jeffrey Tucker) does provide some immunity. But once a weapon has been unsheathed by one side, it is inevitable that the other will take it up as well.

2020s Lawfare will be to American politics what poison gas was to combat in WWI.

Lawfare–and especially the weaponization of criminal law–makes politics existential. All restraints are lifted in existential conflicts. We can only go downhill from here.

Perhaps if the Democrats could make a meaningful pivot to the median voters, or if the common sense caucus types from both major parties could offer a less unpalatable bundle than what passes for Trumpian populism or Obaman totalitarianism a temporary peace might be at hand.

It's unlikely any such peace will be forthcoming.

And that’s where we are now.

The bitter irony is that a common criticism of Trump is that he transgresses American democratic norms. Most of this is in the fevered imagination of his enemies: most of his norm violations have come merely from running his big mouth. That pales in comparisons to the violations of political and legal norms that have become commonplace in the lawfare waged not just against him, but against many in his orbit, and many outside it who have had the temerity to challenge the regime.

Words can’t hurt you: legal sticks and stones certainly can. And if one side picks them up, the other side will inevitably do so.

It is also sickly ironic that a bogus charge of “election interference” (bogus because no actual legal violation of Federal election law was properly charged, and New York has no jurisdiction over this law regardless) is being used to engage in the most flagrant attempt in American history to manipulate a national election.

This betrays a deep insecurity among Biden and the Democrats. A confident president and party would not feel it necessary to stoop to such devices.

Exactly where we go from here is unknown. But it is clear that we are entering an era of existential politics. Such a politics inevitably descends into conflict, chaos, and violence. And frequently to civil war. And when future generations look back, they will know exactly who to blame, and to when the Time of Troubles began.

Nor did the efforts, primarily by Democrats, to shore up voter participation in the middle of what everyone understood as a pandemic in the fall of 2020 help.  No, I'm not going to endorse any stolen election theories today.   Consider, dear reader, what Reason and Volokh Conspiracy contributor Steven Calabresi observed.

Using the the Covid pandemic as an excuse, the Left in 2020 massively changed the way presidential elections are held in this country. Whereas previously the secret ballot and same day voting was the norm, and one needed an excuse to get an absentee ballot, suddenly the Left declared it was essential to switch to mail in voting, for any reason at all, over a period of many weeks.

Swarms of Democratic vote canvassers knocked on the doors of thousands of people who had not yet voted "by mail" and offered to "help" them "make their vote count". Ballots were filled in by voters at home. possibly with canvassers or family members, "observing" how each person voted. Canvassers then "offered" to deliver the "harvested ballots" to "drop boxes" saving voters the trouble of turning them in themselves. The net result was that Donald Trump got more votes in Pennsylvania in 2020 than Barack Obama had in either 2008 or in 2012, but he still fell 80,555 votes short of Joe Biden because "mail-in" voting with no secret ballot and canvassers conveying your ballot for you to the polls or a drop box was such a hit.

Note: there is nothing wrong with encouraging voters to turn out; nor is it any surprise that big city political machines do things to get sympathetic voters to vote: and I have not been persuaded that former Trump voters from 2016 switched or stayed home.  In any case, what happens in the local elections is more interesting than the presidency.

That noted, people who claim there was election-rigging, either by the palace guard media and social media companies determining what was news and what was not, or by one-off changes in voting procedures, have a case.  Mr Calabresi offers it.

I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions. I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. I simply do not believe that in an honestly held traditionally run presidential election that Joe Biden would get 181,866 more votes for President in 2020 in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama got in 2008.

As a result, many Republicans, myself included, thought that the 2020 presidential election was probably stolen, even though that fact could not be proved in a court of law. President Trump himself did not claim right after the election that mail in voting and the loss of the secret ballot had altered the vote count in the 2020 election. He waited for two weeks and asked for hopeless recounts instead. No recount in Pennsylvania was ever going to erase an 80,555 Biden lead in votes counted at the polls. The margins Trump lost by in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona were simply too big to change after endless recounts. Some Republicans, including me, therefore acquiesced in Joe Biden taking office because we thought we had to do that to preserve a facade of democracy absent concrete proof of vote fraud.  But deep down in our guts we thought that Joe Biden's campaign had probably won with dirty tricks, although that could not proved in a court of law.

That Dementia Joe pitched a hissy fit over Georgia's subsequent revisions of voting procedures and continues to tell lies about not being able to provide water to voters waiting to vote tells you more about the possibility of dirty tricks than any evidence, although there is evidence.  That corporate interests are in on the scam might be verified by the snap relocation of baseball's 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta to Denver.  Buckle in.

The election fraud that wrongly cost Trump his victory in 2020 was caused by mail in voting, drop boxes for ballots, and the loss of the secret ballot. President Trump's mistake was in not complaining much more loudly before the vote was counted that the rules of the game had been rigged against him to produce an undemocratic outcome.

Biden said as a candidate in 2020 that he was a moderate liberal, but he proceeded to govern like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren except for the refusal of two brave Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to go along with that nonsense. Manchin and Sinema will both be booted out of the Senate come January 3, 2025, as a result. Biden said as a candidate that he would depoliticize the criminal justice process. Instead, his Department of Justice has used an unconstitutionally appointed Special Prosecutor to indict former President Donald Trump—the first time in history that a former President has been indicted. Hillary Clinton was given a pass on the misuse of classified documents, but not so Donald Trump. Biden's Democrats even got Trump unconstitutionally convicted for altering business records to conceal the Trump Organization's involvement in First Amendment protected speech in a New York State trial that was truly a charade.

We are now about to choose again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a presidential election year—2024—which is totally free of the fears of infection in public places caused by Covid. Here are three things we should insist on: 1) a return to truly secret ballots cast in polling booths with the curtain shut behind the voter; 2) no use of drop boxes, and 3) that everyone votes on the same day, with the same headlines in mind, and not over the period of a month.

The loss of the secret ballot, the use of drop boxes, and of same day voting is a huge change in our democracy, which ought to be abandoned now that Covid is gone. You cannot fill out a ballot at home in most cases without your family members knowing how you voted and that means the sudden loss of the secret ballot. Partisan canvassers may also observe how people vote, intimidating them and undermining their independence.

The secret ballot is of central importance in elections, especially when candidates generate the passionate feelings of hatred that are generated by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is a hatred that pits family members and even long-time friends against one another sometimes ruining long-cherished relationships. If ever, there was to be a presidential election for which the secret ballot was essential, it is this year's rematch between President Trump and Joe Biden.

George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley also sees the punishment cycles emerging from the best of intentions.  "In 2024, the greatest test for our Constitution may be whether it can survive the 'Defenders of Democracy.'"  That's Friday short take material but for his continuation, which reinforces elements of both posts previously cited.

Many Americans have tuned out the overheated rhetoric, as shown by Donald Trump’s continuing lead in many polls even after his conviction in Manhattan. The warnings also ignore that our system has checks and balances that protected democracy for centuries as the world’s oldest and most successful constitutional system. These dire predictions would require all three branches to fail in an unprecedented fashion.

While these figures cite the Capitol riot on Jan 6., 2021 as evidence of the pending collapse of democracy, the system worked as designed on that day. Congress refused to be deterred by the riot and virtually every court (including many presided over by Trump-appointed judges) rejected challenges to the election.

The most obvious threats today to the democratic system are coming from the left, not the right.

Democratic secretaries of state sought to block Trump from the ballot in 2024, and Democratic members sought to bar roughly 120 colleagues from their respective ballots. It seemed that the greatest threat to democracy was its exercise by voters. Fortunately, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected the theory and added, “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.”

There has also been a push by Democrats to keep third-party candidates off ballots. Again, the last thing democracy needs is for voters to have more democratic choice.

Both major parties have long worked to keep annoying third parties off the ballot, whether it is for dog-catcher or for the presidency, and it has long been a conceit of self-styled progressives that hoi polloi often vote against their interests.  It's not that the Normals aren't noticing.

Many voters are also responding to what they see as the politicalization of the criminal justice system, particularly with Trump’s recent trial in Manhattan. Again, these cases are being embraced as key to “defending democracy” when many citizens view them as the very antithesis of a nation committed to the rule of law.

This glaring disconnect was evident when President Joe Biden spoke on the top of the Point-du-Hoc in Normandy on the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Biden again used the event to suggest that democracy was in danger in the United States with the upcoming election. Yet, Biden has overseen widespread government censorship with federal agencies targeting those with opposing views on everything from elections and climate change to COVID-19 and transgender policies.

But for suggesting such truths, he earns the opprobrium of Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor, part of the Biden cheering section there.  That's not the way out of the punishment cycles.