spectator.org
With Trump’s Win, The Law Wins
On a single day in late November 1943, Winston Churchill addressed two notes from Cairo, one going to both his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and his Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, and one to Morrison alone.
Hold fast to the heights and together we will make American law great again.
Churchill was writing on the extraordinary powers Parliament had granted his government when Britain was in its moment of greatest peril. The Nazi war machine in 1940 seemed invincible. Mighty France had fallen in six weeks. The British army barely escaped, leaving most of its equipment behind. Britain had no allies. The German invasion was expected at any moment. Parliament gave the government emergency powers to lock up without trial or charge anyone they considered a risk to safety.
But now in the summer of ’43, on the way to meet Stalin and FDR at Tehran, three years had passed and the tide had turned. The Americans and the Soviets were allied with Britain in the fight. The great turning point battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein had been won and the Germans were in retreat. The direst phase of emergency was past and Churchill was pushing for change in the law.
The emergency powers, Churchill wrote to Morrison, “should be completely abolished, as the national emergency no longer justifies abrogation of individual rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury on definite charges.”
Writing to both Morrison and Attlee that same day, he wrote further, “On no account should we lend any countenance to the totalitarian idea of the right of the Executive to lockup political opponents or unpopular people.” If, out of caution, they still might oppose giving back these powers until the danger was more completely overcome, Churchill advised that they ought to be “proclaiming your resolve to use [those powers] with the utmost circumspection and humanity. Do not quit the heights.”
The heights Churchill referred to were the moral heights that Britain and America commanded. Since the motivation of the people to fight and win that terrible conflict sprang from the stark moral contrast between Nazi tyranny and the liberty-preserving constitutional democracies, these heights were just as important strategically for Churchill as the commanding ground on the battlefield where the armies faced off.
Both Obama and Biden chose to remove a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office when they took office (45 had restored the bust to its former position in between, and probably will do so again as 47). In the outbreak of political lawfare that characterized their attempts to destroy the political threat to their power that Trump posed, they showed why the petty case of bust removal was a symbol of their rejection of Churchill’s passionate constitutionalism.
The imprisoning of Trump staff and the coordinated attempt to bankrupt, exhaust, and imprison Trump himself represented the exact opposite of the passion animating Churchill’s notes that wartime November. Churchill subordinated party to nation and galvanized all parties, left and right alike, in a sublime and magnificent war effort.
He was gracious in defeat, headed a loyal parliamentary opposition for six years, and finally regained the votes of the people to be elected to a second term as prime minister. The key to the trust in the government was that no one faced loss of liberty save for violation of known laws and through a fair process.
Obama, by contrast, served as the barely-hidden linch-pin of an opposition to Trump that used the apparatus of government intelligence and of federal law enforcement to put its thumb on the election scales in 2016 and 2020. In the lead-up to 2024, the Biden White House went further under the deep influence of Obama, who had broken precedent to remain in DC after his term of office in order to exercise influence.
In a series of law cases that bear the hallmark of active coordination, novel and unprecedented uses of civil and criminal law — laws not known beforehand — were used to try to end forever the ability of Donald Trump to affect American politics.
The use of law in these cases exhibited contempt for the attitude Churchill expressed in his plea to his ministers to “resolve to use [their legal powers] with the utmost circumspection and humanity.” All was subordinated to the political goal, in a logic which inevitably led to branding Trump and his 70 million supporters as Nazis and fascists. An immense and sustained media campaign augmented the claim that Trump represented a threat as grave as Hitler’s, a true threat to democracy. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: We Must All Renew the American Covenant)
How did that work out?
Before the series of trials started about a year ago, Trump’s candidacy was not going well. People sought alternatives. They wanted the political drama to go away. They wanted, as voters did a century earlier, a return to normalcy.
And then the court cases hit. Charges that didn’t sit right, weird and strange in their juicing of freshly-minted statute and bizarre twistings of older laws to apply to things never before acted upon as illegal.
Trump’s drastic turn of fortune can be pegged precisely to the revulsion that shuddered through America when Trump was hauled into court. At each successive stage of the coordinated prosecutions — mug shot, indictment, gag order, enforced courtroom presence, and on and on — there was a bump upwards.
Trump’s enemies believed that pasting on him the label of an indicted man, and finally of a convicted felon, would cause America to reject Trump for good. But each successive advance in the court processes brought out a deeper revulsion. Before their very eyes, people had been ready to leave Trump behind and give credence to his critics who saw what a real threat to democracy looks like.
And they got behind Trump.
The political prosecutors and those who coordinated their work at every level lacked Churchill’s reverence for political liberty and the free, if often unpleasant, debate that living constitutional government requires. Equally, they lacked a respect for the intelligence and the good heart of a population whom they were always too ready to dismiss as deplorables, clingers, and garbage.
The people’s heart was with Churchill’s, not with those who demoted his bust and departed from his commitment to liberty. Their hearts have been touched by liberty and they saw through the propaganda and the oh-so-clever arguments of those who wanted Trump off the ballot, off the internet, off the street, bankrupted, and jailed.
Churchill saw the commitment to political liberty as realization of the great civilizational process of the ages. And he was right. It is. America decided it was not going backwards.
In the book that did more to make the West literate than any other, the Bible, we see in the Book of Exodus the classic fight for freedom. In Egypt, liberty and knowledge and the protections of law belonged only to a few. It was dangerous to educate slaves; they were to be governed by force. Self-government was only for the powerful few and always at the mercy of someone with more power.
Then came the great drama of the Exodus, the escape of a whole nation of slaves from the taskmasters’ control. What followed Israel’s escape from Egypt was even more important — the law was given to the people directly from its Source, a law to which even the most powerful were accountable.
Most important, out of love for the One who so empowered them, the people were bidden to take the laws as their own, to place them “upon your heart, to teach them to your children, and to speak of them, whether sitting in your home, walking in your way, lying down or rising up.” The laws are to be known by the people, not by some professional class of experts alone. And because the laws were theirs, the people would cherish them, and most of all, the love that animates them.
Pharaohs still lurk. Sometimes they are effective in convincing the people that the business of government is only for elite professionals. They preach Lennonism: turn off your minds, relax, and float downstream. They tell you: this is not dying. Let us do the business of governing. (READ MORE: Unity Is a Common Goal, Often Abused)
Americans are trusting. We are willing to listen to challenging thought and even give it a try. But the tale of this last campaign is that in the end, the people’s hearts know the law they love and what constitutes its real threat. Their former leaders deserted the heights of which Churchill spoke. But the hearts of the people remain true and they held the post.
It was enough.
It’s now up to Trump and his team to stay worthy of the trust in the smashing electoral victory the people gave them. Hold fast to the heights and together we will make American law great again, a law preserved in the hearts of a wise and understanding people.
The post With Trump’s Win, The Law Wins appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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