A spokeswoman for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo indicated that the governor “believes that the federal legal system should not provide a basis for any wrong doers to escape justice.”
Placing the statement’s incredulity aside — the governor is no friend of law enforcement and no serious person believes that he means that statement — it cuts to the core of the paradoxes buttressing a politics of expedience and self-righteousness. Pitiless imposers of the people’s retribution upon crimes — or, more aptly, criminals — for which and whom they hold contempt, New York’s simultaneous contention that federal immigration law’s teeth end where the cosmopolitan tolerance of its state lines begin is too ironic to be the fruits of anything but cynicism.
One of the (many) great ironies of the Trump presidency, as Tucker Carlson notes, is that the people who a mere two years ago labeled an affinity for federalism a species of Faubusite intolerance, now themselves hold high the flag of states’ rights as a means proper of “resistance.” An ideology that induces its adherents to selectively mete out the fiat of federal law upon its myriad dissenters approaches a more righteous cause for such resistance, one intuits.
Outraged at the prospective pardoning of a man whose visceral crime was a minor campaign finance violation and actual offense was infidelity to the cult of Obama-worship, the New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood released a statement decrying, among other things, Dinesh D’Souza’s pardon and the “double jeopardy loophole.” Such a loophole is known, in other parlance, as a clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, a document that she herself is duty-bound to uphold by her own oath of office.
Underwood’s ultimate goal is likely more nuanced but no less foul; her invocation of a remedy for the “loophole” is a call for the ability to try federally pardoned citizens for violations of New York law, even if they have already been previously tried on a federal level.
There is a palpable contempt for the founders’ enshrined protection from retrial; that and other provisions in the Constitution certainly weaken the “resistance” effort, and if the sitting president is indeed a fascistic despot waiting to intern visible minorities in internment camps like a Democratic forebearer then constitutional norms seem of little consequence.
Therein lies the great paradox for American progressives in the civil service: can they swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and concurrently serve an ideology that despises the Founders and their seminal document’s principles and civic vision?
Progressives have long abhorred the Constitution’s penchant for negative liberty, and deified progressive president Woodrow Wilson long sought to unshackle himself from the bounds of constitutionally delineated power. The Left’s broader distaste for the very documents they swear to uphold is a paradox that predates the movement’s current hysteria in the face of a Trump presidency, but the climate of panic that has enveloped the culture has exacerbated progressive hostility for the country’s founding documents.
Let’s hope we don’t lose the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment to the ill-tempered political preferences of a New York civil servant.