New York Gov. Kathy Hochul knows she has spooked her state’s business community. That’s why she went on a talk show last week to calm their very legitimate fears that they would be next. If former President Donald Trump can be prosecuted and fined hundreds of millions of dollars for a common business practice, who is safe?
Hochul said New Yorkers are generally “honest people, and they’re not trying to hide their assets and they’re following the rules… This judge determined that Donald Trump did not follow the rules.” Hence the $355 million fine levied by the court.
But the truth is Trump engaged in a common business practice for developers. As “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary noted in a Fox News interview, “Forget about Trump, every single real estate developer everywhere on Earth does this. They always talk about their asset being worth a lot, and the bank says no. That’s just the way it is.”
The broader effect of such politicized prosecutions is clear — Americans are increasingly convinced we live in a nation with a two-tiered justice system.
“The trend has underlined the prosecutorial temptation to crusading self-righteousness,” The Washington Post’s Jason Willick pointed out recently. “The people charged with enforcing federal law seem to thrill at finding new ways to prosecute politically unsympathetic people who have behaved badly, even when their behavior wasn’t clearly illegal.”
That includes Americans like Daniel Penny, the young man prosecuted for murder for defending a subway car full of passengers from a mentally ill homeless man who threatened them, while the illegal immigrants who attacked an NYPD officer on the subway were released without bail.
This affirms what Americans learned from the prosecution of Trump for the alleged mishandling of classified documents, while Biden (like Hillary Clinton before him) got a pass for the same thing. And the list goes on.
What’s more, even the judge in the Trump case acknowledged that there were no victims and that every party in the deal brought to trial by New York Attorney General Letitia James made a profit. He also noted that “it is undisputed that defendants have made all required payments on time.”
In their desperation to sideline Trump, and anyone else who challenges the leftist narrative, Democrats are ripping up what philosopher John Locke described as the “social contract.”
As the American Bar Association explains, “The rule of law functions because most of us agree that it is important to observe the law, even if a police officer is not present to enforce it. Our agreement as citizens to obey the law to maintain our social order is sometimes described as an essential part of the social contract.”
But what happens when government lets down its side? The U.S. Supreme Court has warned us about this repeatedly.
“There can be no free society without law administered through an independent judiciary,” the high court ruled in a 1947 case. “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.”
Locke himself warned about this; “where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
Our two-tiered justice system is a far greater threat to our democracy than Trump or any size basket of deplorables.
“Political prosecutions are a danger, but so is overcharging by ambitious, media-savvy prosecutors whose main interest is their own advancement and notoriety,” added The Washinton Post’s Willick. “Americans might need to worry more about the propensity of prosecutors to deprive the public of honest services when they stretch the limits of the law.”
Gov. Hochul tried to soothe her state’s business community with assurances that other real estate developers need not worry about receiving the Trump treatment. But it’s tyranny when our liberty relies on the whims of a government official.
The Honorable Robert Henneke is the Executive Director and General Counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
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