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AUGUST 15, 2023

On the Prospect website

* Bob Kuttner on China's economic woes
<[link removed]> and enduring
mercantilism

* Ryan Cooper on Dobbs's disastrous consequences
<[link removed]> for
girls in their early teens

* Ramenda Cyrus on the scam of auto title loans
<[link removed]>

Meyerson on TAP

It Took a Village to Try to Seize the Presidency

As the Georgia indictments make all too clear.

With 19 indicted conspirators and 30 unindicted conspirators, there are
now almost as many Republicans caught up in Fulton County's wheels of
justice as there are Republican candidates for president. At some point,
we may want to indict those candidates (among whom only Chris Christie
and, lately and reluctantly, Mike Pence have noted that Trump appears to
have broken the law), too. On the charge of contributing to the erosion
of American democracy, any number are guilty as sin.

The sheer length of Fulton County DA Fani Willis's bill of criminal
particulars makes clear that it takes a village to seize the presidency,
even when that seizure is thwarted. Nor is it only in Georgia that those
villagers are being hauled into court. Those Georgians who posed as the
state's electors have company in Michigan, where that state's
attorney general has indicted those Michiganders who swore, falsely,
that they were that state's authorized electors. According to a report
<[link removed]>
in today's

**Arizona Republic**, both groups may yet be joined by Arizona's
electoral poseurs.

Such is the genius of federalism.

Some law school professors (not a lot) have argued that taking Trump to
trial, much less convicting him, would do so much damage to our system
of government and/or be so divisive that we shouldn't go through with
it. The question they don't address, however, is what we should do
about his co-conspirators who also broke fundamental laws-by, for
instance, swearing falsely that they were their state's electors and
thereby depriving the voters of their state of their right to choose a
president. Should people who violated the very laws on which the nation
is based also be let go? And if not, how can we hold them responsible
for such violations but exempt the person entirely responsible for their
lawbreaking? This is the kind of thing that could give double standards
a bad name.

If we're to scrap the very idea of equal justice under the law, in the
most glaring and democracy-eroding way imaginable, tens of millions of
Americans are certain to conclude that our legal system is a (bad) joke
and a fraud. (Those Americans who keep abreast of the Supreme Court may
well have already done that, of course.) I can only presume that those
legal eagles who counsel us to cease the prosecutions of our former
president don't wish that to be the consequence. If they don't,
however, they'd have to support dropping the charges not just against
Trump but against every knave and fool who broke the law on his behalf,
including those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

Of course, if we're actually serious about equal justice under the
law, we'd scrap the Electoral College and the Senate, but I digress.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>

[link removed]

The Republican War on Families
<[link removed]>
The 'Dobbs' decision and conservative policies mean teenage rape
victims are forced to give birth in dangerous, threadbare hospitals. BY
RYAN COOPER

The China Conundrum
<[link removed]>
As the world's second-largest economy deals with multiple problems, is
it time for a cozier relationship? BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Sketchy Auto Title Loans Under Fire
<[link removed]>
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking aim at the practice
of borrowers exchanging the title of their vehicle for a small-dollar
loan. BY RAMENDA CYRUS

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