This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.
Laws that hamper Democrats are ignored. Laws that might be used to hurt Republicans are enforced to — and often well past — the limits of the law.
One need look no farther than the absurd circus-clown show trial (one pundit prefers the term “goat rodeo”) in which the state of New York has gone so far in trying to turn Donald Trump’s (alleged) personal peccadilloes into business crimes that Gov. Hochul had to go out of her way to reassure other businessmen that this was a one-off, and that only Trump would be prosecuted under this novel approach to the law.
As law professor Jonathan Turley noted in these pages, the New York statute in question has never been used this way before: “Even The New York Times agreed that it could not find a single case in history where this statute was used against an individual or a company that did not commit a criminal offense, go bankrupt, or leave financial victims.”
Nothing says “rule of law” like custom-made forms of liability designed for a single hated defendant.