Nancy Pelosi wrote a tweet following the news that Democrat operatives in New York had indicted Trump. While the tweet was obviously intended to celebrate American norms, what it did instead highlighted the Democrats’ new norms in 21st-Century America. Under the new rules, liberty and due process no longer apply. To those of us who watched Pelosi during the Trump years, her revised take on American jurisprudence was entirely consistent with her behavior during the two Trump impeachments she engineered.
I won’t keep you in suspense. Here’s Pelosi’s tweet:
Readers instantly grasped what was wrong with her statement, so now, if you view it on Twitter, it has some helpful information appended:
Ms. Pelosi mistakenly says that Trump can prove his innocence at trial. Law in the US assumes the innocence of a defendant and the prosecution must prove guilt for a conviction.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/presumption_of_innocence
Pelosi isn’t stupid, and she’s old enough to have lived in an America where every sentient person knew that, under our law, defendants are innocent until the state carries its heavy burden of proving that defendant guilty. It’s an essential part of American jurisprudence protecting individuals from the fact that the state pays and, except for most juries, controls the police, prosecutors, judge, jailers, and executors.
That Pelosi got the legal standard wrong was either deliberate (“Hail the brave new America”) or the mother of all Freudian slips. It was also entirely consistent with her prior approaches to governance. In 2019, when Democrats were preparing for Trump’s first impeachment, Pelosi (with help from Adam Schiff and Mitch McConnell’s later shameful acquiescence) deprived Trump of his due process rights.
And lest anyone say impeaching a president is different, it’s not. Then, as now, Pelosi ignored hundreds of years of precedent, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story explained in his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution, Vol. II (1833). (Story’s commentary is at the bottom of the linked post as the addendum.)
I noted above that Pelosi comes from a generation that should know this principle. Unfortunately, the younger generation does not. Emily Olson and Emma Bowman, very young NPR employees, approvingly quoted Nancy Pelosi’s tweet in their essay regarding Democrats’ crowing that “no one is above the law.” These two products of modern American education didn’t know that Nancy Pelosi, deliberately or accidentally, got it wrong.
We live in very dangerous times because Democrats are completely unconstrained by—and, if young, unaware of—the liberty-based norms that America inherited from England and enshrined, explicitly or implicitly, into America’s constitutional and common law.