The Lesson of Robespierre

He’ll make mistakes, and there are certainly policies with which I disagree, but I wasn’t elected. Let’s see how it comes out.

In any case, I’m quite certain, as I’ve been saying on X for months, Trump > Harris.

But I think we need to be careful.

First of all, we’ve elected a president, not anointed a king. There are things we permit a president to do and things we don’t permit a president to do. 

A whole lot of people are calling for Trump to do things right away that he’s not actually permitted to do.

In no particular order, some of these — I’m sure it’s not an exhaustive list — are:

• He can’t pardon Daniel Penny. That’s a state charge, and he can only pardon people for federal crimes. 
• He can’t put the J6 committee in jail. It’s possible that some of the staffers may have committed crimes for which they could be charged, but we’ll talk about that more a little later.
• He can’t try pretty much anyone for treason. I know this is one of my pet peeves, but I’m going to pet it just a little more. The Founders were very aware of how flexible the charge of treason had been in English common law, and even more aware that under the flexible charge of treason in English common law, they were lucky to escape hanging. Ben Franklin was not joking when he said they could hang together, or hang separately. See my lengthier discussions here, here, and here.

Of course, there are things he certainly can do. He can, and should, clean out the top brass in the military, and while he can’t charge, e.g., Gen. Milley with treason, Trump can recall him to active duty where he can be tried by court-martial. Along with other possibilities, a good one for an officer is “conduct unbecoming.” And I think looking at the Espionage Act has some promise in the civilian courts.

He certainly can clear out the top levels of Department of Justice lawyers, a lot of the top level of the State Department, in general, a whole bunch of holdovers from Biden-Harris. Some of the holdovers were converted to civil service — an obvious ploy to preserve Obama’s influence after the election — so they will be harder to outright fire, at least until Congress can change the civil service laws as part of the move to the Department of Government Efficiency.

For those people, I want to recommend to Trump an old Japanese custom. It’s called a “window seat.” If someone is not performing, you reassign them. Maybe you move them to an office in New Mexico and give them responsibility for counting the gay prairie dog population. Maybe you just move them to a rented office in Arlington with a phone and internet but with no access to government systems and no responsibilities other than verifying they’re in the office every 15 minutes. The point is that you make things sufficiently unpleasant that they, as the saying goes, self-deport.

But now, a warning

I mentioned that I don’t think Liz Cheney and the other members of the J6 committee can be charged successfully. The Speech and Debate Clause is amazingly broad. We might be able to charge some of the committee staff, but I wonder if it would be wise, except for any explicit espionage or the like.

During the French Revolution, a man named Maximilien Robespierre became powerful. He actually started out as recognizably One of Us, demanding among other things an end to slavery and a right to bear arms. But as the revolution continued, it became the Reign of Terror. Robespierre sent many many people to the guillotine. Then the political winds shifted, and he eventually died rather horribly on the guillotine himself.

There’s a lesson here. No matter how much you resent what a political opponent does, you need to remember that the political winds can change and your political opponents can and will come to power again.

Remember the Lesson of Robespierre: if something can be done for you, it can be done to you.