Brief Note on the Speed of the January 6th Prosecutions

Legal analyst and emeritus UCLA law professor Peter L. Arenella tweets:

Can you imagine working 16-18 hrs every day including mot of your weekends while you partner and kids complain about never seeing you. Becoming a ghost to your family for an extended period of time because you believe your work is a necessary component of the effort to save our democracy. And, then having to listen to “know nothing” TV pundits complain for over a year that the DOJ is doing nothing while you are working like a slave and taking sleep medication at night to stop your brain from going into overdrive so you can get a few hrs of sleep. [etc., etc.] – tweet

I have decided that Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice staff are doing their jobs, but that, for the past three decades, the Democratic leadership did not. For those decades, we needed leaders to stand up and for three decades they didn’t. There were off-ramps. Conceding the presidential election of 2000 and the confirmation of Alito come to mind. In every case the Democratic leadership folded until finally insurrectionists led by Donald Trump built a gibbet outside Congress.

Where was the Nancy Pelosi the January Sixth Committee showed us on video during the years leading up to the insurrection?

Elizabeth Cheney has had huge positive publicity from her prosecution of the inssurectionists in the January 6th committe. But she was one of the arsonists who laid the fire that Donald Trump finally lit. It would be horrible if she parlays this into a Presidential campaign.

There is something badly wrong with our democracy and it was wrong long before the election of Donald Trump.