This commentary is by David M. Roth, a Burlington resident and entrepreneur.
The impeachment trial of Donald Trump, while an inherently political process, illustrates accurately how wealth, power and race routinely tip our nation’s scales of justice.
The case made by the House impeachment managers was profound and profoundly resonant and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the former president incited violence prior to and on Jan. 6, 2021.
This impeachment process, however, was not immune to the realities of our nation’s system of justice and its outcome was as predictable as are the thousands of others involving people of privilege. To quote Sam Brooke of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “You’re much better off in our justice system if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”
Our history bears out the stark reality of the power of privilege, and that reality was on full display in the U.S. Senate this past week. Despite the extraordinarily cogent, dispassionate, rational and factually grounded case made by Congressman Raskin, Congressman Lieu, Delegate Plaskett and their talented colleagues, 43 Republicans decided that loyalty to country neither outweighed fealty to a demagogue nor fear of political backlash by that demagogue’s base.
The Republican senators who did not vote to convict made their decisions based on politics, not justice. Their lack of support for convicting the former president for such an obvious crime has generations of precedent in other juries and judges who routinely convict the impoverished but acquit the powerful and connected.
Our history is replete with examples and statistics to support the contention that outcomes in our nation’s justice system are inextricably tied to demographic factors, but the connection between relative wealth and justice is quite stark. In “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander makes the point crystal clear; “People who enter the criminal justice system are overwhelmingly poor. Two-thirds detained in jails report annual incomes under $12,000 prior to arrest.”
It is not only that crime is one of the most pernicious effects of poverty, but that often the crimes committed by the most privileged damage the most people and often go without punishment at all (e.g., the 2008 financial crisis).
Of course, poverty is not the only determining factor in outcomes related to justice; race is as well. According to The Sentencing Project, Black males born in 2001 have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17% chance; white males have a 6% chance.” Different outcomes based on wealth and race are found throughout our society but are so painfully blatant within the justice system — and were so painfully blatant in the Senate’s vote to acquit.
The Senate’s acquittal of Mr. Trump will certainly go down in history as a miscarriage of justice, but it will also go down in history as a prime example of what happens when our political leaders pay more attention to polls than to people and more attention to reelection than to reconciliation.
The acquittal of Mr. Trump will not bring our nation closer together — quite the opposite, and that is perhaps the worst outcome of all. Justice, at its core, is about healing, but our nation will be unable to heal so long as the wounds that Mr. Trump caused are allowed to fester. Convicting the man who incited a failed coup d’état would have sent a powerful message that what is right is forever right and what is wrong will never be tolerated, regardless of the color of your skin or the heft of your wallet or your political party affiliation.
A few years ago, in January 2016, Mr. Trump boasted that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” He might have also said that he could incite people to violently attempt to overthrow the American government and not face any repercussions at all, because that is exactly what happened.
The Senate failed us all in acquitting Mr. Trump, but most profoundly failed those families whose lives were forever damaged as a result of the attempted coup. People died during the siege of the Capitol and as a result of the siege, and while responsibility for the pain and the damage and the anguish lays primarily at Trump’s feet, the Senate’s inability to convict only serves to exacerbate and prolong the anguish for us all.
President Lincoln was correct in his observations about “domestic terror”: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The Senate’s decision served the powerful and the forces of division at the expense of the rest of us with the acquittal, but the work to repair our nation will continue despite the failure of the Senate to hold Mr. Trump accountable for actions that were designed to destroy our democracy.
With thanks to the resiliency of our people, our democracy will live to fight another day, but with no thanks to 43 members of the United States Senate who voted to acquit a man demonstrably guilty of the highest of crimes and misdemeanors.
