In every age, there are threats to our safety that generate a call to compromise our civil liberties.
During my own lifetime, liberal president Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the detention of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps far away from their homes. This compromise of civil liberties was approved by the most liberal justices in modern Supreme Court history.
Then came the threat of Communism during the 1950s. The response was another compromise in civil liberties demanded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers. Free speech was restricted, the Communist party was outlawed, and the courts upheld many of these compromises on civil liberties.
Then came the civil rights movement, with violence on both sides and the accompanying call for compromises in our civil liberties. The Supreme Court was asked to limit trial by jury so that segregationist governors could be compelled to obey court orders without the risk of jury nullification.
This was followed by the Vietnam War, during which the government drafted dissenters in order to silence them, and war protestors were charged with a variety of crimes to stifle dissent.
At the beginning of this century, we witnessed the disaster of September 11. This was followed by a call to compromise the civil liberties of suspected terrorists by detaining them without trial, torturing them, and silencing imams who advocated jihad.
And now, the presidency of Donald Trump has given rise to demands that we stretch the criminal law and the criteria for impeaching and removing the president. The justification offered for this compromise is that Trump himself has denied the civil liberties of people seeking asylum and immigration into our country.
In every age, we hear the same claim: “This time it’s different. Previous threats have never been as great. This time we really need to compromise civil liberties.”
But as Benjamin Franklin warned us more than 250 years ago: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Whenever civil liberties have been compromised, I have been on the forefront of demanding strict compliance with our Constitution. It is precisely during times of crisis that civil liberties are most endangered, because decent people believe that the short-term needs for safety outweigh the long-term needs for liberty. I have been vilified, not only by the hard left, but by some centrist liberals as well, for insisting that the criminal law not be stretched to target Donald Trump’s political sins, and that the criteria for impeaching and removing a president not be expanded in order to target this particular president.
Had Hillary Clinton been elected president and had the Republicans tried to prosecute and impeach her, I would be making precisely the same arguments I am now making with regard to President Trump. The book I recently wrote, entitled The Case Against Impeaching Trump, would have been The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton. The title would have been different, but the content would have been the same. To emphasize this point, I had my publisher produce a mock cover featuring Clinton’s name instead of Trump’s. Had I been making these exact arguments in regard to Hillary Clinton, people on the left would be building a statue of me instead of trying to tear me down.
Throughout my life, I have applied what I call the “shoe on the other foot” test. Whenever I make an argument, I ask myself: “Would I be making the same argument if the shoe were on the other foot, if the person whose rights I was defending was of the opposite party or political persuasion?” I pass this test with flying colors. Most of my critics fail it.
I will continue to demand civil liberties and constitutional rights for all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, ideology, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. The equal protection of the law does not stop at the Oval Office. No one is above the law. No one is below the law. If the law can be stretched to target a president, it can be stretched to target anyone.
