Democrats Should Stop the ‘Lock Him Up’ Chants
Calling for the arrest of political opponents is undemocratic, whichever party is doing it.
Not how it works.
Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty
I’ve been a little slow on this, but I agree with Quinta Jurecic: It’s unacceptable for presidential candidates to talk about jailing their political opponents. Or for members of Congress to say that the president should “rot in prison.” Or for chants of “lock him up” to become fixtures at Democratic rallies.
It was a violation of democratic politics when Donald Trump and other Republicans started doing this kind of thing three years ago. It’s even worse that Trump has continued it as president. That doesn’t give Democrats license to copy him – even if there’s plenty of evidence that the president has committed crimes.
Presidents and candidates should protect the independence of the Justice Department. If Democrats think it’s an abuse of power for the president to choose who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t, then they shouldn’t support anything that sounds remotely like presidential interference in criminal cases. And yet, asked if she’d want the Justice Department to prosecute Trump if she becomes president, Senator Kamala Harris answered: “I believe that they would have no choice, and that they should, yes.”
Lawmakers who aren’t running for president don’t have quite the same responsibility. But Congress is hardly irrelevant to what executive-branch departments do. I can’t quite envision a rider on a spending bill forcing the Justice Department to prosecute (or not) some political actor, but it’s not as far-fetched to imagine a committee chair using the budget process to push for specific behavior, or even senators conditioning their confirmation of an attorney general or other nominee on how they’d deal with specific cases.
As far as “lock him up” chants? Individual citizens, as opposed to federal officials, have no reason to restrain themselves from offering opinions about who should be prosecuted. But encouraging mob rule is undemocratic, and so is the notion that elections should determine who winds up in prison. Audiences shouldn’t do it, and politicians and other speakers at such events should make clear that democracy doesn’t work that way.
This doesn’t mean Democrats need to be reticent about Trump’s wrongdoing. Some of them, in fact, are issuing excessively weak statements about the latest accusations that the president committed sexual assault. It’s fine to criticize a president harshly when appropriate, and it’s okay to talk about evidence of criminality. Congress also has a responsibility to consider impeachment and removal when relevant.
But Democrats should resist the temptation to react in kind to violations of democratic norms. They probably expect that Trump will accuse whoever they nominate of criminal behavior, or even to suggest that federal prosecutors go after his opponent. Compared to that, upholding the norms I’m talking about may seem like disarming before a crucial fight. But reacting to hardball with hardball isn’t always appropriate.
In this case, the norms involved are too important to heedlessly violate. And at the end of the day, staying within them isn’t really a sacrifice: There are plenty of perfectly reasonable (and sufficiently invigorating) chants for Democratic crowds, and plenty of appropriately harsh language for candidates to use. Perhaps, if they do stand up to “lock him up” chanters, they’ll even look good to some undecided voters. You never know.
1. Rick Hasen on the census case and the Supreme Court.
2. Seth Masket on his latest survey of Democratic early-state activists.
3. Kim Yi Dionne and Laura Seay at the Monkey Cage on the continuing Ebola outbreak.
4. If you’ve ever heard about “filling the tree” for bills on the Senate floor and wondered what it meant, James Wallner has a comprehensive guide.
5. James Pethokoukis on productivity growth.
6. Molly Jong-Fast on media overage of rape accusations against the president.
7. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Karl W. Smith on carbon taxes.
Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.