A brief comment on Trump's New York conviction

It's worse than you think.

The following is an editor’s note that precedes my article for TomKlingenstein.com; it gives you a flavor of my argument:

In our founders’ time, it was common for those disfavored by the regime—especially high-ranking or ambitious politicians—to be deprived of their rights and their place in public affairs, without trial or recourse, by acts of the legislature known as “bills of attainder.” Our founders were so cautious of this particular form of treachery that they banned the practice not just in the U.S. Constitution but in every single one of the original state constitutions.

What the founders didn’t foresee, argues attorney Deion Kathawa, is the current predicament in which such abuses—like so much legislative business—would be absorbed by the other branches and carried out by political prosecutors in front of political judges. Donald Trump’s conviction serves the exact same purpose as these bills of attainder once did. That it is wrapped up in the creeping rule of the administrative state makes it doubly objectionable. The result, Kathawa argues, is a totalitarian threat somewhere between a Soviet show trial and a regression to the overreach that forced our revolution.

Read the rest here.