'Disgracing themselves': Columnist blasts GOP extremists for tearing party apart over Trump trial

Republicans are "disgracing themselves" – and damaging their party – with their scramble to find ways to punish Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for her prosecution of Donald Trump, wrote former political science professor Jonathan Bernstein for Bloomberg on Thursday.

This comes as Georgia Republicans fight amongst themselves over how best, or whether, to go after Willis, and as far-right Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) introduces a proposal to eliminate federal funding – including salary – for any Justice Department official trying to prosecute presidential candidates at the federal level.

Presidential candidates, wrote Bernstein, "Should be subject to the rule of law like every other US citizen."

Allies of Trump, like Clyde, assert that prosecuting a presidential candidate would cause damage to the nation's politics and circumvent the impeachment process — which he incidentally voted against both times it was used against Trump. However, Bernstein said, this logic would mean, "Presidential candidates would have a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card, given that after losing once they could presumably file to run in the next election."

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Moreover, Bernstein wrote, there is little global precedent for the idea current, former, or aspiring national leaders are immune from prosecution — such leaders have been prosecuted in France, Italy, Japan, and Israel.

The kernel of truth in this, said Bernstein, is that political officeholders cannot be seen as prosecuting their potential opponents — this is a real threat, and it's notorious in autocracies like Russia. However, this isn't the case in the U.S. There are rules and regulations separating the president from the day-to-day legal actions of the Justice Department, and especially so in the Trump case, where a special counsel outside the normal operations of the DOJ was appointed to oversee all the cases against him.

Ultimately, wrote Bernstein, the fact is that "the rule of law requires everyone, including presidents and certainly presidential candidates, to be subject to prosecution by duly authorized officials." Congressmen like Clyde who are trying to shield Trump from any criminal scrutiny, then, are "disgracing themselves and threatening constitutional government."

He added that the push for defunding and punishment is mere posturing by extremists who are trying to prove their conservative credentials, with no chance of success for what they're proposing. And it's hurting their party.

"To be sure, Clyde’s effort and similar moves by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and others are creating internal divisions within the party and aren’t going to pass into law," he said. "Clyde’s amendment may well fail in committee and Greene’s effort would fail on the House floor if it came to a vote. Even if they somehow managed to get included in spending bills that pass the House, they won’t have any chance in the Senate.

He went on: "Again and again, we see extremists try to find ways to differentiate themselves from mainstream conservatives so that they can claim to be the true conservatives and everyone else RINOs. But given how conservative the entire conference is on normal policy questions, the only ground available to them is procedural radicalism."