Letting Mr. Trump slide
Once upon a time, Ronald Reagan earned the moniker “the Teflon president.” But he’s got nothing on Donald Trump.
America got another look at just how slippery Mr. Trump is when a resignation letter surfaced last week from Mark Pomerantz, a senior prosecutor on a criminal case against the former president involving his alleged falsifying of financial information. Two prosecutors resigned in February after Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, lost faith in the case.
In the letter, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Pomerantz asserted that the ex-president is “guilty of numerous felony violations” — and that they could have made them stick.
What’s more, Mr. Pomerantz said, letting Mr. Trump wriggle free of prosecution would be “a grave failure of justice”: “Respect for the rule of law, and the need to reinforce the bedrock proposition that ‘no man is above the law,’ require that this prosecution be brought even if a conviction is not certain,” he wrote.
That is indeed one of the dangers here: Letting this case choke gives the
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public more reason to think that the system cannot be trusted to hold the powerful accountable.
But there’s a larger danger, too. Our democracy has been taking a beating, primarily at the fists of Mr. Trump and his thugs. Just the latest example: Last week Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks — a lackey who recently lost a Trump endorsement — accused the ex-president of repeatedly pressing him to “rescind” the election and eject President Joe Biden. If true, it would yet another violation of the law that Mr. Trump has yet to answer for.
Make no mistake: If he wins the White House again, his abuses of office in his first term could pale by comparison. With the groundwork Republicans have laid nationally to undermine elections, Mr. Trump will have greater power and fewer guardrails.
And if that happens, we may not recognize our country anymore.
Choosing paths in Bethlehem
Faced with parents’ resistance, Bethlehem schools backed off a proposal that would have had more children walking to school. It’s an opportunity for the town to have a larger discussion about whom the streets are for, and what it would take to become the kind of town where pedestrians, even young ones, can feel — and be — safer.
As it juggles the widespread shortage of bus drivers, Bethlehem looked at tightening school bus eligibility. Under the tabled proposal, some students now picked up by bus would have had to walk next year, or be driven. Some parents objected that it would be too far for children to walk, that streets are unsafe for pedestrians, that parts of town lack sidewalks.
Last fall, Bethlehem voters rejected a traffic-calming initiative that could have slowed vehicle speeds on Delaware Avenue — including in front of Elsmere Elementary — and made the town more pedestrian-friendly. That measure would not have magically made the whole town safer to walk and bike in. But it would have helped.
Of course parents in Bethlehem want their kids to be safe getting to school. We all want that for our kids. The bus plan and the traffic-calming proposal raise some of the same questions about what kind of a community Bethlehem should be, and what infrastructure investments could help the town get there. We hope that in Bethlehem, the discussion continues.