Trump, tolls, celebrity rape: The chaos of justice
Justice and democracy are messy, chaotic things at their core.
We saw that in highprofile abundance Friday at the Trump impeachment trial in Washington; at the Harvey Weinstein rape trial in New York; and at a public hearing on tolls in Hartford, where the governor and two top Democrats quietly agreed to hold a vote as partisans duked it out in front of lawmakers.
My understanding of how these three events tie together started decades ago in Hackensack, N.J., in my senior year of high school. My buddy David Black and I had internships at the Bergen County courthouse, where we followed the trial of an accused cocaine dealer named Napoleon Crafter.
Judge Gould called us into his chambers before he gaveled the trial into session. “This guy did it,” he tells a couple of shocked schoolboys, in my rough memory. “I know that, the prosecutor knows it, the defense lawyer knows it and the jury knows it. The only question is whether the state can prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. If not, he goes free.”
Likewise, guilt is clear in President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Reasonable people — including some Republicans in the U.S. Senate — can agree that Trump held up military aid to Ukraine in an effort to prod an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden.
Even Republicans Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Marco Rubio of Florida said as much, though Rubio’s account read like it came from Rufus T. Firefly, Groucho Marx’s character in Duck Soup.
Alan Dershowitz, Trump’s celebrity lawyer, basically conceded the president’s guilt in his argument that the Senate can’t convict Trump for advancing his own reelection.
The question was whether that guilt would rise to an impeachment conviction and whether it would come out in Senate testimony for the world to see. The answer is no. Friday’s 51-49 vote to call no witnesses and introduce no documents — with Alexander and Rubio joining the majority — flouted the will of a clear majority of Americans, an average of 73 percent in several polls.
Flouting the will of the people is OK in this democracy if it’s the right moral choice, per the founding fathers (and mothers, though they had to offer advice on the sly from home).
Likewise, reasonable people can agree and a majority of Americans believe that Weinstein, the film mogul, did sexually assault a number of women. Strong circumstantial evidence and the public claims of some 80 alleged victims points in that direction.
Whether he faces judicial punishment or goes free depends on the state of New York’s ability to persuade a jury that at least one of two women — the second of whom gave lurid and emotional testimony Friday — are telling the truth.
That’s no slam dunk, as these women spent some time in consensual relationships with Weinstein, who wielded influence over their careers.
In the Connecticut tolls debate, the will of the people is modest tolling of trucks, if and only if the money is used strictly for the road and bridge upgrades. Gov. Ned Lamont won office on a strong promise of it.
Even if that’s not a mandate, the failure in the state House and Senate to hold any votes on tolls would seem a slap in the face of Democracy, the one with the capital D.
Why such a comic-tragic farce over the last year, with at least three plans, each weaker than the one before it, and no votes? Because democracy, the one with the small d, is necessarily messy and chaotic, the better to hear voices that will not, ultimately, carry the day.
And because politics does not reward risk the way business does, especially in steady-habits Connecticut.
The state Senate has trodden so lightly on tolls, despite the need and the apparent support, that first-term Sen. Alex Bergstein, D-Greenwich, is slamming her fellow senators at huge risk to her own political career.
“The messaging and the public handling of this has been wildly mishandled,” said Bergstein, a strong supporter of tolls for cars as well as trucks. “The public...was never educated about the real options.”
She called the latest version, which bans car tolling for a decade, “intellectually dishonest and fiscally irresponsible,” and added, “I expect our elected officials to do what they were elected to do, which is lead the state.”
The irony is that it took a closed meeting of three men in Lamont’s office to make it happen. It now appears votes will come this month on Lamont’s plan to toll trucks at 12 locations around the state.
Lamont’s 40-minute confab with Marty Looney, the Senate president protem, and House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, the likely speaker in 2021, could not have been a genteel afternoon tea. His governorship hits an iceberg if he doesn’t get these votes.
These guys have the power to make it happen and he has the power to make their lives hellish if they don’t.
Maybe all he had to do on Friday afternoon, as the tolls hearing unfolded in the next building, was remind them that he signed the bills they wanted last year — the minimum wage hike, paid family and medical leave and a favorable budget — and that he’s not giving up on his tolls plan.
Maybe he had to mediate between them, as we know there’s mistrust between the House and Senate, both of which want the other chamber to cast the risky tolls vote first.
Whatever Lamont said, we’re likely to see those votes and it’s a decent bet we’ll see a trucks-only tolling plan raising $172 million a year after expenses, which is just 7.5 percent of the amount the state will raise for transportation upgrades.
Then again, we won’t know until we know.
Trump will win acquittal, and probably re-election. The economy remains strong and he’s a master at planting lies about his opponents, speaking of messy chaos.
Weinstein’s fate is anyone’s call. And by the way, the jury found Napoleon Crafter not guilty of selling cocaine in that long-ago New Jersey trial.
Justice and democracy are messy, chaotic things at their core.