Presidents not above the law

For some years now, American presidents have been breaking U.S. and international Laws with impunity. As this has been overlooked and tolerated by Congress, the courts and the American people, these unprosecuted crimes that presidents have committed predictably have only gotten worse over time. If the U.S. does not remedy this situation there might be no limit to the crimes a U.S. president could commit in the future without consequence.

For the first time in recent history a U.S. president has been implicated in felonious criminal activity by the U.S. Justice Department. President Trump under a special counsel is being investigated for abuse of presidential powers, perjury, obstructing justice and conspiring with a hostile foreign power to help him get elected in a quid pro quo arrangement with Russia to reduce or eliminate sanctions for helping Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

If the Justice Department will not indict the president and Congress will not impeach the president, even if the prosecutors determine these are serious and indictable felonious crimes we the people have set a regrettable precedent that our president can commit any crime with impunity. It will become clearer to the world by our non-action that our president is above U.S. and international law.

One doesn’t have to look to far back to see what led up to this crime trend in the U.S. presidency that has gone unchecked and unpunished for many years. For example, President Obama ordered the secret killing of American citizens without due process and he secretly ordered drone attacks, which killed civilians in countries where we had no declared war. President George W. Bush brought the U.S. into an illegal, unjustified and unnecessary war in Iraq which resulted in many hundreds of thousand of civilian deaths, destabilized an entire region of the world, used illegal torture, illegally kidnapped people and set up illegal detention centers around the world.

Presidential crimes are not limited Trump, Obama and G.W. Bush — H.W. Bush, Clinton, Reagan and even Carter were involved in activities around the world and here at home in which many books have been written that have found gray areas of law breaking. Even Richard Nixon was able to slither out of the normal punishment for his crimes that any other American citizen could not have achieved.

If we don’t respect our own policies and the rule of law for all, how can we expect by example that other countries aspire to these goals as free and fair societies?