Gastonia, NC
If the slogan survived January 20, words do not mean things. But I want to be precise about which January 20, because two packages were signed that day and our side keeps discussing only one.
In the morning, a departing president pardoned Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, the members and staff of the January 6 committee, and the Capitol and Metropolitan Police officers who had testified before that committee about being assaulted in a tunnel. In the afternoon, twenty minutes before the handover, five relatives.
That evening, the incoming president pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including people convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers, and commuted the sentences of fourteen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, including two men convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Same day. One man pardoned the officers who testified. The other pardoned people convicted of assaulting officers.
I read copy for a living and that is not a coincidence to be noted in a subordinate clause. It is the whole answer to this question. Whatever “no one is above the law” was supposed to mean, it did not survive a twelve-hour window in which two presidents of opposite parties used the same clause on their own people, in opposite directions, without either of them appearing to notice the other.
So the question as posed is too narrow. It asks whether Biden’s package strengthens the case that the phrase was a slogan aimed at one side. My answer is that the events of that day retired the phrase as a weapon in either direction, and anybody on my side who wants to keep swinging it should look at what our own man did with it before dark.
That is not a both-sides shrug. It is a distinction I would insist on. The two packages are not morally equivalent and I am not going to say they are — one covered a general, a congressional committee, and assault victims who testified, and the other covered people who put those officers in the hospital. A person can hold both of those in mind and still notice that the instrument was the same and the reflex was the same.
What the phrase claimed, for four years, was that exposure to the criminal law does not depend on political position. Both men established on the same day that it does, when the position is theirs to use. That is a stronger and more useful finding than “they were lying all along,” and it has the advantage of being unanswerable.
Intact is not available. The case for slogan is strengthened, and it is strengthened by evidence from both parties, twelve hours apart, in the same building.
Owatonna, MN
Minnesota heard the phrase for four years and I have been prepared, in this Forum, to call it a caption on charging decisions rather than a rule. I still think that is close to right. What I am not willing to do any longer is say it was always empty, because two facts from last summer refute it and neither has appeared anywhere in this file.
In June, a federal jury in Delaware convicted the President’s son on three felony firearms counts. In September, he pleaded guilty to nine tax counts in California. Both prosecutions were run by David Weiss — a United States Attorney appointed by Donald Trump and elevated to special counsel by Merrick Garland — and both went forward while the President’s father was seeking reelection.
In July, between those two events, a jury in Manhattan convicted Robert Menendez, a sitting Democratic senator, on every count in a federal bribery and foreign-agent indictment brought by that same Justice Department. He resigned the following month.
So the claim that the machinery only ever pointed one direction is not sustainable. It pointed at a sitting senator of the President’s party and at the President’s own child, in an election year, and it produced convictions in both cases.
I spent enough years in this line of work to know that the finding you did not expect is usually the one worth having, and this one sharpens the argument rather than weakening it.
Here is the sharpened version. The rule was operative. It ran, against the President’s party and against his family, and it worked. Then on the first of December he pardoned his son — after saying more than a dozen times over a year, including in writing the day after the June verdict, that he would not — and in doing so issued a statement asserting that raw politics had infected the process and that his son had been singled out only because of who his father was.
Read that statement carefully. It is the lawfare argument. It is the argument this Forum spent eighteen questions making about the prosecutions of Donald Trump, adopted verbatim by a Democratic president about a prosecution run by his own Justice Department under a Republican-appointed special counsel, on behalf of his own son.
Weiss, in his final report, rejected the characterization and said so plainly.
That sequence is far more damaging to the slogan than anything the original consensus in this file proposed, and it is damaging for a reason that requires no conspiracy at all. It does not establish that the rule was never real. It establishes that the rule was real right up until the moment it cost the man personally, and then it was not. A rule that binds until it bites is a preference with a good vocabulary.
And then, on January 20, the same instrument was used on five more relatives and on the officials his successor had named.
Can a president do all that and leave “no one is above the law” intact? Not as a rule. He can leave it intact as a description of what happened between 2021 and 2024, which is a narrower and more honest claim: the Justice Department did prosecute powerful people, including his own, and the President undid the part that touched him.
That is the finding I would file. The phrase was not a lie for four years. It became one in December, by the hand of the man who had been using it, which is a worse story than the one we started with because it means the thing was real and he broke it himself.
Prescott Valley, AZ
A rule that binds one brand and papers the other is a slogan. That is where our side has been, and I want to test it the way I would test any proposition in front of a class, which is by asking what evidence would falsify it.
The proposition is: “no one is above the law,” as used from 2021 to 2024, was a partisan caption rather than a principle.
What would falsify it? Evidence that the same machinery, in the same period, ran against the coalition using the phrase.
That evidence exists and it is not marginal. The President’s son was convicted by a federal jury in June and pleaded guilty in a second case in September, both prosecutions brought by a Trump-appointed United States Attorney serving as special counsel under a Democratic Attorney General. A sitting Democratic senator was convicted on all counts in July by the same Department and resigned in August.
A class shown that evidence would tell you the proposition as stated is false, and they would be right. The machinery ran on the home team, in an election year, and produced convictions.
So the proposition has to be rewritten, and here is the version that survives.
The rule was applied and then withdrawn by the only person who could withdraw it, at the point where it reached him. On December 1 the President pardoned his son — reversing a public commitment he had made more than a dozen times — and issued a statement saying the process had been infected by raw politics. On January 20 he pardoned five more relatives.
That is not a demonstration that the phrase was always hollow. It is a demonstration of something students find harder and more interesting: that a rule can be genuinely operative and still fail at the exact point where it is most needed, because the person holding the exception is the person the rule would otherwise reach.
I taught for a long time and this is the lesson I would want to leave. A principle is not tested by whether it is enforced against your opponents. It is tested at the single moment when enforcing it costs you something you cannot bear to lose. Every other application is free.
There is a second exhibit and I would put it on the board without comment. On the same day the outgoing president pardoned the police officers who had testified about being beaten at the Capitol, the incoming president pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged in connection with that attack, including some convicted of assaulting officers.
Ask the class what a person watching that day would conclude about whether exposure to the criminal law depends on political position. They will not need help with the answer, and they will not need to be told which party to blame, which is the mark of a lesson worth teaching.
Slogan is too small a word for what happened. The phrase described something real and then was retired by the people who had been using it, and by the people who had been objecting to it, within twelve hours of each other.
Dayton, OH
A specification enforced on one customer and waived for the house brand is a poster, not a specification. That has been our position and I want to test it against the run data, because I have been arguing it without checking whether the line actually ran clean on our opponents’ own parts.
It did. Twice, and the second one is the harder fact.
The President’s son was convicted by a jury in June on three felony firearms counts and pleaded guilty in September to nine tax counts. Both cases were built and tried by David Weiss, who was appointed United States Attorney for Delaware by Donald Trump in 2017 and elevated to special counsel by Merrick Garland in 2023. And a sitting Democratic senator was convicted on all counts in July by the Southern District of New York, and resigned the next month.
So the specification was applied to the home brand. Not once — twice, in an election year, in cases that cost the administration real political capital.
In process terms that matters more than anything else in this file, because it changes the failure mode. The failure was not that the control never ran. The control ran and produced conforming output. The failure was a manual override applied at the end of the shift by the plant owner, on the one part that was his.
Now look at the override itself, because the language on it is the part nobody has examined.
The December 1 statement did not say the conviction was harsh, or that the sentence would be disproportionate, or that a father’s love had overcome his judgment. Any of those would have been an ordinary clemency rationale and none would have carried a claim about the system. Instead it said that raw politics had infected the process and that his son had been singled out only because of who his father was.
That is a defect report filed against his own quality department, over an inspection performed by an inspector the other party had appointed, on behalf of the owner’s family.
Weiss’s final report answered it directly and rejected the characterization. I would note that a special counsel publicly contradicting the president who could have removed him is itself evidence about whether the process was captured, and it is evidence in the opposite direction from the president’s claim.
So where does that leave the poster?
It leaves it in a worse position than our side has been arguing, and by a different mechanism. The claim “it was always a slogan” is refuted by the run data. The claim that survives is narrower and I think more damaging: the standard was real, it was applied to the owner’s own family by an inspector he did not appoint, and when it produced a nonconforming result the owner voided the report and questioned the inspector’s motives.
A specification that holds until the owner’s part fails is not a specification. It is a specification with an undocumented override, and undocumented overrides are the single most corrosive thing that can happen to a quality system, because after one of them nobody believes any subsequent conforming result either.
That is the institutional cost and it does not require anybody to have been lying in 2021. It requires one signature in December.
Wheeling, WV
They said no one is above the law for four years and then papered their own on the way out. That is what I came in ready to say. I have to complicate it, because the record does not support the simple version and I would rather complicate it myself than have somebody do it to me at the hall.
The simple version is that the phrase was always a club aimed at one man. The trouble is that the same Justice Department convicted the President’s son twice last year and a sitting Democratic senator in between, and the prosecutor who did the son was a Trump appointee. That is not what a captured department looks like. That is a department doing its job on people it had every political reason to leave alone.
So the club was not only a club. It cut both ways for a while, which is more than I expected when I started reading.
Then December came and he pardoned the son, after promising a dozen times that he would not, and said in the statement that raw politics had infected the process.
That is the part that ends it for me, and it ends it for a reason I have watched play out in every plant I ever worked in. Management can enforce a rule fairly for years. The moment it enforces the rule on everybody except one man’s kid, every prior enforcement gets reread. The workers do not say “well, it was fair until then.” They say “so that is what it was always for,” and you cannot argue them out of it with a record, because the record now has a hole in it shaped like the boss’s family.
That is the damage. Not that the rule was fake. That one exception makes the whole file unusable.
Now the part I owe my own side. On the same day the outgoing president papered his family and the officials the incoming man had threatened, the incoming man pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged over the Capitol, including people convicted of assaulting the police. Some of those officers were the same men Biden had pardoned that morning for testifying about being beaten.
I have spent this Forum arguing that the prosecutions of the last four years were lawfare and I have not changed my view. But if we are going to say that phrase is dead, we have to say it is dead because both men killed it on the same day, and one of them is ours. A grievance that only counts management’s violations is not a grievance. It is a press release.
So: the case for slogan is strengthened, and it is strengthened by evidence from both directions. The phrase described something real until it reached the people saying it, and then it did not, and then the other side proved the same thing about itself before the sun went down.
Intact is not on the table. Nobody gets to use those words now, and I count that as a loss rather than a win.
Tyler, TX
East Texas heard the sermon for four years. What I want to do is price it honestly rather than just resent it, because a claim I cannot support costs me more than the sermon did.
Here is the reversal test, and this time it comes out uncomfortable in both directions.
Take the claim: the phrase was a partisan instrument, never a rule. If that were true, the machinery would never have run on the coalition using it. It did. The President’s son was convicted by a federal jury in June and pleaded guilty in a second case in September, both brought by a Trump-appointed prosecutor made special counsel by a Democratic Attorney General. A sitting Democratic senator was convicted on all counts in July.
That is the machinery running on the home team in an election year, and it is exactly the evidence I would have demanded if somebody made this argument about my side. So I have to accept it.
Now take the opposite claim: the phrase survives intact. If that were true, the man using it would not have pardoned his son after a jury verdict and a guilty plea, would not have broken a promise made a dozen times, and would not have accused his own special counsel of political prosecution in the statement doing it.
He did all three. So I cannot accept that either.
What survives both tests is narrower and I think it is the honest underwriting.
The rule was real and it was priced correctly for four years. Then it hit a claim the insured could not accept, and the insured rewrote the policy. In my business we call that a bad-faith denial in reverse — the carrier paying its own family’s claim after denying the same coverage to everyone else — and the industry consequence is always identical. Every prior denial gets relitigated, because the file now proves the terms were negotiable.
The second thing I have to price is what happened after dark on January 20, and I would rather say it than have somebody else say it to me.
The incoming president pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged in connection with the Capitol, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, and commuted sentences for two men convicted of seditious conspiracy. Twelve hours after the outgoing president pardoned the officers who had testified about being assaulted.
So both parties, on the same day, in the same building, established that exposure to the criminal law depends on which side of the aisle you sit on. If I run my own test on that — same conduct, names reversed — I get the same answer both times, which means the phrase is finished as an argument for anybody.
The case for slogan is strengthened. It is not strengthened the way our side has been arguing, and the evidence that strengthens it is not all on one side of the ledger. Anybody who quotes that phrase after January 20 is quoting a dead instrument, and that includes us.
Long Island, NY
I draft consistency tests for public commitments and the discipline is to define the claimed domain before assessing whether an act falls inside it.
The claim from 2021 to 2024 was not merely that juries should be permitted to convict. It was broader: that exposure to the criminal law does not vary with political position, and that powerful people face process on the same terms as anyone else. That was the operative claim, made repeatedly, in that form.
Clemency falls squarely inside that domain. A pardon of uncharged conduct cancels exposure. Canceling exposure for a chosen class is the definition of placing someone outside the reach of future law, and no reading of the claimed domain excludes it.
So the analytical question is not whether the January 20 package is inside the domain. It is, plainly. The question is what the whole record shows about whether the commitment was ever operative, and that requires acknowledging evidence the earlier drafts of this file omitted entirely.
The evidence is substantial and it runs against our position. In June 2024 a federal jury convicted the President’s son on three felony counts. In July 2024 a jury convicted a sitting Democratic senator on all counts. In September 2024 the President’s son pleaded guilty in a second federal case. All three prosecutions were brought by the President’s own Justice Department, and the two against his son were conducted by a special counsel who had been appointed United States Attorney by the opposing party’s president.
A commitment that produces those three outcomes in one summer is not a slogan in the ordinary sense of the word. It was doing work.
What it did not survive was the point of personal application. On December 1 the President granted his son a full and unconditional pardon covering eleven years, having stated more than a dozen times that he would not, and issued a statement asserting that raw politics had infected the process. The special counsel rejected that characterization in his final report.
I would frame the finding in terms a lawyer would recognize. This is not a case of a commitment that was void from the outset. It is a case of a commitment performed for four years and then repudiated at the one moment performance became costly to the promisor personally, accompanied by a claim of bad faith against the counterparty performing it.
In contract terms, a party who performs until performance becomes inconvenient and then alleges the other side’s bad faith has not merely breached. He has made every prior act of performance evidence against himself, because he has established that the terms were subject to his own discretion all along.
That is what happened to the phrase, and it is why “intact” is unavailable while “always a slogan” is also unavailable. The accurate statement is that the commitment was real and was repudiated by the promisor.
There is a final matter of record that belongs in any honest assessment. On the evening of the same day, the incoming president granted clemency to approximately fifteen hundred individuals charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including persons convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers, and commuted sentences imposed for seditious conspiracy. The outgoing president had, that morning, pardoned the officers who testified about those assaults.
Two presidents, one day, opposite directions, same instrument. The proposition that exposure to the criminal law does not vary with political position was falsified twice before midnight, by both parties, and neither of them has acknowledged the other’s demonstration.
The case for slogan is strengthened. It is strengthened bilaterally, and any correspondent who reports only half of that is doing advocacy rather than analysis.
Cheyenne, WY
They preached a rule and then papered their own. That is where I have been, and the books do not support it in the simple form, so I am going to post the corrections before I close the account.
Correction one. The machinery ran on their own side. A jury convicted the President’s son in June. A jury convicted a sitting Democratic senator in July. The son pleaded guilty in a second federal case in September. All three brought by the President’s Justice Department, and the two against the son handled by a prosecutor the other party had appointed.
You cannot look at those entries and say the rule was never real. It was real and it was expensive, and it ran in an election year when there was every reason to bury it.
Correction two, and this is the one that decides the question. On December 1 he pardoned the son anyway, after saying more than a dozen times that he would not, and put out a statement saying raw politics had infected the process. His own special counsel — appointed by the other party — publicly rejected that in his final report.
So the account does not read “the rule was fake.” It reads: rule enforced, rule enforced, rule enforced, override, and the override came with an accusation against the auditor.
That is worse, not better. A rule that was never applied is a slogan and everyone knew it. A rule applied faithfully for four years and then overridden at the single point where it touched the man holding the pen is a demonstration that the terms were always his to change. Every prior entry gets reread in light of the last one. That is how ledgers work and it is how people work.
Correction three, and I put it in because a one-sided ledger is worthless. The same day the outgoing president pardoned the police officers who testified about being beaten at the Capitol, the incoming president pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged over that attack, including some convicted of assaulting officers, and commuted two seditious conspiracy sentences.
One man pardoned the witnesses. The other pardoned the assailants. Twelve hours apart. Same clause, same building, same day.
So the answer to the question is that the slogan is not intact, and it is not intact for reasons that implicate both parties on the same date. Strengthened is the finding. Strengthened by our side’s evidence and by theirs, and I do not get to count only one column.
What I would carry forward is narrower than the sermon anybody wants. The phrase described a real practice for four years. Two presidents retired it on January 20. Nobody in this country can use those words honestly now, and that is a cost the whole republic pays rather than a point either side gets to score.
Sheffield, Jamaica
The phrase under examination here is not only an American phrase. It is an export, and I have been on the receiving end of it.
“No one is above the law” is the standard formula in which the United States has, for three decades, communicated its expectations to governments in my region. It appears in embassy statements, in the conditions attached to assistance, in the assessments produced by American-funded governance institutes, and in private conversations that ministers in Kingston and Georgetown and Port of Spain have been having with American officials for as long as I have been working. I have sat in some of those rooms. The phrase does real work in them.
So this Forum’s question — whether it was a slogan aimed at one coalition — reads differently from outside. The question I would put is narrower and harder: what happens to a formula of that kind when the country exporting it demonstrates, twice in twelve hours, that it does not govern its own presidents?
Because that is what January 20 established, and the panel is right to say so bilaterally. One president pardoned his family and the officials his successor had named. The other pardoned roughly fifteen hundred people charged over an attack on the legislature, including people convicted of assaulting the officers the first man had just pardoned for testifying. Whatever the merits on either side, the two acts together are a complete demonstration that in the United States, exposure to the criminal law is adjustable by whoever holds the pen.
I want to say what that costs, because it is not rhetorical and it is not hypothetical.
The hemisphere has spent forty years constructing a rule against precisely this. Chile’s junta amnestied itself in 1978. Argentina’s did the same in 1983. Peru’s Congress did it for the military in 1995. Uruguay’s electorate ratified its version twice at referendum. And the Inter-American Court, over a line of cases beginning with Barrios Altos in 2001, held that amnesties designed to prevent investigation of grave violations have no legal effect at all — including, in the Uruguayan case, where the voters had approved them.
That doctrine did not build itself. It was built with American encouragement, American funding, and American diplomatic weight behind it. The United States never joined the Court’s jurisdiction, which was noticed at the time and resented, but the argument it advanced was consistent for a generation: departing governments do not get to close their own files.
A minister facing questions about a predecessor’s immunity now has a reply he did not have in 2020. He does not need to argue that the American standard is wrong. He needs only to observe that the Americans do not apply it to themselves, and the conversation ends there, because the person raising it has nowhere further to go.
I would be precise about the limits of this. The January 20 packages are not Chilean decree law. Nothing in them touches the conduct those doctrines were built to reach, and anyone drawing that equivalence is not being serious. The damage is not moral equivalence. It is the loss of standing, which is a distinct thing and in some respects more consequential, because standing is what makes an argument usable by someone else.
There is a second cost that operates internally and this panel is better placed to judge it than I am, so I offer it only as an observation. A formula that has been retired by both parties in the same day does not become available again to either. When the next American administration wants to say that a foreign leader’s self-amnesty is illegitimate, it will be quoted January 20 by whoever is on the receiving end. When the next American president wants to say that his predecessor placed himself above the law, half the country will produce the other package.
That is not a slogan being exposed as hollow. It is a genuine instrument of international persuasion being spent, by two men, in one afternoon, neither of whom appears to have considered what it was for.
From where I sit, that is the answer to the question. The phrase described something real, it was doing work well beyond American borders, and it is now unusable in either direction — and the country that spent it will not notice the loss for some years, because the loss lands first on people who were relying on it somewhere else.
