When Laws No Longer Matter
The Trump administration is ignoring the law … because they can.
Most people believe that laws are meant to be followed, and they are meant to be enforced. But what the rich know and what the rest of us often take for granted is that there are many laws that are not enforced at all or enforced so gingerly that breaking the law is sometimes the smart move.
US Labor law often operates this way. Union busting is against the law, for example, but the penalty for it is so small that breaking the law is, for most corporations, just good business. Workplace harassment laws operate this way as well; while it is illegal to harass someone at work, those laws have almost no enforcement mechanism to them, so if the company doesn’t handle it internally (and many don’t) then the victim is often left with no real way to get justice, that is, unless they can find a way to go viral first. And while wage theft dwarfs all other forms of theft in terms of the money lost because of it, it is never prosecuted. But if you or I steal a pack of gum, we’re going to jail for sure.
In the US, many of our laws have this giant chasm between the law on paper and how it is enforced in the real world. Think about rich people avoiding taxes, or richer people molesting children for decades with absolute impunity. They break the law because they can, and we can’t stop them because passing a law and making people obey a law are very different things. And too often, we pass laws that we simply do not know how to enforce in the first place, or we pass laws simply to get headlines instead of results.
Now to my point: The moment the deadline to release the Epstein Files passed, and I mean the very second we knew the Trump administration was breaking that law, someone should have been in handcuffs. And that someone should be a member of senior leadership. Perp-walking Pam Bondi would have been a good start.
Now the deadline is weeks old, and from the most recent estimates, we have received less than 1% of the documents our government is legally required to produce. No one is in jail, and no one is going to jail. Therefore, the conclusion is simple – we will never see the Epstein Files. We will only see what Trump says we can see, and Democrats are fine with that because the longer the outrage persists, the better it is for the entire party, both electorally and monetarily. No one is going to sacrifice their political advantage over a concept as silly and outdated as American justice.
And if we look at all the times this has happened in both Trump terms, we can quickly prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that laws only apply to the working class. The immorally rich can do whatever they please. They can rob, rape, and even murder with absolute impunity. They can buy pardons, bribe public officials openly, steal classified nuclear documents, rig elections, and even knock down the White House itself, all while laughing in our faces as our weak-willed representatives quote statutes on cable news. It may be great for democratic fundraising numbers, but America is learning that laws don’t matter, and they’re beginning to behave as such.
Jonathan Ross certainly knew this when he murdered a mother of three in the streets of Minneapolis last week. And while I believe he will be convicted of murder at some point, this will only happen because Jonathan Ross isn’t rich enough to be above the law. Trump could pull the trigger, call it an official act, and walk. Then he could pardon ten more murderers and take in millions in bribes for doing so. And there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s how far we have fallen.
So when you see Democrats on the air wailing about the Epstein Files, maybe ask them why they passed a law with no enforcement mechanism attached to it. Truth is, they do it so they can extend the controversy, make lots of money for their campaigns, and then get reelected. But you’ll never get them to admit it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us just want our laws to matter again.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.
I appreciate hearing this perspective on America's long-existing judicial inequalities. For our further education, please provide some examples of laws written with enforcement mechanisms attached. And what are some examples of these specific enforcement mechanisms & what were the results of the enforcement actions?