No. of Recommendations: 1
I can only speak for myself, but I believe if someone breaks the law they should be punished.
I don't, and I doubt you do either.
It is almost impossible to live in modern society without breaking the law constantly. Trivial things, like violating copyright protection by posting too long an excerpt of a news article, or sending someone a copy of a song that you didn't purchase a second time, or using a work computer to look up the weather for your weekend trip. Slightly more consequential things, like going over the speed limit or a rolling stop. Teenagers that commit minor acts of vandalism, adults who share streaming passwords or fudge a bit on their taxes. Even more consequentially, otherwise lawful and upright citizens who commit first offenses where no one gets hurt (they get pulled over for a slightly-over-the-limit DUI, they accidentally fail to scan an item at the self-checkout, they get into a bar fight after too much to drink on a Saturday night) often are given the chance, through thoughtful and appropriate conversations with police and prosecutors, to avoid the formalities of a criminal conviction. If everyone who breaks the law received the full measure of punishment for breaking the law, there would be few outside the jails.
Prosecutorial discretion is among the most powerful forces in the criminal justice system.
Bill Clinton received a civil contempt charge in 1998 from a conservative federal judge after her determination that he perjured himself in an Arkansas deposition. If George W. Bush's US Attorney for Arkansas in 2000 had decided to go ahead and press criminal charges against Clinton, Democrats would have gone ballistic</b over that. In a counterfactual where it was Clinton (not Gore) who had narrowly lost in 2000 and was likely to run again in 2004, many Democrats would almost certainly have rallied behind Clinton against what they would have perceived as a politically motivated charge brought in circumstances where prosecutorial discretion would be called for. Or if Gore were running against Bush in 2004, and Florida had a Democratic governor and secretary of state, and Gore had made the statements that Trump had made, Democrats would be livid if a rural conservative Republican prosecutor had tried to bring Gore up on charges.
I'm not claiming that these underlying actions are not violations of law - or even that they don't warrant being prosecuted. Just that a very large number of Democrats would react similarly if die-hard Republicans prosecuted their political leaders. It's not some deep mystery that confounds all understanding. No one minds if their own in-group decides to move away from a political leader because of a screw-up. But people will find a way to ratinalize if the out-group goes after a political leader that the in-group still likes, especially if going after that political leader will actually have electoral consequences (which neither Frankel nor Cuomo did).
