‘Convicted felon’ doesn’t sting when you’re convicted for being a Republican

MILWAUKEE — In a healthy political culture, a party’s voters and delegates would see a felony conviction as a reason not to nominate a politician. We do not function in a healthy political culture.

The Republican Party has a cultural sickness that is its cult of personality. Former President Donald Trump has successfully recentered the party around him, personally — branding as a "Republican In Name Only" or a traitor any Republican who opposes him.

But even worse is the utter abandonment of professional standards, institutional authority, and pretense of neutrality by nearly every institution in America controlled by the American Left.

When media elites and Democratic commentators point out that Trump is a convicted felon, they are drawing on an old idea. To them, “convicted felon” means someone who has been judged guilty of a serious crime at multiple levels of serious consideration.

In a healthy society, it’s rare that a prosecutor would bring charges against someone unless he seriously believed that person had willfully broken the law and caused serious harm. In a healthy society, a judge would make it difficult for an overzealous prosecutor to convict someone unless that person had willfully broken the law and caused serious harm.

But in our broken culture, prosecutors and judges see their power as tools to use for political gain. In such a culture “convicted felon” carries no more weight than “politician hated by his opponents.”

Donald Trump isn’t an ordinary politician. All of the criminal and civil cases brought against him reflect actual misdeeds — improper handling of public records, marital infidelity, and rejecting the results of an election he lost. But most or all of those prosecutions, and certainly the New York case under which he has been prosecuted by a politician who ran on the promise he would find something for which to prosecute Trump, reflect something else.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Given such a criminal justice system, it’s archaic for newsmen to use “convicted felon” as a criticism.

It would be good if “convicted felon” carried more weight than “politician hated by his opponents,” but today it doesn’t — and newsmen and commentators should stop pretending it does.