By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
Let’s say that one party holds the White House for one term, and is followed by a term in which the other party holds the White House.
For four long years, the first party raised tax rates higher than the other party wanted; the first party set lower sentencing guidelines for convicted criminals than the other party wanted, the first party was nicer to our enemies and ruder to our allies than the other party wanted.
And then there was an election, and the two parties swapped power.
In this new term, the second party can change those policies. They can lower the taxes, increase the sentencing guidelines, straighten out our diplomats’ rhetoric in foreign policy. A lot of policies can be improved.
But one thing they cannot do is prosecute that first party for such policy differences. This is a republic. If another party takes different positions than yours – legal positions, legally achieved, legally enacted – then you can’t prosecute them. You can’t jail them, or punish them, just for holding different positions and making different choices in public office.
In these United States, with a strictly constitutional form of government, the above has always been the rule, the gold standard for behavior by the political class, both in and out of government.
And rightly so. We cannot criminalize legitimate policy differences that are mere differences of opinion, like what level at which to set tax rates, or whether convicted criminals should spend ten years in jail or twenty.
We have even continued to take this position – that we don’t prosecute our predecessors – even long after the above descriptions failed to apply, when it was no longer a matter of policy differences, but of much, much worse.
Today, we see the Republican Party regaining the reins of power after the executive branch operated as a four-year-long criminal enterprise.
Illegally throwing open the gates to millions of illegal aliens, even flying and busing them into our cities in violation of both their constitutional obligation to defend the homeland and our immigration laws.
Illegally funding terrorist organizations and rogue nations with billions in taxpayer dollars, in the full knowledge that such funds would be used against us and our allies.
Illegally “forgiving” tens of billions of dollars in debts that were not theirs to forgive, such as legitimate college loans, again and again, despite countless court rulings that it was clearly illegal.
Illegally stopping the work on government projects such as the border wall and the Keystone Pipeline, in violation of existing contracts, to the detriment of our ally Canada and of the thousands of workers employed on such projects.
Illegally issuing mandates such as the forced acceptance of an experimental vaccine, and firing government employees, from military to civil service, for refusing – even attempting to illegally use OSHA to force such a mandate on the private sector.
Illegally holding hundreds of harmless, unarmed rally attendees without charge – in some cases for several years and in many cases subjecting them to inhuman, unconstitutional punishment – on the vague claim that they were involved in the first “insurrection” in history to be staged entirely by unarmed tourists (none of whom, tellingly, was ever actually charged with insurrection).
This is just a short list of the hundreds of blatantly illegal acts of the Biden-Harris regime, committed either directly by Joseph Biden or by his various cabinet level and sub cabinet level appointees over the past four years.
We are not talking here about policy differences – tax rates for taxpayers, sentencing guidelines for criminals, etc. We are talking here about outright crimes, blatant lawbreaking by elected and appointed officials who knew what they were doing was illegal, but who felt safe in doing so because after all, they were in power. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department wasn’t going to prosecute them if they broke the law.
And our tradition has always been that we don’t prosecute our rivals in the United States, because the pendulum swings back and forth, and the shoe will surely be on the other foot someday soon.
So they were confident, and when their crimes exceeded the mere millions in Biden family kickbacks that had always been an open secret in Washington, and began to climb into the billions, then tens of billions, they continued to be confident in the knowledge that we don’t criminalize policy in America. We just don’t do it.
And that’s true.
But somewhere along the way, rather early on, they forgot where that line was drawn.
We’re not talking about policy here. We ARE talking about outright crime.
The Obama and Biden regimes broke the law, repeatedly, to the point of it being not a mere frequency but a constancy. Not a week went by when these administrations didn’t either forgive or incur a debt illegally, when they didn’t either give aid and comfort to an enemy nation or refuse to enforce the laws on the books, or issue regulations in clear contradiction to the powers they were granted by Congress and the Constitution.
The old rule about not criminalizing policy can’t apply when it’s not about policy but actual, outright criminality.
So now the Republicans in office have a judgment call to make: Would it be better to honor the tradition of sweeping the other side’s issues under the rug in the interest of a return to normalcy? Or would that actually be more harmful, because of the lessons it would promote?
If we allow these Biden-Harris regime leaders to skate, that tells future officeholders that there are no constraints on their power. It tells them that they can do whatever they want, from sinking the nation into irreversible, generational debt, to crippling our very culture, from destroying our energy grid and our auto industry, to ruining the education, athletics, and financial future of a generation of youth.
We cannot allow them to get away with this.
Every future administration, every future generation, depends on seeing justice done to the tyrants who locked up the J-6 tourists, the tyrants who ordered young girls to compete in swimming and basketball and wresting and boxing with boys twice their size.
We must see justice done to the bureaucrats who put thousands of truckers out of business despite contracts in force for government construction projects. We must see justice done to the scammers who collected the cream off the top of the billions of dollars of taxpayer money shoveled into hotels and school districts and transportation companies and concessions as the massive importation of millions of illegal aliens and the massive expansion of a welfare state to non-citizens siphoned countless billions out of our economy.
Every Biden-Harris appointee, from cabinet secretaries to agency chiefs, was in violation of the law for overstepping their legal authority.
They can’t claim that there’s no evidence: it’s all published in the Federal Register. Page after page of illegal overreach, book after book of violations of the human rights of our nation’s small businessmen, truckers, students, parents, children, seniors, immigrants, retirees… There isn’t a demographic in this country that the Biden-Harris regime didn’t hurt, not just by getting policy wrong, but by hurting with illegal spending, rulemaking, mandates and forced shortages.
We can’t prosecute everyone, of course. To prosecute every criminal in the Biden-Harris regime would dominate the next four years and reduce the ability of the Trump administration to be productive.
But to fail to prosecute at least the most obvious, most blatant criminals would be to ensure that the next time the Democrats get in, they will be even worse, even more destructive. And considering the damage they did this time, a worse administration that’s empowered to commit even more destruction is terrifying to contemplate.
So the Trump administration has its work cut out for them – deciding who to prosecute, what kinds of crimes and what kinds of people, to ensure that future generations know what happened, and know where to draw the line.
But there is a bright side, at least: Unlike the plethora of kangaroo courts that the Left threw at President Trump over the past few years, these Democrat authoritarians are actually guilty of actual crimes, in which millions of actual innocent American citizens were hurt.
And that will make the prosecutions easier, and provide something true for future historians to write about.
May Divine Providence grant this administration the wisdom and judgment to choose the best cases to prosecute, not only to promote justice, but to show the world that here in the United States of America, it is the government that will be brought to heel.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
