trump and the law

link:http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/roaming-charges-big-boss-man/

by Jeffrey St. Clair

You got me working boss man, a workin’ around the clock,
I want a little drink of whiskey, you sure won’t let me stop.
Big boss man, can’t you hear me when I call?
Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all.

— Jimmy Reed, Big Boss Man

When Trump speaks these days it’s usually in a strictly-controlled environment, before a self-selected (if not always compensated) crowd that bows, laughs and applauds on cue, like the “live studio audience” of a sit-com.

This week Trump cloaked himself in a pack of gung-ho sheriffs summoned from Trump-devoted counties across the country. The mutual backslapping and banal banter between the President and the cops took an ominous turn when Harold Eavenson, Sheriff of Rockwell County, Texas, complained to Trump that soft-on crime politicians were threatening the financial firepower of the war on drugs by trying to enact minor reforms in asset seizure laws, which allow police departments to confiscate the property of suspects in drug crimes, sell it off and keep the money to fund their own operations.

Eavenson griped to Trump: “There’s a state senator in Texas that was talking about legislation to require conviction before we could receive that forfeiture money.”

Trump’s hackles rose to the occasion: “Who is that state senator? I want to hear his name,” he boasted. “We’ll destroy his career!”

Even the sheriff seemed stunned by Trump’s political bloodlust. Eavenson chuckled nervously, but refused to name the senator.

This is a portrait of Trump in full law-and-order mode, where all of the emphasis is on order and none on law. Any real conservative would object to asset seizure as a “taking” of property without compensation or judicial review, a constitutional crime by the state.

That’s not the way Trump thinks, naturally. But let’s face it, his eagerness to demolish the career of a state senator from Texas is hardly the political equivalent of big game hunting. A small town politician is scarcely a threat to the Republic on the order of refugee-coddling Angela Merkel, currency-manipulating Xi Jinping or even the impertinent John Bercow, speaker of the British House of Commons who has vowed to bar Trump from addressing Parliament. But Trump doesn’t discriminate. Blood will have blood.

In the perverse logic of the bully, Trump seems to believe…see link