Mitt Romney is Wrong

I take Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and others in the non-insane section of the Republican Party at their word when they say they believe charging and convicting Donald Trump for business records violations in New York was wrong.

But their belief highlights the extent to which even smart people who are genuinely dedicated to our Constitutional order increasingly fail to grasp our country’s foundational structure and as a result undermine it.

American Democracy has always been maintained through checks and balances. Part of those checks and balances are partisan investigations. If corruption in government could only be investigated by the political party of the accused and only prosecuted by the political party of the accused with a trial only overseen by a judge from the party of the accused and a jury selected from the party of the accused, we could all be assured that investigations and convictions for government corruption would be rare. Corruption, on the other hand, would not be.

To argue that Trump’s prosecution is wrong because it’s partisan is to argue for the elimination of one of the primary checks on each political party’s abuse of power — the other political party. We have an adversarial system for a reason.

Yes, partisan investigations are sometimes excessive. Democrats know this all too well from having watched Hillary Clinton be investigated by 7 different Republican-led Benghazi committees. Republican Special Counsel Ken Starr investigated the Clintons for six years — not the mere 1…