Political Lawfare
The party in power weaponizing the law to go after its political opponents may be routine in banana republics, but it is not what one would expect to see in the United States of America.
Yet it is painfully obvious that the law is now being weaponized to go after Donald Trump and MAGA. This is an extraordinary event in American political history, but it is not without precedent. In fact, examples of the politically powerful abusing their power to go after their political opponents can be found going back to the early days of the Republic.
The Birth of Political Parties
The rancorous rhetoric and division of political parties helped create the conditions for officeholders to abuse their powers to harass their opponents. There were no formal political parties when General George Washington was unanimously elected as our nation’s first president, but Washington’s election masked growing political differences among some of the greatest of our Founding Fathers. Two men in Washington’s first Cabinet — Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton — had some philosophical differences, and out of these differences emerged our first political parties. Hamilton’s supporters styled themselves the Federalist Party, while Jefferson’s countered, calling themselves the Republicans (not to be confused with the Republican Party of today, which was founded in the 1850s).
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