NationalReview | The rules of society should be fair to everybody, not based on
tribal identity.
It’s amazing how complicated simple principles can become when they’re
inconvenient to your team.
On Sunday, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi created a mess for herself
by insisting on NBC’s Meet the Press that Representative John Conyers
deserves “due process” in the face of a series of accusations of
improper conduct.
Politically, Pelosi’s performance was a gift to her many critics.
For
liberals who think she’s passed her sell-by date as a Democratic leader,
her hapless effort will now be Exhibit A in the brief against her,
despite her subsequent efforts to clean up the mess.
For populists on the left and right who think the political
establishment is rigged to protect members of the club, Pelosi’s effort
to protect Conyers — and Senator Al Franken, who has also been accused
of several sexual transgressions — while at the same time insisting that
we know all we need to know about President Trump and Alabama Senate
candidate Roy Moore is simply a naked partisan double standard.
“We are strengthened by due process,” Pelosi insists when the topic
is Conyers. But Moore is “a child molester.”
This raises the most dismaying gift that Pelosi lobbed to the mob.
By
circling the wagons around Conyers and Franken (and Bill Clinton to some
extent), Pelosi is all but guaranteeing the election of Moore.
It is difficult to exaggerate the anger among many Republicans who
believe that liberals use the rules selectively, shamelessly invoking
standards of conduct to delegitimize and destroy their enemies while
exempting their own.
“Zero tolerance” for thee, “it’s complicated” for
me.
It was this belief — hardly unfounded — that let millions of Republicans
dismiss allegations of sexual abuse against Trump and now Moore.
Every
day, conservatives angry at my opposition to Moore tell me “we” can’t
“unilaterally disarm.” If they won’t play by the rules, why should we?
