Court cases brought against a former president who also happens to be the frontrunner for a third go atop his party’s national ticket are inevitably political, regardless of high-minded claims by prosecutors and judges that they are pursuing them only because democracy demands that no man stands above the law.
The latest to make this argument is the chief justice of the Colorado supreme court, Brian Boatright. In his explosive opinion on Tuesday barring Donald Trump from his state’s primary ballot, Boatright argued that he and his colleagues on the bench were “mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favour, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach”.
Boatright — plus the local and federal prosecutors who have indicted Trump four times, and the congressional leaders who impeached him twice — is not wrong. Equality before the law is arguably the most sacrosanct of democratic principles, particularly at a time when Trump and many of his fellow travellers elsewhere have begun to wrap themselves in the trappings of authoritarianism.