Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy contend that a grave injustice is afoot.
Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy contend that a grave injustice is afoot. In the last two weeks, several of the ringleaders of the January 6 riot — not the rank and file, but those convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy, among other serious charges — have received harsh sentences for their actions on that day. This, these candidates maintain, indicates that prosecutors and judges alike are exposing their biases against Capitol riot defendants. The evidence for this assertion is that rioters convicted for their participation in the violence that erupted across the country in the summer of 2020 weren’t sentenced nearly as harshly.
“They just walked into the Capitol. If they were B.L.M., they would not have been prosecuted,” DeSantis said in a Wednesday interview. “You can look at, OK, maybe they were guilty, but 22 years if other people that did other things got six months?” Ramaswamy agreed with his opponent. “America now has a two-tiered justice system,” he wrote. “Antifa and B.L.M. rioters roam free while peaceful Jan. 6 protesters are imprisoned without bail.”
Okay, let’s take that (dubious) premise at face value. Their remedy, then, to the injustice associated with the 2020 rioters receiving what they regard as overly lenient sentences isn’t to seek harsher penalties for rioters in general. It’s to ensure that the January 6 rioters benefit similarly from the injustice they decry.
Both candidates have floated offers of pardons and clemency for certain January 6 rioters, even including the Proud Boys leadership. It’s hard to see how that remedies the error these candidates claim judges made when handing down sentences for those who engaged in vandalism, property destruction, theft, and violence in the summer of 2020. It’s even harder to envision how that would discourage would-be rioters from engaging in similar misconduct in the future. These candidates argue that the answer to what they claim is a concrete injustice is to mete out a cosmic comeuppance by treating these convicts not as individuals but as representatives of a marginalized group — a Republican version of social justice, if you will.
But perhaps this isn’t an intellectual exercise at all. CBS News recently obtained the toplines of the opposition research controversial congressman George Santos’s campaign performed on its candidate, and the report maintains that one of his primary political vulnerabilities is his claim that “people who acted like thugs and stormed the Capitol should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” There’s nothing in there about the 2020 rioters and balancing the scales of justice. The data Santos’s team are parsing indicate that the Republican voters his campaign needs to placate reject the idea that the January 6 defendants are legally exposed at all.
Only if appealing to a similar voter profile is the objective can we understand the logic in DeSantis’s recent comments: “I think we need a single standard of justice, and so we’ll use pardons and commutations as appropriate to ensure that everyone’s treated equally, and as we know, a lot of people with the BLM riots, they didn’t get prosecuted at all,” he told Newsmax’s Eric Bolling. That certainly would constitute a “single standard of justice” — a lax one.
How does this square with the GOP’s self-image as the tough-on-crime party? It doesn’t. And it’s not designed to. It is a cynical pander to what all public polling indicates are the minority of self-described Republicans who do not hold the actions of the January 6 protesters in contempt or view their treatment as an extension of their belief that government has been “weaponized” against them. But if that is a cynical pander, why would it benefit either Ramaswamy or DeSantis? If there are GOP primary voters whose votes will be determined by which candidate proves most devoted to restoring the January 6 rioters’ good names, why would they gravitate toward any other candidate than the one who is the supposed target of the justice system’s wrath — who is himself being prosecuted for his proximity to the events of January 6?
It’s all fairly mind-boggling if you apply more than a moment’s thought to it, but maybe that’s where we went wrong from the start.