Many Republicans and conservatives have accused today’s Democratic Party of using “lawfare” against President Donald Trump and his supporters. They claim that this use of lawfare against a political opponent is unprecedented. But it is not unprecedented. What follows is a short history of the Democratic Party’s use of lawfare to attain and maintain political power.
The Democratic Party’s use of law and the criminal justice system to maintain political power dates back to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. It is often ignored or deliberately forgotten that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. In the states of the Deep South and elsewhere, Democratic Party legislators enshrined slavery into law, Democratic executives enforced those laws, and Democratic judges upheld those laws against legal and constitutional challenges. Democratic presidents like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson were slaveholders. So were many Democratic governors. It was Democrats who insisted on passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. It was a Democratic Supreme Court Chief Justice (Roger Taney) who wrote the court’s opinion (Scott v. Sanford, known as the Dred Scott case) upholding slavery and declaring African Americans to be chattel.
It was Democratic Party state and local officials that in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction imposed so-called “Jim Crow” laws in many states of the Deep South. Indeed, as part of a deal for not continuing to challenge the controversial presidential election of 1876 (which included two sets of electors in three contested states and a Republican majority commission that awarded the 20 disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes), Democrats insisted on an end to Reconstruction, which allowed them to pass and enforce segregationist laws. As African American populations rose in the south, this was a mechanism for oppression, control, and maintaining Democratic Party political supremacy. And when southerners took the law into their own hands by lynching African Americans, it was local, state, and national Democratic political leaders who ensured that anti-lynching bills did not become laws, and that rigged juries would acquit the murderers of African Americans. At the national level, Democratic control of key congressional committee chairmanships ensured the defeat of effective Civil Rights bills for decades until 1964 — Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson goes into great detail as to how this worked.
Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, a rabid racist, authorized segregation within the federal government. Franklin Roosevelt refused to support anti-lynching laws. Democratic Senate leader Robert Byrd was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. So was Democratic Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Democratic governors like George Wallace and Lester Maddox — to name just two — were openly segregationist.
Lawfare was not limited to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and legal segregation. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that forcibly removed more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and interned them in camps during World War II, a Democratic Party-controlled Congress legislated in support of that order, and a majority-Democratic Party Supreme Court upheld this massive legal and constitutional injustice. Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson used the IRS to investigate political opponents. More recently, Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did this, too.
Lawfare was also involved in the Democratic-led coup (known as Watergate) against President Richard Nixon, this time with the full-throated support of the mainstream media, who hated Nixon ever since he helped to expose Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Geoff Shepard in several books has revealed the collusion between Democratic congressional staffers, the Democratic Party-staffed special counsel’s office, senior FBI agents, and federal judges, to prosecute Nixon’s staffers and ultimately remove Nixon from office.
So using lawfare against political opponents is nothing new for Democrats.
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