What Would a Sanders Presidency Mean for the Rule of Law?

[EasyAce]

Bernie is an outsider promising big changes but offering no clear sense of how to accomplish them. Sounds familiar.
By Benjamin Parker
https://thebulwark.com/what-would-a-sanders-presidency-mean-for-the-rule-of-law/

. . . [J]just because Sanders wouldn’t mimic Trump’s assaults on the rule of law doesn’t mean he wouldn’t start his own. Voters from any party who think of their ballot as an attempt to restore the constitutional order shouldn’t be under the illusion that a Sanders White House will herald a return to normalcy.

The most obvious reason is that Sanders has repeatedly and vocally supported authoritarian leaders. Sanders counted himself as the highest-ranking American official in Nicaragua for the Sandinistas’ “Seventh Anniversary of the Revolution” celebration in 1985. He called the Nicaraguan revolutionary and president, Daniel Ortega, “an impressive guy.” Praising Ortega’s and his fellow Sandinistas’ “very deep convictions,” Sanders commented, “You do not fight, and lose your family, and get tortured, to go to jail for years to be a hack.”

And what was this Nicaraguan regime like? In the years between 1979 and 1987, an estimated 10 percent of the Nicaraguan population had fled Sandinista rule. Among the reasons refugees reportedly gave for leaving were “arbitrary arrest and detention . . . without due process as a method of harassment and intimidation” and “forcible resettlement” in which the “Sandinistas . . . confiscated family-size farms and ordered their former owners to move from their villages into state-run farms.”

Of course, Sanders isn’t a Sandinista. But his defenses of the Sandinistas in 1985 suggest that he, like they, considered the rule of law to be a luxury rather than a necessity for a just society. Noting that the Sandinistas were at war, he called the “temporary suspension of certain civil liberties” “complex.”

More recently, Sanders offered praise for the Castro government in Cuba. “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but, you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad,” he remarked. “When Fidel Castro came into office you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program.”

Sanders’s statement about Cuba was in line with his recent rhetoric, which has clearly supported socialist economic policies without the abuses and injustices that come with radically reordering society.

But that distinction doesn’t resolve the issue. If Sanders regarded the rule of law as sacrosanct and necessary to the proper functioning of society, he would have recoiled in revulsion from Castro and Ortega. Instead, he cheered them on . . .

[Cyber Liberty]

Couldn't be worse than President Tweety, right?

[EasyAce]

Couldn't be worse than President Tweety, right?

@Cyber Liberty

I could live without both, I can certainly live without Bernie more, but this and more are just more reasons for me to be glad my voting options in Nevada include "None of These Candidates"----the option I've been voting since I moved here in 2007, with neither regret nor apology.

[Fishrrman]

Mr. Parker's question:
"What Would a Sanders Presidency Mean for the Rule of Law?"

What use do the communists have for "laws" -- except for the ones they pass themselves and use to enslave people...?