Alvin Bragg vs. American Democracy | Opinion

A politically motivated prosecution of a national party leader over years-old campaign finance violations. Protests in the streets leading to a political and constitutional crisis. Democracy undermined for a generation to come.

I am writing, of course, about the Indian constitutional crisis of 1975.

As Mark Twain once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." On Thursday, radical leftist New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted former President Donald Trump over purported minor business records and campaign finance violations relating to alleged hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels in 2016. If history is any guide, the course Bragg has chosen to take the country down is a perilous one—not for President Trump, but for American democracy.

In 1975, a court in Allahabad, India, convicted Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister of India and the leader of that country's largest political party, of what The Times of India described as the electoral law equivalent of a "traffic ticket." The principal allegations, which dated back to that country's election in 1971, were that Gandhi had a civil servant perform campaign tasks. Gandhi's supporters claimed that the civil servant had in fact tendered his resignation before beginning his work for her campaign, but the court found otherwise in issuing its judgment.

Despite the de minimis nature of the charges, and the fact they were brought by a political foe of Gandhi's who was bitter over his loss to her in an electoral landslide, the Allahabad court ordered Gandhi to vacate her office. Gandhi, to put it bluntly, said no. Protestors on both sides took to the streets, and Gandhi's political opponents issued thinly veiled calls to revolution, couched in terms of resisting what they described as a government rendered illegitimate by the court's ruling.

Pandora's box, once opened, erupted with alarming speed. Gandhi refused to back down and obtained a declaration of a state of emergency that ended up lasting almost two years. During this time, she ruled by fiat, effectively holding in abeyance the Indian Constitution and Indian democracy. She canceled elections, and without any effective democratic check on her rule, her government engaged in horrific abuses, including a mass sterilization campaign and severe crackdowns on the freedom of speech and of the press.

It is a lynchpin of all modern democracies that law enforcement should not, and cannot, be weaponized to achieve nakedly political ends. But what we have seen since President Trump's election in 2016 is a systematic undermining of this norm by the American Left.

Under the guise of "Resistance" to Trump, political actors in the FBI and Department of Justice engaged in an unprecedented effort to surveil a political campaign—and after that, a far-reaching cover-up when their measures did not yield any usable evidence of the conspiracy they sought to uncover.

Leftist prosecutors such as Bragg, all too often funded and brought into power by George Soros and his sprawling network of political organizations, have prioritized politics over sound prosecution. In doing so, they have turned many of our nation's once-vibrant urban areas into sanctuary cities for crime, refusing to prosecute violent criminals, and under the guise of "bail reform" releasing even those they do prosecute back onto the streets to reoffend. The downward spiral of crime begetting more crime has led to tragic lawlessness on our streets of the sort this country has not seen in decades.

Meanwhile, conservative Americans have become law enforcement targets for such offenses as daring to speak out against their local school boards—for exercising, in other words, their First Amendment rights to speak freely and to petition their government for the redress of very real grievances.

To the modern Left, fundamentally totalitarian in its outlook and aims, all of this and far, far more is justifiable, as a means to the end of enacting more leftism. As Stalin-apologist Times bureau chief Walter Duranty famously put it, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

It is in this context that we must view Alvin Bragg's rush to indict President Trump over the political equivalent of a traffic ticket—seven-year-old alleged bookkeeping offenses that federal prosecutors have repeatedly declined to prosecute, and which are now time-barred anyway. Bragg's objective is clear, and it has nothing to do with enforcing state or federal law regarding business records and campaign finance reports. He intends to substitute himself and his view of President Trump for that of the American people, handicapping President Trump's efforts to seek re-election right as the 2024 election cycle gets underway. This is nothing more than a naked power grab, and it is one that all Americans, Republican and Democrat, Trump supporter and Trump detractor, should reject.

Political prosecutions are anathema to the functioning of democracies. The case against Indira Gandhi, her reaction to it, and the horrific events that followed in the world's largest democracy should serve as a stark warning to the people of the world's oldest democracy. Alvin Bragg's show trial may play out initially in a New York grand jury room or courthouse, but its ramifications will be felt by all of us for many years to come.

Will Scharf is a former federal prosecutor and candidate for attorney general of Missouri. Twitter: @willscharf.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.