Except that this was no shark attack, and it wasn’t a boating accident or Jack the Ripper. This is what happens when an entire political party decides that it will never give an elected official the minimal bi-partisan support required to make our three Branch system work, and will ignore, breach or distort basic, core essential democratic principles and traditions to destroy him for as long as it takes.

That arm belongs to Lady Liberty.

Yesterday, two of the terrible consequences of the Democratic mania to destroy Donald Trump, first as President, then as ex-President and Presidential candidate, became especially vivid. Let me say, because if I don’t blow my metaphorical horn no one else will, that Ethics Alarms warned about all of this, tirelessly and repetitiously.

WordPress shows me the 10 tags I have used most frequently since Ethics Alarms began in 2009. Nine are what you would expect on an ethics blog: fairness, ethics, responsibility, integrity, trust, respect, hypocrisy, honesty…and the 2016 Post Election Train Wreck. That tag originated in 2016 when Ethics Alarms first blew the metaphorical whistle on the Democrats’ (along with “the resistance” and the news media) destructive, divisive, unprecedented and totalitarian-tending reaction to the (greatly deserved) loss by Hillary Clinton in a presidential race they thought was a sure thing. I have said repeatedly that the 2016 Post-election Ethics Train Wreck is the most serious and important ethics story in the 21st Century, and one of the five or so worst in our nation’s history. We survived the others, but were lucky. There is a substantial chance that this time, our luck will run out.

The two giant vicious chickens that came home to roost yesterday—and after that long introduction, I don’t need to take much time with them belaboring the point—were the partisan impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a single vote in the House, and the revelation of what Trump’s lawyers argued in their (futile and hopeless) application to the Supreme Court in Trump’s appeal of the immunity case ruling. Two lower courts have held that former Presidents could indeed be prosecuted for criminal acts committed during their terms of office. They had no choice, since the alternative would be a President with limitless powers.

Incredibly, the news media, pundits and Democrats have the gall to complain that the impeachment of Mayorkas based on his policies and political animus rather than plausible allegations that he committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” will turn impeachment into a purely political weapon to be abused by Congressional majorities. The Democrats shattered impeachment for all time with their two impeachments of Trump after several prominent Democrats argued that he should be impeached simply because House Democrats had the voted to do it and they hated the man. The party was searching for any excuse to impeach Trump, and did impeach him on dubious ground both times. I wrote—both times—that this meant the end of impeachment as the Founders intended it, and that henceforth it would have little meaning or impact except for partisan warfare and pay-back. The Mayorkas impeachment is product of that, and the Democrats are responsible, just as they were responsible for destroying the Supreme Court nomination process when they rejected an extraordinary judge, Robert Bork, that President Reagan had every right to nomination and have confirmed under the traditional comity of the process. Impeachment is dead as an effective restraint on Presidents and others.

As for the SCOTUS application, Trump’s lawyers argue that prosecuting a former President “is a stunning breach of precedent and historical norms.” “In 234 years of American history, no President was ever prosecuted for his official acts,” Trump’s lawyers say. “Nor should they be. Presidents ‘must make the most sensitive and far-reaching decisions entrusted to any official under our constitutional system.'” [Quoting Nixon v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 731, 752 (1982).]

The reason no previous President was prosecuted is that both parties respected the tradition that White House occupants needed and should be given a wide margin of error to function as effective leaders. Presidents still had to be cognizant of the law, so the matter of Presidential immunity was left as an unwritten rule, like baseball’s unwritten rule about not running up the score against a team when the result of a game isn’t in doubt. This unwritten rule was that Presidents would not be prosecuted for their acts in office, because no President would abuse his office sufficiently to make a prosecution unavoidable.

Unwritten rules have exceptions, because they need exceptions. However, by bringing the unwritten rules that Presidents don’t seek to abuse their margin for error by flagrantly violating laws and the opposing party doesn’t abuse the tradition that some illegality will be overlooked in the interest of the Separation of Powers and the strength of the institution into court for codification, Trump’s desperate defense against the Democratic lawfare against him as a candidate forces the Courts to eliminate the useful and valuable tradition of a flexible rule. The tradition is now shattered because no previous President was so distrusted that an affirmation that the President isn’t above the law was needed, and no previous party before sought to use the criminal justice system to keep a former President off the ballot and the campaign trail. Trump’s lawyers write,

“The President’s political opponents will seek to influence and control his or her decisions via effective extortion or blackmail with the threat, explicit or implicit, of indictment by a future, hostile Administration, for acts that do not warrant any such prosecution. This threat will hang like a millstone around every future President’s neck, distorting Presidential decisionmaking, undermining the President’s independence, and clouding the President’s ability “‘to deal fearlessly and impartially with’ the duties of his office.” Id. at 752. Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist….

Yup. That’s exactly what will happen, and the Democrats, in the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck that they engineered and have kept running, have now guaranteed that it will happen. Their relentless and unprecedented refusal to let Donald Trump be President as the voters elected him to be broke a crucial unwritten tradition, and this has led us to the destruction of many more.

That is what happens.