 One of the things that is funny about this clip, which was Rachel Maddow talking to Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, kind of just sky-larking or, you know, floating a trial balloon of a way where, hey, maybe we can get around this. With Spiro Agnew, you get a 40-count federal indictment that is brought against him, not related to Watergate, but because of crimes that he was committing in his own office in the White House. And in that case, what the Justice Department, bravely and nimbly and controversially, brokered with him, is that that indictment would essentially go poof in exchange for him agreeing to get out of the White House. And so that delicate balance between needing a political solution to the criminal in the White House and needing a criminal solution, a criminal law solution to the criminal in the White House, is one that 50 years ago, this year in 1973, we dealt with, in 1972, we dealt with with Spiro Agnew. You have to wonder if the Justice Department is considering whether there is some political solution to this criminal problem, whether part of the issue here is not just that Trump has committed crimes, but that Trump has committed crimes and plans on being back in the White House. Do they consider, as part of a potential plea offer, something that would proscribe him from running for office again? I don't know. I would imagine, if anything like that happened, that it would have to come from the defense side of the negotiation. That the Trump team would say, oh, by the way, and with this, we will also drop out of the race for president. Otherwise, it would put the Justice Department in this position that Donald Trump claims they're in. He claims they're trying to stop him, simply trying to stop him from becoming president again. And that's the only reason they're doing this. We're entering a banana republic phase where each successive president can threaten their predecessor with being put in jail or having all kinds of conditions put on their continued citizenship and whatnot. People on MSNBC, particularly people like Rachel Maddow, were saying the problem with Trump is that he is the destroyer of norms. He has his steak cooked well, and he eats it with ketchup. He's like a horrible human being. He's an oaf, an ogre, a bull in a china shop, et cetera. But there you have people like that actually floating an idea where if you read about this in Chile after Pinochet, you would be like, what the fuck is going on here? This is the quintessence of like a banana republic, and it's being talked about seriously on major media. The problem as I see it is that to go back to something we discussed before, we haven't had an explicit conversation about the nature of the free pass that high ranking politicians are going to get. They're definitely going to get some kind of a free pass. We haven't really had a candid discussion about sort of what it looks like. We just know that they get one. And so that leaves a room for somebody like Trump to say, well, wait a minute, Hillary Clinton is a corrupt criminal flunter of norms who put national security at significant risk by setting up this Betty Crocker server in her house. Why am I getting prosecuted? That's not a completely unreasonable position to take. Now, part of what I think would come up if we had this very sort of unseemly discussion about, you know, why high ranking politicians get a free pass that the rest of us don't. And what the shape of that pass is is, for example, Hillary, I don't think Hillary Clinton is any less corrupt than Donald Trump is she might even be more corrupt, but I think she's less dangerous. I think she sort of understands institutional norms and the importance of things like, you know, cozying up, not cozying up to dictators like Kim Jong-un. So, so in some sense you could make a case that she should get a bigger and more durable free pass than Donald Trump. And you wouldn't be crazy, but like, can you imagine, I can't imagine ever having that discussion explicitly. And so this heuristic, you know, this, this formula is just out there somewhere in the ether, we've never really tried to work it through or or or or or or or because ties it. And yet, it's there. And the, the sort of, seeming inexplicability of why Hillary Clinton gets a free pass, but Donald Trump doesn't get a free pass is going to be a source of conflict and grievance. Because we can't have an honest discussion about who gets free passes and why. and why? Are there any, you know, structural or institutional reforms that would help with this problem? I mean, we had your call your Cato colleague Ian Vasquez on here a while ago talking about the decline in human freedom around the world, particularly post pandemic. And a lot of that has to do with institutional decline and rise in corruption specifically here in the United States. Is there anything there that could help stop this slide towards the Badana Republic, if that's how we're putting it? Or is this really ultimately a political problem? So the answer, can it be saved? Can we redeem the institutions? I don't know, but yes, there is something that can be done. And Nick kind of alluded to it earlier. Put a fire in the belly libertarian in charge of the Department of Justice and give them, you know, in effect a free, you know, give them full authority to enforce all the laws against whoever breaks them. And you will see a rapid change in behavior because, you know, if I, for example, were that Attorney General, I would create a whole new unit within the Department of Justice to make sure that we have completely revoked the free passes that high ranking politicians currently enjoy and make sure that they understand that those free passes have been revoked and that they themselves will receive at least as much attention from the Department of Justice as, for example, intercity drug dealers have been receiving. And, you know, for however long, I don't know how long it would be before that, Attorney General will be impeached, probably a matter of weeks instead of months. But I think we're talking minutes, but yes, hopefully, hopefully they get weeks. Yeah, but you know, I sort of fantasize about the idea of maybe, you know, bringing a adjacent Voorhees hockey mask into the office on the first day of the job, the way that, you know, Elon Musk brought up whatever it was, a toilet just to convey to the kitchen sink, kitchen sink. Right. Later used as a toilet, I'm sure. So, you know, I'm being a little bit flippant, but I do think that if it were possible to have, you know, the Attorney General of the United States not be a member of either tribe, neither team blue nor team red, but somebody who is not does not have that political affiliation and has a commitment to even handedly enforcing the law, not just, you know, sort of saying that, which they all understand they're supposed to say it, but actually doing it and revoking the kinds of free passes that we saw handed out to Hillary Clinton and arguably Mike Pence and at least so far Hunter Biden and just saying, look, I don't care. I don't care who, what office you hold or who you're related to, you're going to be held to the same standard as the rest as all the muggles out there. You know, I think that would be progress. It might burn the whole thing down, but at least it would I think sort of lance the boil of this, you know, this cynicism, this, you know, anger and frustration that people have that it's only people on my team were getting singled out for bad treatment, not people on the other team. That's not true, but you're not crazy if you have that impression. That was an excerpt from our live stream talking about the Trump indictment with the Cato Institute's Clark Neely. If you want to see the full conversation, go here. And if you want to see a different excerpt, go here and make sure to join us every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern when reason Zach Weismiller and I talk with somebody very interesting telling you something that you need to know.