As legal events unfolded in the nation’s capital yesterday, everything appeared to be happening by the book. Federal prosecutors and a grand jury filed an indictment against Donald Trump; the case was assigned to a D.C. District Court judge; the documents were unsealed; and the former president — in this case, the defendant — was given an arraignment date.
But as The New York Times reported, some Republicans complained, not about the process, but about the city.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raced to respond to news that former President Donald J. Trump had been indicted a third time not by opining one way or the other on the new federal charges, but by leveling an unusual attack at residents of the District of Columbia, where the case is being prosecuted. Suggesting that Mr. Trump could not get a fair trial if the jurors were residents of the nation’s capital, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Mr. DeSantis called for enacting reforms to let Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, D.C. to their home districts.
The Republican governor, who has a habit of criticizing “D.C. Republicans” despite having served five years in Congress, said it would be “unfair” for the former president to be put on trial in the nation’s capital. (In the 2020 election, Trump lost D.C. by nearly 87 percentage points, receiving roughly 5% of the vote. No, that’s not a typo.)
DeSantis isn’t the only member of his party thinking along these lines. Sen. Lindsey Graham recently declared that if special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump in Washington, D.C., he and other Republicans would consider it “a major outrage.” The South Carolinian added, “You could convict any Republican of anything in Washington, D.C.”
Conservative media figure Hugh Hewitt voiced a similar point shortly after the latest indictment was unsealed, insisting that Smith “should be obliged to prosecute this case outside of the Beltway.”
There are legal experts who can speak to this with more authority than I can, but broadly speaking, there are a few problems with this that stand out. The first and most obvious is the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that in all criminal prosecutions, “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” There are no asterisks or addendums creating exceptions for Republicans in areas with a lot of Democratic voters. The second problem is the inherent dangers surrounding this line of argument. Trump has repeatedly argued, for example, that he considers his indictment in New York City to also be unfair because of the city’s Democratic majority. But are policymakers seriously prepared to consider overhauling the judicial system, ensuring that indicted partisans only face juries inclined to share their political beliefs? And third, it’s probably worth pausing to remind DeSantis, Graham, and their likeminded allies that if Trump didn’t want to face a jury in Washington, D.C., then he shouldn’t have taken allegedly criminal steps to overturn an election in Washington, D.C.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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