The charge that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election was never serious. The Democratic National Committee’s civil suit in that regard makes the unseriousness transparent. “Obstruction of justice” is the charge Democrats want to use to remove him from office. And in fact, Trump’s campaign, his election, and presidency, have done a lot of obstruction. He has thwarted longstanding bureaucratic policies and has fired bureaucrats. Whether that has obstructed justice or favored it depends on the meaning of “justice.”
The following explains the “justice” that the Democratic Party and its ruling class retinue correctly accuse Donald Trump of obstructing. Their justice, however, is contrary to the one embodied in the U.S. Constitution; never mind Plato’s classic sense of justice on which America’s founders relied. This classical notion of justice begins with guarding that which rightly belongs to each, and is founded on a political order that reflects the proper order of souls.
America’s Founders, having revolted against a legitimate government that was justly reputed to be perhaps mankind’s most liberal, had to explain to themselves, to their contemporaries, and to posterity why what they were doing was just. All them had read and revered William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. But all the procedures described therein, of which the Americans approved, had been based on the idea that the sovereign power of the permanent state flows legitimately from the existence of the kingdom, which the king embodies. The easy part was to argue that King George III had forfeited that power by abusing it, and hence the regime’s legitimacy. The more significant challenge was to show that there is no such thing as a sovereign power that exists independent of the people.
James Wilson, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, taken part in the constitutional convention of 1787, and served on the first U.S. Supreme Court, made this argument most fully in 1790 at the dedication of America’s first law school, to an audience of the founders, from Washington on down.