Last week, Russian political activist and dissident Alexei Navalny died in a Siberian prison camp, where he was serving a 30-year sentence for what most observers agree were specious, purely politically motivated convictions.
Navalny had been an opponent of Vladimir Putin, the country's current president, and one of Putin's most vehement critics, calling Putin's political party one of "crooks and thieves." Young and charismatic, Navalny had repeatedly tried to run for elected office in Russia, but the Russian government attacked him at every turn, accusing him of being a political "extremist" and charging him with various crimes, including "organizing illegal demonstrations," corruption, embezzlement, fraud and contempt of court; placing him under house arrest; censoring his access to the internet and social media; imposing huge fines on him (and his family members) and liquidating his assets.
As might be expected, Navalny's death has produced renewed outrage against Putin, and U.S. President Joe Biden has announced new sanctions against Russia in response.
Stories like that of Navalny have traditionally served as cautionary tales about the concentration of power and the superiority of the U.S. system of government. Dictators are laws unto themselves, but America is "a country of laws, and not of men," or so the saying goes.
And yet, what we are seeing in case after case -- at the federal, state, and local levels of government -- is the radical abandonment of that principle in favor of shredding the law to "get" whoever the........