Philippe Rousseau:
Still Life with Ham
(1870s)

"…inept attempts of his Injustice Department persecutors to inflict injustice on innocent ham sandwiches"

In a 1985 interview with The New York Times, former Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler argued that grand juries had become so subservient to prosecutors that they would “indict a ham sandwich” if a district attorney told them to. He supported abolishing the entire grand jury system. Wachtler was not wrong. According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, federal grand juries vote to indict in over 99% of the cases brought before them. Out of hundreds of thousands of cases brought by federal prosecutors each year, grand juries return a “no bill” (a refusal to indict) only a handful of times. Or, maybe I should say this is how it used to work. Since our incumbent assumed responsibilities for administering our Justice Department, successfully rebranding it as the Injustice Department and installing its signature We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Administration governance, ham sandwiches have been able to breathe a little easier. A series of relatively high-profile cases have been rejected by federal grand juries as unbelievable, and damned well should have been.

Of all the checks and balances embedded in our system, few would have suspected that the lowly grand jury system might have shown real backbone when challenged by some wannabe authoritarian. Our incumbent’s cynical persecutions of obviously innocent citizens, often blatantly illegal retributions, have been thrown back into their hapless persecutors’ faces. Judges have challenged prosecutors’ mischaracterizations when instructing grand juries. Some prosecutors have resigned rather than embarrass themselves by bringing baseless charges, while others have amply demonstrated how low some people will go to curry favor with an incumbent. It has become apparent that the insurrectionists who firmly believed that they could just have their way with our democracy won’t get away with their attempts scot-free. They will have to pay some price for attempting to undermine the system founded to dispense justice rather than political favors.

Overreach typifies most of our incumbent’s strategies, if, indeed, his tactics even qualify as strategic moves. They play like maneuvers instigated by someone who possesses no functional understanding of how the game they’re attempting to play actually works. They cannot perceive what almost anybody not deceived by the MAGA propaganda deeply comprehends. The incumbent’s clever moves don’t quite seem naive to the honest judges, and even to the hapless citizens tapped to serve on one of those grand juries. The system’s cards were always stacked in the prosecutor’s favor. Like everything, the whole system depended on the prosecutor’s goodwill and character. Install some bad-willed litigator of little character, and the system was fully capable of abusing itself. Still, with the rules so stacked in the prosecutor’s favor, few traditionally felt the need to materially misrepresent the underlying facts of the cases they’d present. Remember, no defense attorney can be present when a grand jury considers a case, and no prosecutor needs to present exculpatory evidence, either. They just need to demonstrate probable cause that a crime was committed, not the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required to convict someone at trial.

Even then, a series of grand juries have thrown prosecutors’ cases back in their incredulous faces. Our dedicated Injustice Department isn’t above moving a case to a different jurisdiction, hoping to land in a courtroom overseen by one of their lickspittle jurists. Abuse continues, but it’s no longer a given that any old odd federal prosecutor can indict any old odd ham sandwich for anything it cares to charge. This infuriates our incumbent, who was probably promised free rein to do whatever he pleased once he was elected. With the infamous assertion that a new fool is born every minute, it must have seemed a safe bet to our incumbent that he could run just as roughshod as he cared to run once in office, that new fools would also infinitely populate grand juries, not that he would inevitably turn out to be one of those newborn fools. His initial ignorance of how our system works kept him hopeful through much of his first year, as ham sandwiches continued to be indicted, especially in immigration courts. But his was a wasting resource, sure to diminish more quickly than it could eventually succeed. Our incumbent didn’t necessarily prioritize, either. He rather indiscriminately indicted ham sandwiches as if swatting at annoying flies, burning precious daylight while the system slowly realized how it was being scammed. He’d used much of his potential on frivolous prosecutions and now has little goodwill left to propel some that could have done real damage.

As we wearily wend our way toward the midterms, the outcomes of which we will know a scant week from now, the presumed power of this Presidency has waned well into the negligible range. It was never even half as substantial as he pretended it was, and such assertions always eventually get debunked. They are born with a short shelf-life. The differences seem stark between what he so blithely asserted before and just after he was elected and what he actually managed to deliver since. He could be mistaken for a blowhard if he hadn’t already proven, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he always was a blowhard and likely always will be. Thankfully, his abuses of power have largely been misuses of power. These have blunted the effects he’d hoped for, just like when that latest ham sandwich walked free on its own recognizance, unindicted and very likely forever unindictable, thanks to the inept attempts of his Injustice Department persecutors to inflict injustice on innocent ham sandwiches.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz