The first criminal trial of DJT is underway

Many were despairing of such an event. But jury selection is now underway.

The former President, Donald Trump, is now being tried in a court whose judgment is not subject to any presidential pardon. He is not being tried for insurrection. He is being tried for falsifying business records. But he is on trial -- his odd de facto immunity from any such proceedings is at an end. 

Nothing even remotely like this has happened in our country since 1807, when Aaron Burr went on trial. 

Burr was not a former President, of course. Burr was a former Vice President. Another difference: Burr was tried by a federal court. He could presumably have pardoned himself had he been convicted there and had somehow thereafter been elected President. So ... not an exact likeness to the current situation.  

But let's talk a bit about Burr. He was the guy who inspired the 12th amendment, changing the way vice presidents are selected, largely so that Jefferson could replace him with George Clinton.

Dramatically dumped in that manner by the Democratic-Republicans, despised by Federalists over the death of their leader three years before in an affair that would one day be featured as the climax of a Broadway musical, Burr was arrested for insurrection and treason on February 19, 1807.

Burr was acquitted at that trial -- the gist of it was that after the infamous duel Burr went west, and he seems to done a lot of indiscreet talking and writing about a plot to create a new country for himself, one that would have combined parts of newly-purchased Louisiana with the Mississippi Territory, controlling both banks of the lower Mississippi. The plan never got beyond talk  so it involved none of the "overt acts" that the constitutional definition of treason requires.  On the basis of the absence of such overt acts, Burr was acquitted.  

The alleged insurrectionist plot itself seems largely to have faded from American history education in our public schools. But it could make a great Broadway play, maybe after they close Hamilton. 

I seem to have wandered from the point. Anyway: we might imagine this as the case that might have arisen if Burr had been put on trial, AFTER his apparent efforts at insurrection, NOT for insurrection at all but for an earlier incident in his life.  Let us say he had been tried for dueling. My understanding is that a (successful) participant in a duel was not then treated as a murderer in the laws of New Jersey, though he was guilty of a crime, the duel itself. 

So if Burr had been able to delay the federal trial, I suppose he might have been arrested and put on trial in New Jersey.  And the one trial might have been regarded, sensibly, as a sort of karmic substitute for the other.

Trump might in time be tried for treason/insurrection, if we can keep him from the Oval Office. But to the end of doing so, and despite the less compelling charges, I am very happy this day has come at last!