The Press Was Too Charitable

On the respectable conservatism we were asked to keep looking for

Listening to The Dispatch Podcast this morning, I heard Kevin Williamson explain how failing to appear at a court hearing can get you thrown in jail in America. The discussion concerned a former patient of Roger Marshall, now a Republican senator, who says she was arrested while eight months pregnant during a medical-debt collection case.

I have a slight grudge against Steve Hayes. In his interview with Andy Mills, Hayes framed my analysis as a “conspiracy theory,” while acknowledging elements of truth; Mills used the term “conspiracy theorist.” Readers can revisit “The Plot Against America” and judge that argument for themselves.

Despite intense disagreements, I have a soft spot for Jonah Goldberg. I do think he’s trying to be intellectually honest. And credit to him here, because he seemed to think it was ridiculous that a woman who was eight months pregnant was jailed under these circumstances.

Williamson described failing to appear at a court hearing as “an excellent way to get yourself arrested.” Well, maybe it shouldn’t be so easy to put someone in jail. People can understand a procedure and still object to what it does.

Marshall’s lawyers say Meischa Zimmerman was arrested for missing a court appearance, rather than a payment, and that the underlying debt was roughly $3,600, not $50. Neither distinction establishes that incarceration was proportionate.

What is a court supposed to do when someone fails to show up? Kansas law expressly allows a court to enter a default judgment when a defendant fails to answer or appear. A civil case need not stop because the defendant is absent.

Missing a later hearing to enforce that judgment is a different matter. Kansas provides for hearings about a debtor’s property and income, and contempt proceedings for failure to attend. Default judgment is not a substitute for those proceedings. But a defense of incarceration requires more than the observation that the court has business to conduct.

Williamson acknowledged that it was “a bad look”, then compared it with arrests arising from other obligations, including parking tickets.

The Justice Department’s 2015 Ferguson investigation documented a woman whose two parking citations began with a $151 fine, plus fees. Over seven years, she was arrested twice and spent six days in jail; by December 2014, she had paid $550 and still owed $541. The court had even refused her attempts at partial payment.

In its work on fines-and-fees enforcement, the Justice Department has documented job loss and escalating debt that can trap people in poverty. Research by the Brennan Center describes incarceration depriving families of a wage earner while additional costs accumulate. A system demanding payment can destroy the means of paying.

Williamson offered parking tickets as though their familiarity should make the jail cell less objectionable. I think that reflects badly on his judgment. The comparison should have made him more curious about what happens to the people subjected to these practices, rather than more confident that the rest of us needed a civics lesson.

I grew up among conservatives. This dry, procedural response to someone else’s suffering is familiar to me: the law is the law, and the person suffering should have known better. I think it is one of the worst habits of the conservative mind. It allows a refusal to examine the rule to pass for seriousness about the world.

In 2024, 90 percent of voters who identified as conservative voted for Donald Trump. By Election Day, a jury had already found him guilty of thirty-four felonies. His opponent had served as California’s attorney general.

I do not think a prosecutor’s resume obliges anyone to vote for her. But a movement that overwhelmingly preferred the convicted candidate has demonstrated that a court’s judgment need not settle its own political judgment.

Goldberg, to his credit, called Trump’s violation of the peaceful transfer of power “inherently disqualifying” and said ending his hold on the Republican Party was worth a Harris presidency. His refusal to vote for either candidate in the District of Columbia came with an explicit rejection of neutrality about the outcome.

Trump was entitled to challenge his conviction, and voters were entitled to assess his objections. Someone concerned about a pregnant woman’s incarceration is entitled to question the use of legal authority too. That capacity for judgment should not disappear when the person subjected to the law has less power than the people discussing her.

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For most of my adult life, I listened to conservatives complain that the mainstream press refused to see the decent people beneath the caricature. Reporters mistook conviction for bigotry. They let the loudest cranks stand for a movement whose respectable core deserved a fair hearing.

Journalists can misunderstand people outside their own social world. But the complaint asked us to keep believing in a conservatism that would impose limits on the people acting in its name. How much longer were we supposed to wait?

In February 2022, the Republican National Committee formally censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their work on the House committee investigating January 6. Its resolution accused them of supporting efforts to destroy Trump more than they supported winning back a Republican majority, and pledged to cease supporting them as party members.

Here were conservatives willing to impose a limit. The party had located them and decided they were the problem.

According to the resolution, the pair were participating in a persecution of citizens engaged in “legitimate political discourse.” Ronna McDaniel subsequently said that description referred to conduct unrelated to violence at the Capitol, a distinction the resolution itself did not make.

Even granting her clarification, the disciplinary decision remained. A national party that punished its members for investigating an attack on Congress was instructing its respectable faction to stop.

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In February 2017, after Trump honored the widow of Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens during his address to Congress, CNN commentator Van Jones said, “He became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Jones was praising a particular moment, not endorsing the administration. Yet performing a familiar presidential ritual had earned Trump a declaration of transformation.

In April, after Trump ordered a missile strike on Syria, Fareed Zakaria said on CNN: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” the previous night. He explained that Trump had begun invoking international norms and America’s responsibility to enforce them, describing “a kind of education of Donald Trump.”

One could favor the strike without concluding that the president had changed. Other journalists mocked these declarations at the time. The press was never unanimous. But Trump could receive credit toward rehabilitation without first accounting for the conduct that made rehabilitation necessary.

The expectation of a responsible core works much the same way. It allows every new offense to be assessed against the principles a movement professes, with the discrepancy treated as another departure from its true character. Eventually, the repetition ought to change our account of the character.

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Republican leaders have no difficulty questioning a legal process when it threatens one of their own. In a June 2023 letter to Merrick Garland, Jim Jordan complained that Trump would be indicted “despite declining to indict” Hillary Clinton, and described at least an appearance of a double standard and a miscarriage of justice.

When Trump was indicted over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Tim Scott responded by invoking Hunter Biden: “What we see today are two different tracks of justice. One for political opponents and another for the son of the current president.”

I have heard versions of this argument from conservative friends and family for years. Before we can discuss what a Republican did, we are expected to settle whether some Democrat has been punished sufficiently. Fair is fair, apparently.

Whether Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden committed a crime cannot establish that Donald Trump did not. Evidence of selective prosecution deserves examination, but it requires an argument about comparable conduct and unequal treatment. Counting defendants by party supplies neither. Impartial enforcement has no obligation to produce an equal number of defendants from each party.

Obtaining a conviction does not satisfy the objection either. After Trump’s New York verdict, Marco Rubio denounced a “political show trial” and included among his complaints “a jury from the most liberal county in America”.

A defendant can challenge a jury’s impartiality. But how a county votes does not establish that its jurors disregarded the evidence. Dismissing the verdict on that basis turns a demand for due process into a demand for a process that cannot return the wrong answer.

The supposed Democratic abuse then became a justification for Republican retaliation. On September 20, 2025, Trump publicly pressed Pam Bondi to pursue his adversaries, citing his own treatment: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING.”

After James Comey’s indictment, the Washington Times editorial board opened its defense by contrasting his treatment with what it asserted Democrats did to their opponents: “They place septuagenarian suspects in leg irons, just because.” It credited Trump with doing none of that.

A president’s grievance does not establish evidence against the people he wants charged. Anyone who believed partisan prosecution was wrong when Trump complained of it owes the same objection when Trump demands it. If Democrats abused prosecutorial power, that would be a reason to stop the abuse. “They started it” gives each administration permission for the next round.

Earlier that year, on January 20, Trump commuted fourteen sentences and issued sweeping pardons for offenses connected to January 6, while directing the dismissal of pending cases. The clemency included people convicted of violently assaulting police officers.

His proclamation described its purpose as ending “a grave national injustice” perpetrated on the American people. The injustice being remedied was the prosecution of the people who had participated in the attack.

Put that decision beside the censure of Cheney and Kinzinger. The people who helped investigate the attack received the party’s formal condemnation. People convicted of attacking police received presidential clemency. No theory about a journalist’s cultural prejudices explains away that allocation of punishment and protection.

A person can dislike an act and still decide that preserving their political alliance matters more than opposing it. Their private reservations do not withdraw the support on which the institution depends. Cheney and Kinzinger accepted consequences for withholding theirs. Their colleagues had that choice too.

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Reporting need not presume the worst of every Republican. It should stop treating a Republican’s stated principles as evidence that the next decision will be better than the last.

An interview can ask whether a scandal will cost votes. It should also ask what an official did about it when they had the power to act. Giving someone a fair hearing includes the possibility of concluding that their explanation fails.

The conservative complaint asked us to distinguish its worst elements from its respectable core. Its leadership issued the censure and the pardons. Continuing to treat that conduct as unrepresentative requires a conservatism that exists somewhere other than where conservatives exercise power.

I am tired of being asked to find the better conservatism concealed behind the conservatism that governs. The people who resisted deserve credit for resisting, and someone who voices discomfort deserves a fair account of what they said. Respectability has to require something more of the rest than a composed explanation of how an objectionable thing came to happen.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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