– pic from the Washington Post, on Twitter
The Vandals get a bad rap, mostly because the city they’re famous for having wrecked was the one that produced a large percentage of the historical documents from that time. So, ya know, it got written up and preserved.
It’s not like they were uniquely destructive for the time.
But “vandal” is the word we have now for someone who gets into wanton defacement of public-facing property like this.
Hence: vandalism.
I’m sure a competent prosecutor could come up with several other crimes to charge here too.
But it’s the violation of the process for changes to a designated national landmark that are the big problem.
Changes to the White House are required to be approved by the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service. But these are procedural laws, not criminal ones, so they’re written differently.
They say things like “x shall do y” but not “the penalty for x not doing y will be z“.
And the courts are generally useless in dealing with procedural violations.
Maybe there is actually some general-purpose criminal law somewhere, saying that failing to follow administrative procedures has some penalty, so the courts could be convinced to actually do their job in these situations?
But if there is, I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere.
Not that it would matter at the moment, since the U.S. system also has no independent organization that’s tasked with prosecuting executive branch malfeasance.
But we should keep it in mind for later, when we’re figuring out what systems to put in place next.
On the whole, the wisdom of the Founders has been taking a beating lately.
So we should come up with some standard way for our legal system to deal with process violations like this. The obvious solution the courts use when they bother is to nullify any actions that violate process, but if we do that without also imposing any personal penalty for the officials involved there’s no incentive not to just go violate process again.
You don’t want a system that makes officials too afraid to do anything in case they screw up the process, but you also can’t have a system where officials can do anything regardless.
Another thing we should probably consider would be a restriction on public bodies accepting private funds for projects, since that allows a bad actor to bypass what would normally be the approvals process for things like this. State projects are usually only evaluated and approved via the budgeting and allocation of funds so bypassing that funding review lets the executive run hog wild.
Like a king.
