Faith Based Prosecution: Bernie Sanders Has No Idea Under Which Law(s) His Demand for Mass Prosecutions on Wall Street May be Met.

If you wanted to sum up the Sanders campaign in two words, those two words would be "Wall Street." The Sanders campaign and his supporters have consistently bemoaned that not enough bankers have been jailed. Their candidate made the same argument to the New York Daily News, saying if a firm like Goldman Sachs is willing to pay a $5 billion settlement, that settlement is proof that there must be some kind of prosecutable criminal offense which the government should be able to go after.

But then, something happened. The Daily News board asked a simple question: Under what law? And Bernie just... collapsed.

Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments?

Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don't. But if I would...yeah, that's what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that's illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

Now, I'm glad Sen. Sanders has a sixth sense and all, but here in the United States, the Constitutional guarantee of due process of the law does not allow the President or the Attorney General to prosecute people on the basis of belief. In order to drag people in front of a court and charge them with a crime, one needs two things: facts, and a law (or a set of laws) under which the given facts are evidence of criminal wrongdoing by a particular individual meeting a high legal bar.

But this is telling. Bernie Sanders has built an entire campaign operation and an entire agenda for the highest office in the land based on his disdain for the rich and his belief that banking executives should be prosecuted. Yet, in all this time - in the eight years since the financial collapse or in the one year he has been running for President - Bernie Sanders has not bothered to inform himself on just what criminal statutes a President Sanders' Attorney General could bring charges.