The Tina Peters case continues to reveal how the Republican Party has abandoned its long-time commitment to the Rule of Law, including our once sacrosanct Constitution. Republicans BT (Before Trump) were committed to law and order, without passion or prejudice. The law mattered. But no more.

Last week, POTUS declared that he had granted a full pardon to Peters for her 2024 state convictions. There is no basis in law, precedence, principle or common sense for such an ineffective gesture. POTUS’ gesture must be intentionally farcical. He is too clever to fall victim to the suggestion that the Constitutional words “Power to grant… Pardons for Offences against the United States” can be oragami’d into the ability to up-end state convictions. Federalism is on the ropes. Democrats see states as subsidiaries of the federal government, and MAGA Republicans see state limitations on POTUS’ authority as impediments to be ignored or blown up.

To be clear: POTUS cannot pardon Peters for her well-deserved state convictions. For those who just used the F-word and my name, let’s review the now-glossed-over facts of Peters’ case.

First, it all happened in red, red Mesa County, where Trump got just under 63% of the vote in 2020 — 6,000 more votes than he did in 2016. Tina Peters was elected Mesa’s clerk and recorder in 2018, defeating a long-time employee of the clerk’s office — someone who knew what they were doing. Peters did not know what she was doing and demonstrated it immediately. Under her leadership, her office misplaced a box of ballots that went uncounted for months after the general election. A screw-up of that magnitude is unknown in the modern era in Colorado. That incompetence resulted in the disenfranchisement of 574 Mesa County voters — a violation of their constitutional rights. Those seeking to have Peters removed from office for that historic blunder came within 1,200 signatures of putting her recall on the ballot. Simultaneously, Peters refused to comply with election laws related to her own candidacy, failing to disclose her contributions and expenditures. For three years.

How someone who was so inept at conducting elections and protecting voted ballots became an election integrity champion of MAGA is crack-smoke crazy.

In Colorado, convictions require the involvement of numerous individuals, each of whom has the ability to end the entire effort. The grand jury that indicted Peters came from her own community — the community that elected her. The elected official who sought the indictment against Peters was Republican District Attorney Dan Rubenstein, a career prosecutor who previously was named Colorado’s prosecutor of the year and president of the Colorado District Attorney’s Council. Rubenstein was elected from Peters’ community without opposition in 2016 and 2020.

Peters’ judge, mercilessly maligned by malevolent MAGA marauders, was a decade-long prosecutor, who had been named prosecutor of the year in Colorado’s 9th Judicial District in 2011, and who rose to become a chief deputy district attorney before he was appointed to his District Court position in 2019.  In 2022, the year Peters was indicted by Mesa County grand jurors and assigned to Judge Barrett’s courtroom, he was retained by red Mesa County with 67.9% of the vote.

Let us dispense with the false and failed claim that Peters was wrongfully denied the ability to present a defense based upon her motives by an unscrupulous judge. Nonsense. The “I had a really good reason to break multiple laws” defense does not apply to Peters’ case. The road to incarceration is paved with self-righteous intentions. Peters is unequivocally guilty of the charges against her. She acted guilty. Her conduct throughout the incident she alone created was that of a criminal, trying to defeat security protocols and obscure her own involvement in it. Remember, too, that the jurors who unanimously convicted Peters each came from Peters’ community and were selected with the help of Peters’ own attorneys. They were right.

Even acknowledging the seeming injustice of Polis’ Kardashian-inspired reduction of the sentence of the mass-killing runaway truck driver to a hair longer than Peters’ eventual nine-year sentence, Peters earned incarceration. Doubling down at her sentencing, she was unapologetic, remorseless, and defiant in her comments to the judge. Spoiler alert: If a person convicted of drunk driving told their sentencing judge that they did nothing wrong and they were justified in driving drunk, the moron is going to jail. Any Colorado judge would incarcerate such a vocally recalcitrant defendant to the same.

The good news for Peters’ fans is that the same deliberately obscure and ineffective prison system that paroles domestic abusers, burglars, and drug dealers after a fraction of their sentences, will see Peters paroled two years from now even if Polis does nothing.

Here is the T for the GOP (and everyone else): Tina Peters is not an election integrity champion, a victim of a corrupt criminal justice system, or even a patriot. She is the elderly mother of a deceased Navy SEAL, an incapable and ill-equipped elected official, and the dupe of conspiracy theorists whom she allowed to use her public office to advance a still unproven claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

If the Republican Party is to matter tomorrow, we need to move on from the Tina Peters case today.

George Brauchler is the 23rd Judicial District attorney and former district attorney for the 18th Judicial District. He has served as an Owens Early Criminal Justice Fellow at the Common Sense Institute. Follow him on Twitter.