Why do the Clintons ignore summonses and subpoenas? Why do other politicians, moguls, and celebrity aristocrats treat legal requests like optional invitations to a garden party?
Because they can.
That is the entire mystery. No labyrinthine conspiracy is required. No cinematic backroom drama. In a hyper-procedural civilization that abandoned the substance of justice decades ago—if not earlier—form has replaced meaning. The paperwork matters more than the principle. The choreography matters more than the crime.
We built procedures to shield citizens from overzealous prosecutors. That was the point. Due process was meant to be a bulwark against tyranny, a brake on passion, a guarantee that the state could not simply crush a person because it felt like it. It was a noble design.
But in practice, procedure metastasized.
In a world where every comma can be litigated and every timeline extended, where motions beget counter-motions and appeals bloom like algae in stagnant water, consequence becomes negotiable. Not for everyone, of course. For the ordinary citizen, the machinery still grinds efficiently enough. Miss a filing date and see how merciful the system feels.
But for those with money, status, and access to representation that bills in four digits per hour, time itself becomes a legal strategy.
Delay is victory.
If you can defer accountability long enough, it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense. Cases drag on until public attention drifts. Witnesses forget. Voters move on. Jurisdictions change. Administrations rotate. The clock, once a neutral instrument, becomes a shield. Consequences postponed into the indefinite future are consequences neutralized.
This is the quiet flaw in our architecture.
Proceduralism, detached from moral seriousness, becomes a sanctuary for the unscrupulous. The very safeguards designed to protect the innocent morph into armor for the ruthless. The system is not broken in the sense of malfunction. It performs exactly as designed. It simply performs disproportionately well for those who know how to bend it.
And who bends it most aggressively? Not the conscientious. Not the hesitant. Not the morally conflicted.
Those without a spine, without a conscience, without the faintest hesitation about collateral damage—those are the virtuosos of procedural exploitation. They treat ethics as a sentimental hobby for amateurs. They treat legal friction as a puzzle to be optimized.
This should not surprise us. If you design a labyrinth, do not act shocked when the most cunning creatures learn its shortcuts.
Can this be solved? Not perfectly. Any system that limits arbitrary power will also create opportunities for tactical maneuvering. Remove procedure entirely and you invite tyranny. Keep it, and you invite manipulation. Civilization is an exercise in managing trade-offs, not erasing them.
But one corrective would help more than we are willing to admit.
Sunlight.
Not the theatrical kind. Not performative outrage. Not partisan spectacle masquerading as investigation. Actual transparency. Relentless visibility. Public scrutiny that is not satisfied with headlines but insists on documentation. Processes that cannot be quietly suffocated in committee rooms and procedural fog.
Shady figures thrive in darkness. They prefer environments where nothing fundamental may be questioned, where the narrative is stabilized by intimidation or ridicule. Where dissent is not debated but discredited.
We see this instinct elsewhere. In domains where questioning the orthodoxy earns you the label of heretic. That word alone should make the hair on your neck rise. Heresy belongs to theology, not to public policy or scientific inquiry. The moment deviation is moralized rather than examined, scrutiny becomes taboo.
And anything that cannot be challenged deserves extraordinary scrutiny.
If a legal system cannot tolerate persistent questioning, it will calcify into a caste mechanism. If a scientific field cannot withstand adversarial analysis, it risks drifting into dogma. If political elites can indefinitely sidestep subpoenas while preaching equality before the law, the phrase itself becomes parody.
We need fewer sacred cows and more lifted stones.
Lift them. All of them.
Some will reveal nothing more than damp soil and ordinary insects. Others may expose creatures that prefer not to be seen. It will not be perfect. It will not be tidy. Transparency never is.
But it will rebalance the asymmetry between power and consequence.
Because at the core of this procedural age lies a simple corrosion: justice delayed is justice dissolved. When accountability becomes optional for the influential, the rule of law quietly mutates into the rule of access.
And once that transformation is complete, summonses are no longer commands.
They are suggestions.