This week, at long last, Donald Trump has been indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The indictment makes it clear that it wasn’t illegal for him to lie about the election results or file spurious lawsuits. But much of what he did in the aftermath of the election went well beyond that — for example, conspiring to generate counterfeit electors in states that he lost and to get these electors to “cast fraudulent votes” in the Electoral College and “sign certificates falsely representing that they were legitimate electors.” These are serious charges and they deserve a hearing.

Many of Trump’s apologists have been arguing that the Justice Department trying to punish the misdeeds of a former president is a sign that the legal system is dangerously “politicized.” But they have it exactly backward. While a judicial branch that somehow exists totally apart from politics is a pipe dream, the most dangerous way for political considerations to intrude on the legal system is for presidents and other powerful people to be treated as special people who aren’t subject to the same laws as the rest of us.