Random thoughts on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which recently ended with her not being indicted.

Imagine if you could suck all the political gas from this. You would be left with a pure impartial situation. Suppose you then asked: Did this senior government executive break a bunch of laws? Of course, she did. Should the president be devastated that this happened? Sure. Should he sack his attorney general for her behavior in this? Of course.

Should alarm bells go off in the White House and State Department? For sure. A senior executive handled top-secret stuff as casually as she would comic books. She rolled out red carpets for spies. She endangered all of us with her recklessness.

Now re-inflate the situation with the noxious fumes of politics. Do this, and you get the disgusting scenario that just took place. A president who could give a damn. Top secrets? No big deal. Multiple figures treated as if they are above the law.

Thought: We are told there is a higher bar for our leaders. When it comes to things like secrets and breaking laws. I don’t buy it. They should face a lower bar. Because when they break the law, millions can suffer consequences.

Thought: Is the woman who may become president open to blackmail? From those who captured her emails? Of course she is.

Thought: Is it wrong to now give her clearances to read and handle top-secret material? Without a doubt. Her record with such material is abominable. She couldn’t get a clearance to be a traffic cop in D.C. With her train of scandal, she wouldn’t get hired as a school crossing guard. Unless her name was Hillary.

Thought: Do others get punished for doing what she did? By the thousands. Obama’s Department of Justice has prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined. Combined. Every year our military punish even petty mishandling of secret documents.

Thought: So is there a law for us that does not apply to Hillary and elites? Yes. And now it has been writ in gigantic letters. On a pie called “Unequal Justice.” And shoved in our faces. When we paw the pie from our eyes, we see a sea of the elite. Giving us the finger. And mooning us. Glenn Greenwald wrote about such stuff in his book, “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.”

Greenwald wrote recently, “Those who wield the greatest political and economic power are virtually exempt from the rule of law … while those who are powerless and marginalized are harshly punished, even for the most trivial transgressions.”

One lone, sobering truth: A lower-level person who did what Hillary did would be in the slammer. No question. Lower-level folks are easy targets. No fancy lawyers and political pals for them. They are just little people. Let them eat injustices.

Does our system treat people based on who they are? Rather than by what they have done? Without question. Privilege reigns. We have royalty in this country. You need to curtsy or doff your cap. Whether you want to or not.

Thought: What do we say to the next little guy who gets punished for doing what Hillary did?

Thought: If you think this stuff is wrong, many will call you a hater. Maybe you are. But maybe you are a lover. A lover of justice for all. A lover of equal treatment under the law.

Did Hillary lie her way through this? Golly, what do you think?

In the early 1950s, our nuns taught us about how shabbily blacks were treated. We students were appalled. We quizzed the nuns. Why don’t the police protect blacks? Why don’t they enforce the laws? Why do judges allow this horrible treatment? Why don’t priests, bishops, and cardinals speak out?

The nuns had few answers. God works in ways we don’t understand, they told us.

I badgered my parents with the same questions. My mother said “That’s just the way it is.” My father said “We call this injustice. There are different laws for different people. You will see a lot of it in your lifetime. I hope injustices will always disgust you. Because they are wrong.”

I still see injustices. They still disgust me. And they are still wrong.

From Tom…as in Morgan.

Tom Morgan writes about political, financial, and other subjects from his home near Oneonta. Several upstate radio stations carry his daily commentary, Tom Morgan’s Money Talk. Contact him at tomasinmorgan.com

The race for the presidency is set. So this seems a good time to step back and consider just what it is that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are fighting about.

I don’t mean where they stand on the issues, or whose vision is more compelling. I mean the office itself. The modern presidency is unique, and it’s worth understanding what’s at stake as you watch these two people campaign for it.

As Americans, we have an odd attitude toward the presidency. On the one hand, we’re leery of executive power, and often of the government the president symbolizes. Yet we’re also fascinated by the person who holds the office. And it’s not just Americans. Anywhere you travel, you’ll find people who are curious about the most visible American on the planet.

This is with good reason. Presidents control the political agenda in this country. They formulate the budget, set defense and foreign policy, develop the initiatives that drive domestic affairs, and create the contours of public debate. Congress, by contrast, reacts. And presidents of both parties have worked hard to expand their power, to the point where the president now stands at the center of government.

The job has always carried with it great responsibility, but the weight of the modern presidency is overwhelming. In a representative democracy, the ultimate power may lie with the voters, but every tough problem this nation faces percolates up to the president; if it were easily solvable, someone else would have taken care of it.

No president ever lives up to the expectations people have for him — presidents make mistakes both large and small, and their power is not limitless. But the balance of it in this country is unquestionably tilted in the direction of the White House, and that is not going to change.

So the question about the presidency that concerns me is how to hold the president accountable. He or she needs to be scrutinized, challenged, and held answerable to Congress and the public for his or her policies. There are today only rare opportunities for the vigorous give and take and close examination of a president that our system once provided. But how long can that continue before we cease to be a true representative democracy?

Lee Hamilton is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, representing a district in south central Indiana.