Hearts of darkness
by Tom Sullivan
Still from Apocalypse Now (1979).
Fear is their business. A ruthless one at that. An American faction that lost faith in itself is reduced to shibboleths and nihilism, resembling a death cult more than the hopeful experiment begun in Philadelphia so long ago. Members of the Peoples Temple two centuries later retreated from the world to the jungle camp of Jonestown, Guyana. There they drank cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid as their leader asked. Over 900 died in the mass murder-suicide, then the largest number of U.S. civilian casualties in a non-natural event prior to the September 11 attacks.
Much has been said of the United States being in or on the edge of a constitutional crisis. Along with it, we are witnessing the slow-motion suicide of a political party, led by a man who, like Jim Jones, means to take a lot of others with him, believers and nonbelievers.
For decades, the sitting president complained the world was laughing at us — U.S. He ran for the presidency in 2016, it is said, in retribution and defiance at being the butt of jokes at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. On Tuesday, representatives of the world gathered at the United Nations in his hometown of New York in fact laughed out loud at him. God knows what he does now. God knows what he asks his followers to do.
National attention over the last weeks has focused on Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. The news is awash in allegations of sexual assault and drunken debauchery by Kavanaugh both at his prep school and at Yale. Tomorrow, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary will reopen hearings on Kavanaugh’s nomination. The judge and Christine Blasey Ford, one of the women accusing Kavanaugh of assault, will testify in what, for Kabuki theater, promises to be a helluva show.
Republicans on the panel claimed they didn’t need the FBI to investigate Ford’s allegations. They would do it themselves. Now they don’t have the guts to question her in front of cameras. They know how it would look to women across the planet. They retain enough self-awareness to know, try as they might, they could not mask their feelings. They have farmed out the questioning to Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell.
Ahead of the Thursday hearing and the confirmation vote already scheduled for Friday, Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina formally announced Tuesday he will vote to confirm. Announcement of the Friday confirmation vote drew a sharp response from Democrats:
“Senate Republicans aren’t even pretending to consider Dr. Ford’s testimony,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) tweeted Tuesday. “Rushing a vote sends a clear signal: They don’t value survivors. They don’t believe women.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called Republicans’ announcement of a hearing Friday “outrageous.”
“First Republicans demanded Dr. Blasey Ford testify immediately,” she tweeted. “Now they don’t even need to hear her before they move ahead with a vote.”
Will to power
Speculation continues about the fate of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Rosenstein is scheduled to meet Trump Thursday in what the White House could see as a distraction from Ford’s testimony.
But while attention is focused elsewhere, Natasha Bertrand reports in The Atlantic Republicans are looking elsewhere for means to shield their leader from the law. They have a sudden interest in the double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution:
The Utah lawmaker Orrin Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, filed a 44-page amicus brief earlier this month in Gamble v. United States, a case that will consider whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine should be put to rest. The 150-year-old exception to the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause allows state and federal courts to prosecute the same person for the same criminal offense. According to the brief he filed on September 11, Hatch believes the doctrine should be overturned. “The extensive federalization of criminal law has rendered ineffective the federalist underpinnings of the dual sovereignty doctrine,” his brief reads. “And its persistence impairs full realization of the Double Jeopardy Clause’s liberty protections.”
The American Civil Liberties Union considers the dual-sovereignty logic “specious.” But Bertrand shouldn’t have to spell out why Hatch has intervened now.
Within the context of the Mueller probe, legal observers have seen the dual-sovereignty doctrine as a check on President Donald Trump’s power: It could discourage him from trying to shut down the Mueller investigation or pardon anyone caught up in the probe, because the pardon wouldn’t be applied to state charges. Under settled law, if Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for example—he was convicted last month in federal court on eight counts of tax and bank fraud—both New York and Virginia state prosecutors could still charge him for any crimes that violated their respective laws. (Both states have a double-jeopardy law that bars secondary state prosecutions for committing “the same act,” but there are important exceptions, as the Fordham University School of Law professor Jed Shugerman has noted.) If the dual-sovereignty doctrine were tossed, as Hatch wants, then Trump’s pardon could theoretically protect Manafort from state action.
And thus, indirectly, Trump himself. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos observes, “Republicans, always talk a good game about promoting the sovereign right of states … so long as what the states are doing agrees with them. But here Hatch is willing to take a power away from every state.”
Whatever it takes to win. Principles be damned. Ethics be damned. “Settled law” be damned. Women be damned. The world be damned.
And so it might.
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