Trump is certainly making a power grab. But he’s not the one driving the train
by digby
Jonathan Bernstein has some of the same concerns I’ve been articulating for a while about Trump’s power grab. The difference is that while I’m sure that Trump wants more power, I don’t think he’s driving this train. It’s being driven by the “Unitary Executive” Republicans who see their chance to test out the theory with a friendly judiciary, cowed GOP congress and a president who’s willing to push the envelope because he doesn’t understand or care about the possible fall-out. IN any case, it’s pretty clear to me that there’s more going on here than Trump’s ego:
If President Donald Trump thinks he’s been totally exonerated, as he says, why is he stonewalling Congress? Why wouldn’t he want special counsel Robert Mueller to testify about a report that supposedly clears him? Why not encourage all the witnesses Mueller’s team spoke with to come forward? Why is he attempting to block 20 separate investigations, if he’s done nothing wrong?
Those are the very sensible questions the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has been asking. One possible answer is that Trump is trying to hide information from Congress because it would only confirm the parts of Mueller’s report that weren’t exonerating at all. Although the probe didn’t establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian agents, it did find a whole lot of dubious choices and a whole lot of obstruction of justice. It would make sense if the president didn’t want further details of that misconduct made public.
What worries me is that there’s another possible answer, and it’s a lot worse.
What if Trump is stonewalling Congress because the lesson he took from the Mueller report is that his behavior was perfectly okay? That is, what if Trump isn’t pretending that he didn’t do the misdeeds detailed in the report? What if instead he thinks that Attorney General William Barr, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans are now willing to go along with a theory of presidential power so expansive and unrestricted that even John Yoo and other advocates of executive authority are alarmed?
Unfortunately, that theory fits with Rudy Giuliani’s perfectly open plan to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. It also fits with a series of tweets and statements and actions by the president that appear to be a continuation of a cover-up. Perhaps Sargent is right: Trump knows how bad the underlying facts of the Mueller investigation are, and simply doesn’t want them scrutinized. Or perhaps it’s something worse. I don’t know.
But the biggest questions are the same either way: Are Republican members of Congress really going to endorse the idea that presidential campaigns can urge foreign governments to interfere in U.S. elections? And do they really think that the president should use the full weight of the criminal justice system to protect himself and go after his political opponents? If so, are they so certain they’ll never be among those opponents?
Yes, they are going to endorse it because they know that the Democrats will self-police and if they don’t the Republicans will fall on them like a pack of starving hyenas without a care in the world for their own hypocrisy. They are shameless which is the true power they have discovered.
If the Democrats don’t use all of their institutional power to stop this, Trump will welcome more foreign involvement and will likely also back vote rigging on some pretext of “voter fraud” as they did in Georgia in 2018. The executive branch has tremendous power and the states in the hands of Republicans will get the same signal.
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