“A whole new jurisprudence”
by Tom Sullivan
“I don’t know why they don’t take care of a situation like that. I think it’s embarrassing for the country to allow protesters.”
—President Donald J. Trump, Sept. 4, 2018
The person sworn to defend the U.S. Constitution uttered the quote above. Try processing the other events of this week. Just try.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is conducting hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kavanaugh is nominated by a president who is an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime. It is a stretch to believe we would have held such hearings if Nixon had nominated a judge to the Supreme Court during the Watergate investigation. But we are today. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) finally addressed the matter on Wednesday:
“I want to begin by talking about the elephant in the room, non-theoretical,” Blumenthal said. “The president of the United States who has nominated you is an unindicted co-conspirator implicated in some of the most serious wrongdoing that involves the legitimacy of his presidency. There’s a distinct possibility and even a likelihood that issues concerning his personal criminal or civil liability may come before this Supreme Court as early as the next term. The issues may involve his refusal to comply with a grand jury subpoena or to testify in a criminal trial involving one of the officials in his administration, or his friends or his own actual indictment.”
Democrats suggested Kavanaugh had been chosen specifically because he would be friendly to Trump on the court. Blumenthal asked if Kavanaugh would commit to recusing himself in such a case. He would not.
Trump’s own staff members think their unindicted co-conspirator boss is mentally unstable. One (or more) of these “unsung” conservative “heroes” penned an anonymous letter in the New York Times. The writer credits the Trump administration with textbook conservative wins, but warns Trump’s impulses are “anti-trade and anti-democratic.” Notice which got first billing. This is part of what set stubby fingers flying late yesterday:
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
This attempt to shield true conservatives from being soiled with Trump-schmutz is simply “washing plain old regular conservative movement insanity in the blood of the lamb,” writes historian Rick Perlstein.
The internal resistance is working to keep Trump’s training wheels from flying off, just as excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book alleged earlier in the week. Even “going so far as to swipe and hide papers from his desk so he wouldn’t sign them.”
What so far has saved us from sinking any lower is not “a quiet resistance within the administration,” but Trump’s own inability to be all the autocrat he could be. It is not for lack of desire, notes Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:
Capitol Police removed and arrested the demonstrators — 31 of them by lunchtime. Photographers scanned the audience for the next protester to pop up, whack-a-mole style. Yet the hearing went on. The Republic survived.
A foreign journalist sitting near me marveled at the civil disobedience. “You pull that s— in Venezuela?” she said — then drew her index finger across her throat.
That’s true in many of the countries whose leaders Trump praises: Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, North Korea. Now he suggests protests should be abolished here, too. No civil rights movement. No anti-war protests. No Henry David Thoreau fighting slavery. No Boston Tea Party.
Praise Jesus. If not for Trump’s famous disgust for blood, the republic might be lost. Trump called yesterday for the New York Times to release the name of the traitor within his administration “for National Security purposes.” Somewhere in the White House a “hefty” Red Queen costume is ready for Halloween.
The threats are real and as unusual as the sitting president, Marcy Wheeler believes:
I actually think the constitutional problems presented by Trump are grave.
Our country has vested magical powers in The Word of the President. And for years, significantly bc 3,000 Americans died, we've expanded the power of The Word (abetted by many #Resistance heroes, btw).— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 6, 2018
There were always interesting questions about that. But now Trump comes on the scene, with the power of The Word. And starts issuing Presidential orders via Tweet, some he means, some he later backs off on. We treated it as a joke but bc of the power of The Word, it's not a joke.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 6, 2018
We've literally rolled out a whole new jurisprudence about whether The Word issued by Tweet is legally binding, whether it's before the election or after, whether it happened during Executive Time or not.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) September 6, 2018
There is more, as there will be more today and every day until Congress grows a spine and stops the madness.
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