The looming lame duck crisis
by digby
I hope you don’t want to sleep tonight. This piece by Brian Beutler sounds very plausible to me. He talks about all the machinations in the past couple of weeks having to do with Sessions, McGahn and the Senators signaling that he has a free hand to fire Sessions after the midterms. And he speculates about why that is:
On Wednesday, Trump essentially fired McGahn. Yes, McGahn has reportedly wanted to step down later this year, but Trump made his departure a foregone conclusion, without consulting McGahn, amid a swirl of important revelations—including that McGahn spent much more time voluntarily answering Mueller’s questions than Trump’s personal lawyers knew, and that McGahn has intervened to stop Trump from pardoning his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
As he maneuvered to knock out that guardrail, he simultaneously brought pressure to bear on key Republican senators, who have suddenly come around to the view that Trump will, or even should, fire Sessions—just so long as he waits until after Kavanaugh has been confirmed—which in effect means until after the election. “The fix is in,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN).
This is the backdrop against which we should interpret the Republicans’ urgency to confirm Kavanaugh, marked most importantly by their abrupt reversal on the question of whether the Senate should insist upon reviewing Kavanaugh’s paperwork from his service as George W. Bush’s staff secretary—records that comprise the vast majority of Kavanaugh’s correspondence. That reversal followed a private meeting between key Senate Republicans and McGahn, who is the White House point man for judicial nominations, and whose personal lawyer—Kavanaugh’s former colleague Bill Burck—is managing Kavanaugh’s document production.
Democrats see these unorthodox machinations as part of an effort to bury damaging information in Kavanaugh’s records, and they may well be. But they could just as easily constitute an effort to make sure Kavanaugh is confirmed more quickly than a thorough review of his paper trail would otherwise allow.
Yes, it’s possible that Republicans will lose control of the Senate in January, but they are intent on confirming Kavanaugh before the election, foreclosing on the possibility of using the lame duck session to more completely review Kavanaugh’s public-service record. Their haste looks fairly arbitrary, unless we interpret it as an effort to lock in another Supreme Court justice before Trump takes drastic steps to protect himself from Mueller.
The implication of recent reporting is that those steps will include, at a minimum, pardoning Manafort and firing Sessions. We can see his intentions both in overt and behind-the-scenes steps he’s taken against McGahn and Sessions in recent days, and in reports that he has consulted with his personal, criminal lawyers about both pardoning Manafort, firing Sessions, and impeachment.
Depending upon how willingly Republicans in the Senate will go along with Trump’s designs, Trump may also seek to rush a new, unrecused attorney general through the confirmation process, or abuse the vacancies act to install an acting attorney general who might corruptly interfere with the Mueller investigation.
If Republicans do well in the elections, all this scheming will have proved unnecessary, and Trump will be given a free hand to obstruct any investigation he’d like. But if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress, the lame-duck period will be the critical window during which Trump can take corrupt steps to insulate himself from justice. By the time Democrats took control, their ability to set things right would be limited. They could conduct oversight, which would damage Republicans politically, but Republicans would at the very least have the power to block impeachment and the restoration of the Mueller investigation.
There’s more. I think he’s right. We’ve already seen Graham and Grassly signal that Trump should go ahead and clean house during the lame duck, regardless of the outcome of the election. It will be a very critical time.
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