Senior Political Reporter
Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/23/banner-hours-gop-rule-law/
Aaron Blake writes in the WashPost:
It’s hardly breaking news that President Trump has an uneasy relationship with the rule of law. He campaigned on putting his unindicted opponent in jail. He has attacked judges individually and the judiciary as an institution. He allegedly asked his FBI director for loyalty and to lay off a top aide. He tried to get his first attorney general to launch politically expedient investigations. Robert S. Mueller III laid out five instances in which there was significant evidence that he obstructed justice. He’s declining to cooperate with his own impeachment inquiry. And he even criticized his Justice Department for indicting two Republican congressman.
What hasn’t been chewed over quite as thoroughly is how much this attitude has infected those around him — many of them in the Republican Party, which prides itself as the party of the rule of law.
And the past 24 hours have been full of activity on that front.
They began Tuesday night with Matthew G. Whitaker, Trump’s former acting attorney general, taking to the airwaves of Fox News to declare that a president abusing power not only isn’t a crime, but also isn’t even impeachable.
“Abuse of power is not a crime,” Whitaker said. “Let’s fundamentally boil it down. The Constitution’s very clear that this has to be some pretty egregious behavior.”
Even for a team of supporters accustomed to moving the goal posts for Trump, taking “abuse of power” and suggesting it would not clear the bar was something.
Then came Wednesday morning, when a throng of Republican congressmen, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), decided to storm the proceedings of the House impeachment inquiry to highlight concerns about its process. They effectively shut it down for five hours and caused the testimony of Defense Department aide Laura Cooper to be delayed.
The situation harked back to 2016, when House Democrats — who were then in the minority — staged a sit-in protest on the House floor over gun control. At the time, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) declared that Democrats had “replaced rule of law with the rules of the mob.” Another House Republican shouted, “Rule of law means order!” Another stickler for the rules at the time was then-Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), who is now acting White House chief of staff. “When somebody violates all the rules that they, you know, said they would adhere to and sets bad precedent for the future,” Mulvaney said, “it simply shows that if you act badly, you can get what you want.”
Beyond the issue of the rules in this protest was the matter of security. The impeachment inquiry depositions are held in a secure room, but some Republicans brought in their cellphones, which is against the rules, raising concerns about whether the room had been compromised.
The last development on the rule-of-law front Wednesday was in an actual courtroom. While defending Trump from having to turn over his private financial records, his private attorney William S. Consovoy made an extremely broad assertion of presidential immunity. He said that basically no jurisdiction — whether local or federal — can investigate a sitting president.
And when a judge asked him whether that would also be the case if Trump, as he so famously intoned, shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City, Consovoy responded in the affirmative.
“Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?” U.S. Appeals Court Judge Denny Chin asked. “Nothing could be done? That is your position?”
“That is correct,” Consovoy said, noting that any crimes could be handled once the president was out of office.
It is understood that a president can’t be indicted while in office; this is the policy of the Justice Department and has been dating to Richard Nixon. What is much more controversial is the idea that jurisdictions cannot even investigate Trump. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero recently called the Trump team’s assertion of immunity “virtually limitless” and deemed the claim “repugnant to the nation’s fundamental structure and constitutional values.”
The claim is merely the latest bold one from the Trump legal team and from Consovoy. Earlier this year, both the White House counsel and Consovoy maintained that Congress also had no right to investigate the president for the sake of oversight.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta asked Consovoy that if “a president was involved in some corrupt enterprise, you mean to tell me, because he is the president of the United States, Congress would not have power to investigate?” Consovoy answered that was his argument, because it would not be “pursuant to its legislative agenda.”
Congress has since launched impeachment proceedings, which is a power expressly granted in the Constitution and would seem to mitigate questions about whether its members have the authority to do what they are doing. But Republicans are making all kinds of other process arguments to attack the legitimacy of the investigation and decline to cooperate — even as there is little in the law to guide what impeachment proceedings must look like. They are complaining about the lack of a due process, even though this isn’t a trial (yet). They cry foul over the lack of a vote to launch the inquiry, which has been held in the past but is not required by law.
And as that situation and Trump’s standing as president become more embattled, it looks as though the “rule of law” party is going to continue making arguments about why Trump holds a unique place in relation to that law — and why perhaps it’s worth breaking the rules on his behalf.
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Remember, folks, an attempt to hold the Grifter-in-Chief and his White Nationalist regime accountable for abuses of authority is an attack on White privilege everywhere!
No wonder the so-called “Freedom” Caucus and its privileged White guys (used in a generic sense, as there appear to be a couple of GOP women members who glory in and feel empowered by their male companions’ chauvinism, particularly when it comes to putting down smart, powerful women of color) are so upset. Like their Grifter, they love the concept of America as it was in the “good old days,” before MLK, Jr., and the nasty “Civil Rights Era,” when the law was largely a tool to oppress African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Catholic Americans, Jewish Americans, immigrants, and a host of “others.” They are righteously upset that their overprivileged, unqualified, unscrupulous Supreme Leader, a living example of where “White privilege” will get you, could be held accountable for some of his myriad of misdeeds and outright mockeries of our Constitution and the rule of law.
The good news for the BBRs and their fellow GOP enablers (incidentally, the GOP has had full rights under Congressional rules to participate in the ongoing investigation — just not to control it from their minority position): the impeachment investigation will soon be “taken public” as they (disingenuously) claim to desire.
The bad news: they will have to come up with different forms of diversion and disruption, because on the publicly disclosed facts, there is no defense for either their continuing White privilege or the lawless actions and continuing abuses of authority by their “Supreme Leader.”
PWS
10-24-19