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Robert Reich: Trump's Assault on the Rule of Law
Trump's Assault on the Rule of Law
Robert Reich
November 27, 2018
Can America stand up to this wannabe dictator?
The “rule of law” distinguishes democracies from dictatorships. It’s based on three fundamental principles. Trump is violating every one of them.
The first is that no person is above the law, not even a president. Which means a president cannot stop an investigation into his alleged illegal acts.
Yet in recent weeks Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who at least had possessed enough integrity to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. Trump replaced Sessions with an inexperienced loyalist hack, Matthew G. Whitaker, whose only distinction to date has been loud and public condemnation of that investigation. As a conservative legal commentator on CNN, Whitaker even suggested that a clever attorney general could secretly starve the investigation of funds.
There’s no question why Trump appointed Whitaker. When asked by The Daily Caller, Trump made it clear: “As far as I’m concerned this is an investigation that should have never been brought. It should have never been had. ... It’s an illegal investigation.”
The second principle of the rule of law is that a president cannot prosecute political opponents or critics. Decisions about whom to prosecute for alleged criminal wrongdoing must be made by prosecutors who are independent of politics.
Yet Trump has repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, his 2016 rival, for using a private email server when she was Secretary of State, in alleged violation of the Presidential Records Act.
snip//
Breaking the rule of law doesn’t require consistency. It requires only a thirst for power at whatever cost.
The third principle of the rule of law is that a president must be respectful of the independence of the judiciary.
Yet Trump has done the opposite, openly ridiculing judges who disagree with him in order to fuel public distrust of them—as he did when he called the judge who issued the first federal ruling against his travel ban a “so-called” judge.
more...
http://prospect.org/article/trumps-assault-on-rule-law