Chait: The Republican Party Is Gearing Up for War on the Rule of Law

[highplainsdem]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/the-republican-partys-gearing-up-for-war-on-the-rule-of-law.html

The Republican Party has sent mixed signals for months about how it plans to respond to Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Russia scandal — President Trump’s ragetweets have been alternating with silence, and his Congressional allies have mostly urged patience. But in the days leading up to the first arrests, beginning today with former campaign manager Paul Manafort, the signals have changed, and the dashboard is now flashing red. The party apparatus is gearing up for a frontal attack on Mueller in particular, and the idea that a president can be held legally accountable in general.

The Republican Congress is using its investigative apparatus not to discover the extent of Russian interference in the election, but instead to lash out at Trump’s political opponents. The Republicans have developed a bizarre theory of alt-collusion, which holds that the real interference was Russia feeding false allegations against Donald Trump to private investigator Christopher Steele. Since the FBI investigated Steele’s charges, the FBI is the agency that colluded. And since Robert Mueller is close with the FBI, Mueller, too, is tainted.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been serving as a barely filtered outlet for this line of attack from Republicans in Congress. The page has called for Mueller to resign, and other Republican media outlets spent the weekend amplifying this message.

In today’s Journal op-ed page, two Republican former Department of Justice staffers, David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who frequently pop up in the media to defend party-line arguments, take the argument to its next step. They urge Trump to issue sweeping pardons to everybody involved in the scandal, himself included, so as to hopefully neuter Mueller’s investigation.

And would it be an overreach of sorts for Trump to quash an investigation into himself and his cronies? No, they argue. Indeed, they insist he can halt any investigation he likes:

-snip-

Ryan, of course, is tacitly allowing his chamber’s investigative bodies to run point for Trump. The systematic elimination of any source of intra-party dissent has been one of the significant developments of recent weeks. Steve Bannon’s plans to purge the party have little ideological coherence, but (I have argued) are easily understood as an effort to cleanse its ranks of any members who might be inclined to uphold the rule of law at Trump’s expense.

At this point, the idea that Ryan would call off his party’s Congressional attack dogs, or hold Trump accountable for grotesque illegality, is little more than a punch line. We are watching an important marker in the GOP’s slow metamorphoses into an authoritarian party.

[AJT]

1. Yikes

This has been my fear.

[delisen]

2. There is a big role here for citizens seeking justice.

The right of the people to seek redress of grievances. If election 2016 was fixed to allow the person who did not win attain the office , millions upon millions of us have a grievance.

It is up to us to petition the government for redress.

[dhill926]

3. cornered fucking rats....

this ain't gonna be easy...or pretty....