Is America a Nation of Laws?

“Volume II of the Mueller report is nothing less than a categorical astonishment. A majority of the evidence regarding Trump’s serial obstructions of justice has been in the public sphere for a while now, but because of the avalanche of scandal that has become our daily gruel, much of it has fallen down the memory hole.” William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

It’s dizzying. From William Barr’s performance piece as Trump’s personal attorney on Thursday, to the risible Sarah Huckabee Sanders attributing her lies to a slip of her famously forked tongue, to Trump’s braying about how a report he’s not read -- and could not comprehend even if he did -- completely exonerates him. This is how a once reasonably competent nation fractures. I read somewhere recently that a failed state is one where all the criminals operate from inside the government.

If Trump isn’t impeached, then the United States is a failed state.

I am trying to understand why William Barr would willingly smear himself with Trump’s excrement? Was he offered a condo in Trump Tower, a bag of cash, a lifetime membership at Mar-A-Lago, what? When this mockery of a presidency finally ends, William Barr will be remembered as a partisan hack who lied to the American public to protect Donald J. Trump, the most corrupt, venal person ever to sit in the Oval Office. Why would Barr want to be remembered this way?

It always amuses me when important people in positions of power testify before Congress or in a court of law, and respond to simple, direct questions with, “I can’t recall,” or “I have no recollection.” How do you think that would go over if a 19 or 20 year old African-American male told a judge he couldn’t recall or remember? We have always had multiple legal standards in this country, one for the poor, one for African-Americans and Mexicans and native people, and one for the wealthy and connected. The rule of law in America is as flexible as Gumby, imperfect, as is our ongoing experiment with representative democracy.

At the moment, the American democratic experiment looks like something that stumbled  from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Protecting the rule of law as it applies to the government is now in the hands of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Are you as scared as I am that Pelosi will sit on her hands while she makes endless political calculations about the 2020 elections? That she will sputter about the need for unity and the futility of impeachment given that the GOP owns the Senate? That she will claim the Mueller report isn’t damning enough? Pelosi is busy keeping down the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and assuring Wall Street, pharmaceutical, insurance, fossil fuel, and military-security-surveillance industry donors that the Dems are still faithful servants of the neoliberal project.

In other words, I fear Democrats will fuck this up, let Trump spin and spew his exoneration fairy tale, let this moment pass without any attempt to hold Trump accountable, and still wind up losing the White House to the Orange Menace in 2020, most likely because they will field a Clintonite-retread like Joe Biden or some other cipher who steadfastly clings to the magical, but losing, moderate middle.

What, who, will Democrats blame when they lose the Electoral College again in 2020?

What’s it going to be, politics or the rule of law? Regardless of whether an impeachment proceeding removes Trump from office, protecting the rule of law is worth the effort. The question  is, does Article II, Section 4 of the hallowed US Constitution have meaning or not? The framers obviously understood the danger of the abuse of power and the corrupt use of authority. It’s as if the framers had peered into the future and saw the ugly spectre of a man like Donald J. Trump.