"The point I was trying to make earlier is that, in the situation of the President, who has constitutional authority to supervise proceedings, if in fact a proceeding was not well founded, if it was a groundless proceeding, if it was based on false allegations, the President does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course, the President could terminate that proceeding, and it would not be a corrupt intent, because he was being falsely accused."
That is an articulation of the power of absolute dictatorship, an absolute dictator is one who is answerable to no one and no one has the power to restrain or remove. Any president would have the power to commit any act and because they believe they have committed no crime, they could end any investigation into it - keep in mind how dependent the Congress is and has been on investigations conducted by the FBI and independent investigators who, under the U. S. Constitution are part of the executive branch. That has been true in every significant investigation into crimes committed in the executive branch that I can recall.
And William Barr made that declaration of Republican-fascism it was with the full knowledge that an American President had given any future one such as Trump all the excuse he needed to do just what he wants to do in this infamous exchange Richard Nixon had with David Frost
Frost: “Would you say that there are certain situations … where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation and do something illegal?”
Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Frost: “By definition.”
Nixon: “Exactly, exactly. If the president … approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision … enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise, they’re in an impossible situation.”
And, apparently, it's such a president who decides which situations are those "certain situations," and "impossible situations." That was something an elected Republican President said after he had been forced to resign in the one and only instance when Congressional action, or its possibility, has done that in our history.
Nixon's presumption is one which we can see the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee certainly are willing to extend to presidents of their own party because of their behavior in regard to the flagrant lawbreaking of Trump and other Republican presidents before him. But, as in the case of the gap between the Lindsay Graham of the 1990s who was ready to impeach Bill Clinton over him lying about his sex life, Lindsay Graham has slavishly become the tool of Donald Trump. That before it was clear Trump would become president Graham was predicting disaster if Trump were elected only proves how craven the Republicans in Congress are, even those who, formerly, wanted to pose as men and women of principle who believed in a nation of laws and not men.
That was all pose. They never meant it. That is made clear by their caving to Trump's gangster regime. They are every suck up for every bully and gangster you've ever seen in life and in the movies. That is a guarantee among the devotees of inequality.
I also know that some people think I'm hard on the Founders - well, someone has to be. But this is one case when the unitary executive fascists that the Ivys and Ivy equivalents have defecated over democracy are obviously not originalists because if there's one thing the Founders didn't do, it was give the United States an absolute monarchy, though they gave us a system which was bound to devolve into one if allowed to develop in that way. And ours has. At least it has when it is the list of Republican criminals I gave here yesterday, Nixon through Trump, every one of them has committed impeachable crimes except Ford and what he did in pardoning Nixon was probably the most dangerous single act any of them ever took. If Nixon had been convicted and imprisoned for his crimes, the crimes of the Reagan and Bush I administrations and the Bush II and Trump regimes would almost certainly have been fewer and less serious than they were.
A couple of days ago I mentioned that while they were in the Fuhrer Bunker in the final days of World War II Goebbels read Hitler from Carlyle's biography of Fredrich the Great to encourage him to fight to the end. It may be a little known in the United States that Hitler took that 18th century monarch as an inspiration for his absolute dictatorship.
The Founders certainly knew of him and other such monarchs, it was the predominant form of government in every country they knew, including the one whose control of the 13 colonies they were throwing off. Though some of them, like Hamilton, were warm to some level of monarchical rule, they ultimately rejected it.
An absolute monarch is an absolute dictator, one of the things that the Founders knew in a relatively milder form in George III and they knew they didn't want to recreate that in the United States. But they didn't want egalitarian democracy, either. All being rich, aristocratic men, slave owners and financiers, merchants, they wanted the benefits of liberty for themselves unimpeded by a king who might impinge on what they wanted to do. They wanted inequality that favored them. Especially the slave owners among them, they wanted to avoid the rising idea that all men being created equal with God-endowed rights included those they wanted to enslave ever endangering the slavery that made them rich. That is the reason that the very institutions that imposed Trump on us, as it did Bush II before, the electoral college, the anti-democratic inequality of the Senate, was able to overcome the power of the popular vote.
The Republican-fascist legal establishment of which William Barr is certainly a member, as is Rod Rosenstein, the Republican members of both Congressional Judiciary Committees, favor the kind of inequality that the Founders favored for themselves, they clearly despise every attempt at equality for Black People, for Women, for People of Color, certainly, most of all and in every age, members of the economic underclass. It is their entire reason for what they do.
Now, the seeds of that self-interested inequality embedded in the Constitution have come to fruition and we find that the very freedoms and liberties and advantages that the rich gave themselves are coming back to enslave us all. It is no coincidence of history that the last two Republican presidents have been the result of Constitutional provisions slave owners put there to favor them. Now it is resulting in fascistic powers being asserted by the Attorney General confirmed by the Republican Senate. What William Barr said to no objection by Republicans gives away their game. A president who can do what he claims he can is an absolute despot. No one with genuine despotic tendencies cares about whether or not what they do is wrong, if they did they wouldn't have despotic tendencies, they don't care if what they do is wrong. If they are the ones who get to decide if an investigation into them is legitimate, Barr would give exactly the worst kind of person the most power. And it is clear that the Republicans who don't repudiate what he said are perfectly willing to do that in the person of Donald Trump.
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