On the appeals court, Garland has been a moderate liberal, with a definite pro-prosecution bent in criminal cases. Indeed, his views in the area of criminal law are considerably more conservative than those of the man he would replace, Justice Antonin Scalia.
Nina Totenberg and Carrie Johnson
THE RECENT REPORTING that Attorney General Merrick Garland is fretting that sending to jail the violent, white-supremacist, opponents of American democracy who attacked the Capitol, injuring more than a hundred police officers killing at least one as they were struggling heroically to protect the Congress and others, trying to stop the antiquated Rube Goldberg machinery of putting the winner of the presidential election into office, etc. the ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES! sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution and to administer law is afraid that WHITE THUGS AND GANGSTERS will be more radicalized than they demonstrated they already are BY ATTACKING THE CENTER OF GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT IT FROM COMPLETEING ONE OF ITS CENTRAL ACTS IN ELECTED DEMOCRACY if he does his job proves he was always the wrong person for the job he holds and the job as a member of the Supreme Court he was nominated to but failed to get on due to the Republican-fascists holding the the goddamned Senate.
In light of that quote at the top of this post, I would love to know more as to how his past cases as a prosecutor and judge, especially the Oklahoma Bombing case fit in with his reported reluctance to go after the people who attacked the Capitol. Did he lose his nerve somewhere along the way? Did his subordinates have to deal with his reluctance to prosecute before?
If he fails to act against Steve Bannon as soon as the House sends a criminal referral to the Department of Justice President Biden should ask him for his resignation because he has already proven he is not up to the job of holding white racists and fascists to the same and currently unequal justice that People of Color and others are held to routinely and because he has proven he is not up to the job of defending the Constitution or administering the rule of law.
I had my doubts about the wisdom of Barack Obama in his acquiescent observance to the courtly habits of the legal establishment he, no doubt, learned at Harvard Law and elsewhere. The same place Garland learned about what nice lawyers do and, perhaps, who to go easy on as you don't on others. That was only one of many disappointments I had with Obama. There was little to nothing in his career in public office that led me to believe he had a devotion to true economic and social equality and equal justice under law. He was a prep-Ivy kind of guy, to the core.
It is about a year since I learned the hard lessons of listening to the hearings of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees into the Trump crimes of trying to shake down the Ukranian government to get them to lie about Joe Biden so as to influence the election. How it was the diplomats - who I can assure you I was not inclined to hold in high regard - and the military officers who were the ones to stand up and risk their careers and lives and how it was the legal class, the lawyers who consistently covered their asses and the truth of what really happened, feigning a pose of "fairness" "evenhandedness" "carefulness" to give the benefit of any ridiculously extended doubt in in all of the ways that self-protecting courtiers might be imagined to do. I can add, as longtime readers of what I wrote would know, that watching the behavior of that granitic empty suit's, Robert Mueller's, behavior in regard to his buddy, William Barr, had prepared me for that last disillusionment with the culture of the legal system.
It is one of the biggest problems I have with the administration of law in the United States that it is a grotesquely unequal from the fact that the rich can hire lawyers aplenty and use the clunky mechanisms of the courts and process to get away with anything they can, more than not. The poor, the destitute, the merely not rich cannot do that. Added on top of the fact that in the United States People of Color, members of unfavored groups, those who are not violent, insurrectionist facists on behalf of a would-be dictator, can expect a Merrick Garland to be a precisian enforcer of law and even an administer of injustice that should remove anyone unwilling to go after the January 6 mob from any position in the so-called Department of Justice.
Democratic Presidents have an unfortunate history in their selections of Attorneys General, Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, . . . have all had rather bad ones who frequently demonstrated their devotion to the settled and unequal order or who were just not up to the job. There must be better candidates than get nominated and confirmed, I'd look outside of the graduates of Harvard and the other factories of the enablers of privilege, though that's no guarantee either.
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