IT ISN'T POSSIBLE to assess how valuable that Senator Ruben Gallego may be to the citizens of the United States but his exposure of what should be a criminal scheme among Trump, Bondi-Blanche and the guy who you want to wipe the smug look off his corrupt lying face, Bessent, to hand over ten-billion dollars to Trump was invaluable. That exposure leaves a slim and faint hope that exposure may have delayed the money grab just long enough.
Trump's ten billion dollar theft (on top of tens of millions already stolen) will be facilitated by HIS Department of "justice" and HIS Department of Treasury unless the worst president in American history dies before he completes the theft, THAT BECAME APPARENT IN BESSENT'S FILIBUSTERING NON-RESPONSE TO SENATOR GALLEGO. I hope a future Democratic House or Senate gets that piece of crap before them again to force him to answer questions and to hold him in contempt - the kind that doesn't depend on the corruption of a Republican-fascist "justice" department or the cowardice of a future Democratic Department of "justice" to send his billionaire ass to prison.
And I hope if he goes to prison it's not on of those country-club ones which, by the way, should be abolished. White collar criminals are some of the worst there are and they should do time as hard as the most destitute person convicted.
Before going on "HIS" above is to point out the fact that if the Attorney General is appointed by the sitting president and who can fire them at will, the lie that the Department of Justice is in any way reliably not the sitting president's law firm depends entirely and absolutely on that president acting as Biden did in not exercising that control. Republicans since Eisenhower have shown that they, consistently, will use the it as, if not the president's personal law firm, then the Republican parties and the oligarchs and, now, the white supremacists who are essential to their party's success. The pious notion to the contrary is a piously told and transparent lie.
But back to topic. Now that the Trump crime spree has set up this scheme for Trump to grab ten billion dollars you can't ever depend on some future change in the mere law to stop it. After the Nixon crime spree, including by the Department of "justice" under the Attorney General who eventually went to prison for his part in it, some very good anti-corruption laws, through restricting political money were adopted and destroyed by the Supreme Court, in a case brought by the overtly fascistic James Buckley. There will never be such a thing as an honest Republican administration, again, that party has become so entrenched in oligarchic corruption that every future one will be open to the same practices. That is unless the basic form of government of the United States is changed in the Constitution - those changes including taking the power to nullify federal laws from the almost certainly guaranteed to be corrupt or cowardly or just plain stupid Supreme Court.
Under our system the Department of "justice" is only as clean as those in it choose to be, being staffed by the president and acting at his whim, we have seen through successive Republican administrations since Nixon that they will generally be corrupt, in a line of Do"j" officials, starting with John Mitchell, William French Smith, Ed Meese, William Barr,* John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Mukasey, Jeff Sessions, Matthew Whitaker, William Barr (again) and on to Bondi with slightly lower levels like Blanche in all of those Republican administrations, that pattern is firmly established with a few, arguably less corrupt examples in between. I would be tempted to site Gerald Ford's Attorney General, Edward Levi as an exception to that rule if it were not for the fact that he had Rudy Giuliani, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia working under him. No truly honest person would have such consistent bad judgement as that.
LOOK AT THAT LIST OF DULY, CONSTITUTIONALLY APPOINTED AND SENATE APPROVED (WITH THE EXCEPTION OF WHITAKER) CRIMINALS AND SLEAZEBAGS. Look at it and the more than a half-century of American history they represent with the knowledge what has been permitted under the Constitution is, in fact, what the Constitution is in reality instead of law-scholar, civics-text book lies.
Any system in which the criminal investigations and prosecution department is under the control of a self-interested, guaranteed to be partisan branch of the government is open to direct corruption of the kind that has flourished under every Republican president since Eisenhower and that corruption could be matched with the lack of courage and judgement of a number of those under Democratic administrations, Reno, Garland, . . .
I was curious to know if there was ever another instance like Trump's ten billion dollar grab by a sitting head of state in a modern democracy and found no instance of looking all weekend. The closest I found was when the ex- Prime Minister of Canada, the one often cited as the worst PM in Canadian history Brian Mulroney sued when the RCMP accused him of corruption in the infamous Airbus scandal which, from everything I can see Mulroney was guilty of corruption in. The Jean Chrétien government settling with the criminal was, no doubt, an act of short term political expediency when taking a chance on defending the case would probably have served the country and history better in the long term. I wish I'd written down in my notes who it was who, after he had left office, said they'd never believe a word that Mulroney said because he was an habitual liar, but going into that will only get me into the permissive handling of lies under our system of government. By American standards, by the way, Mulroney would have never come close to being the worst president, he'd have lingered somewhere in the middle.
The framers of the Constitution, a pretty corrupt lot, themselves, probably didn't believe there would come a time when the regime of corruption represented in that list of Attorneys General above would become the norm for the government they were forming, they certainly couldn't imagine a Supreme Court - armed with a self-created power that they never put in the Constitution - would turn the American president into a criminally impune monarch of the kind they'd explicitly thrown off in the Revolution. But such is the inherently wrong assumptions they had about government, to start with in their novel scheme of "balanced powers" and the country continuing in the direction of good governance under a republic they believed, wrongly, that they'd sent the ship of state in that the very things they created have been corrupted UNDER THE VERY RULES THEY ESTABLISHED.
There is always a potential of corruption under any scheme of governance but one that puts the investigation and prosecution of crimes AND THE SETTLEMENT OF CIVIL CLAIMS BY THE SITTING OR PAST EXECUTIVE in the hands of POLITICAL APPOINTEES BY THE VERY MAN WHO COMMITS THOSE CRIMES OR BRINGS THOSE CLAIMS, is a guarantee of corruption and theft. I can't believe they couldn't imagine such corrupt partisans as Bondi, Blanche and Bessent being a possibility - along with such criminals having the power to hollow out experienced, career investigators and prosecutors as has come to maturity and instant rot in Trump II - but that is the consequence of the presidential system they set up. I have not taken the time to see if such consequences were predicted by the Anti-federalists but it is such an obvious problem with how the Department of "justice" and other agencies under the presidential system that someone could not have noticed it as a possibility.
Depending on the. . . um. . . "honor" of lawyers and politicians to avoid the kind of corruption that Trump has installed and will certainly profit from, unless he dies before Bessent gives him the ten billion, can't ever be depended on again. Like the corrupt Rehnquist and Roberts Court, once a road has been cut through the make-believe lore of the Constitution and through those most stupidly depended on entities such as "norms" that road will ever remain open UNTIL THE CONSTITUTION IS EFFECTIVELY CHANGED TO PREVENT A FUTURE COURT TO OPEN THEM UP AGAIN. To prevent that the Marbury power-grab of 1803 has to be forever nullified in the clearest and most effective ways. I think to do that there will have to be a fixed an limited term or membership of the Court with a lifetime ban on ex-"justices" profiting from rulings they've made from the bench. One with real prison terms attached, to be served in real prisons.
Our system is totally corrupt, this scheme of Trump to give himself (and he's said it in those terms, himself) ten billion dollars through his corrupt appointees is the total and final collapse of the "honors" system that has, so far, kept that level of corruption at bay. From here on if we don't override the cowardice and corruption of the lawyers, and those in the House and, especially, the Senate will be a major hurdle to ending that corruption, and the witless foolishness of the "balance of powers" the American Republic will be destroyed by the things already proven to be possible "under the Constitution." The first step is we have to stop worshiping it and the slave-holders and corrupt financiers who wrote it and the corrupt "justices" that amended it at their whim, starting with the Marbury power grab.
I live to, among other things, be able to report the happy news that Trump has died and gone to hell, that, among so many others, his thugs like Todd Blanche are disbarred and behind bars and that that monumental FAGA asshole Bessent has the smug smile wiped from his stupid billionaire face as he is perp walked. I doubt it will happen, the American "justice" system seldom does to hold the biggest, white collar criminals accountable. Probably only the first one will happen, divine justice being what "justice" under our system is not. But I live in hope.
* It should never be forgotten that even as his partisan, Republican corruption was in full flower, the man held up as being the white knight of American lawyers was best friends with the putrid, corrupt, fascistic William Barr. The lavishly over-sold Robert Mueller, oversold in terms of integrity and honesty and devotion to the non-partisan application of the law played a huge role in my final disillusionent about the law and the legal profession.
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