I have been stating for a number of months now that the exclusive concern over the Russian billionaires of Putin's crime regime interfering in American elections is too narrow, it's not all that much worse when a gang of Russian billionaires do it than when American billionaires do it. That's not to say what Putin did was any less of a danger, it is to point out that when American billionaires are allowed to do it, under the First Amendment, it is as dangerous to egalitarian democracy.
If you might argue that when the courts and the laws allow American billionaires to sway elections they at least have the foreign policy interests in common with the good of the United States that is certainly not true. Many of our worst and most consequential disasters in foreign policy have been at the behest and in the interest of wealthy oligarchs, disasters that have cost enormous numbers of lives, enormous numbers of people maimed, and enormous expense in rapidly descending order of moral significance.
The critics of the Citizens United ruling warned before it was handed down that it opened up the United States to the manipulation of foreign powers - something the "Justices" voting in favor of that soi disant free-speech ruling certainly knew of when they made that ruling. It clearly didn't bother them that they were opening up our country like a sardine can, why would it, they've been doing that for domestic oligarchs and gangster-billionaires their entire careers. And, as can be read in briefs filed by such so-called civil liberties groups as the ACLU, it doesn't really much bother them, either. Since I am a liberal and I write from the far left of traditional American liberalism, I am never going to not point out the collusion of the pseudo-left as embodied in the ACLU with the fascists in this matter.
I have also, in recent weeks, expressed my show-me skepticism that a fixture in the same legal establishment as all of the above, a Republican insider law man, Robert Mueller will turn out to be the savior of American democracy that so many are holding him up to be. Even if he were one of those legendary "good Republicans, good conservatives" of the kind that so many were holding Rod Rosenstein out as being, I doubt he has the inclination to really consider the depth of danger that we are under from billionaire-millionaire attacks on democracy, I think his prep-Ivy league credentials make that far less probable, not mitigated by his atypical military service. I think it will turn out that someone like Robert Mueller is not who is needed to save us.
Though, now that he is the focus of Republican-fascist attack, perhaps he will understand more fully the level of danger we are in and have been in for much of the post-WWII period. Perhaps his good friend William Barr's behavior will be what wakes up the guy in his eighth decade and he will redeem himself from skepticism like mine and he will sacrifice his official respectability to achieve something far greater and tell the truth, the whole truth about what he did find, what he looked for, what he did not look into and what he gave to other entities to look into because he lacked the time or he wanted to distance them from the corrupt clique at the head of Trump's Department of Justice so as to preserve evidence. And if he really wants to achieve that level of greatness, I doubt he's going to do it by sticking to "just the facts, ma'am" he's going to have to give an honest analysis of what it means, if someone of his background is able to imagine that. If I were having this conversation with him, I would point out the limits of imagination shown by so many of his former Department of Justice colleagues when it came to imagining William Barr and Rod Rosenstein's willingness to damage American democracy for the likes of Donald Trump and his agenda.
One of the more velvet glove attacks on Robert Mueller I've seen or heard was on the Lawfare site, posted by one of its co-founders Jack Goldsmith.* It is a good example of how a lawyer can defend the indefensible, William Barr's conduct in regard to the Mueller investigation and Report, using all of those outs and dodges that lawyers are trained to find to turn its clear purpose around to face the other way. I think that's what Jesus meant when he said the letter of the law leads to death even as its spirit gives life. I don't think a better case can be made for William Barr, ignoring the fact that he blatantly lied, blatantly deceived, blatantly misled Congress while under oath and that he is clearly part of the cover-up Trump hired him to conduct. The excuse that under William Barr's interpretation of Article II of the Constitution, the president has dictatorial powers of the kind the Founders wanted to avoid as they wrote it, is no excuse at all. The Constitution made the president merely the executor of laws the Congress made, Congress, the entity to whom Barr lied, was clearly the superior authority under the Constitution. The Congress is (allegedly) given the power to remove a president or a Supreme Court justice, no president nor even the Court is empowered to remove Congress.
I have heard a lifetime of conservatives whining about the authority given to departments of the executive on the basis that their rules and regulations lacked congressional adoption and now, under the unitary executive, even more expansive powers, even to break the law, even to sell us out to enemies foreign and domestic, are claimed for the same executive.
No one should be under any, possible impression that any of that right-wing discourse has been honest and above board, it has been, all along, academic babbling towards the end of destroying democracy in favor of oligarchic domination, changing completely, depending on the desired result. The "unitary executive" theory that Barr holds is a view of things that is an overtly fascistic view of the presidency. According to Goldsmith, that view of things has been common on the right:
Barr’s views on executive power are not shared by everyone, of course, but they basically reflect a standard conservative legal interpretation of Article II for almost fifty years now.
I would imagine that if you point out the fascistic nature of the unitary executive its proponents would point to the mythic power of impeachment of the president, something which has never been followed to fruition in the conviction and removal of a sitting president, something which requires a super-majority in the Senate to accomplish and which in reality will never be achieved as the history of that alleged power proves. Those who are clamoring that the House impeach Trump are both right and wrong, he is eminently impeachable, they are wrong if they say that House Democrats will be giving up the power of impeachment if they don't impeach, that power to accomplish the removal of a president doesn't exist in reality. As a protection against the overtly fascistic nature of the unitary executive view of presidents as articulated by William Barr and all of the rest of the Ivy League trained lawyers and law scholars, impeachment is a figment of the imagination. The unitary executive theory is one that is so dangerous and, according to Goldsmith, so widely held by conservatives that unless and until it is abolished by law, by constitutional amendment, if necessary, it is as dangerous to us as Citizens United and Buckley v Valeo are.
Goldsmith's article is a skilled construction meant to obfuscate the real character of the Trump obstruction as executed by William Barr. It is a lawyer's argument for why the most obviously wrong things should be allowed, a defense of the indefensible. It is the kind of thing that, I hope, will become moot as the Congressional investigations subpoena the Mueller Report and Trumps financial records and whatever else they need to do things that I am entirely confident Mueller didn't and wouldn't do. Things that the Department of Justice regulations and the oversight of Rosenstein and Barr would have impeded him from looking at. I hope that Willaim Barr is prosecuted for the perjury he committed under oath while holding the office of Attorney General acting as Trump's mafia lawyer.
But until the full danger of billionaire-millionaire manipulation of our politics and the media are ended, this is going to happen again and again until they succeed in totally destroying the possibility of equality under the law in a democracy.
I don't know if Robert Mueller is one of those conservatives who held the same view of the presidency that his friend William Barr did. If he did, I hope he sees where that leads, now. Maybe he'll be asked about that, maybe he'll talk about it. If he doesn't condemn it, I wouldn't count on him getting to the root of what is so dangerous about having a president working hand in glove with the Putin crime regime. It wasn't much better when we had one working hand in glove with American billionaire gangsters.
* To give you a good idea of where he's coming from, here's his bio from Lawfare: Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003.
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