Performatively outraged
In a performatively outraged eight-page letter to the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon, the White House announced that it would not cooperate with the body’s impeachment inquiry under the circumstances in which it’s being conducted. Or, well, ever.
The tone of the letter, attributable to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, is shouty, reading as a lightly lawyered digest of the president’s tweets. It accuses House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic chairmen of three investigating committees of violating “the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent” in the way they’ve conducted the inquiry.
And compare Trump, who honors Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent in every way at all times. He’s like a miracle of rule of law-observation!
The White House’s plan is to mark the impeachment process as an illegitimate sham, and granting Republican ranking members subpoena power and high-end massage chairs in committee rooms would just lead to new complaints about the rigged nature of the process. A letter like this is not sent as an opening offer in negotiations.
They are not a crook.
Except they are though.
It is my policy to assume that when someone says they are not a crook, they probably are.
And they won’t. And they will get away with it. You have no enforcement mechanism. Yes, The House can issues subpoenas. The WH will ignore those, claiming they have no legal basis. The House will argue before The Courts that the subpoenas must be obeyed, and The Court will so rule. The WH will again say “Nah, not gonna happen”.
The what? What sanctions can be placed on The President and The WH and which police officer will arrest Trump to cart him to jail for contempt?
Your checks and balances only work when all sides agree to play by the same set of rules, and in Trump, you have a criminal maverick. Trump’s twitterfinger and FoxnFriends will stoke the outrage machine to 15 and the Basket of Deplorables would tear anyone attempting to enforce the law against Trump into tiny little pieces.
He warned you in January 2016 – “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, ok? It’s, like, incredible.”
Nixon certainly was a sucker…
The reminds me of another famously terrible legal argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ
Roj, inherent contempt.
Let’s be real, here. In our lifetimes, we’ve seen the Republicans impeach Clinton just because they could, to acting like Obama was a collaborator of an occupying power and using all of their hare-brained fever-dream conspiracy theories to pro-actively justify all of their obstruction and malfeasance and their general disregard for the Constitution. This, despite the fact that the Democrats let Bush, Cheney, and the entire Republican establishment off *scott free* for lying the country into what is looking like it will be an end-of-the-Republic-level forever war in the MENA region, instead of indicting the dozens of them that deserved to be indicted as war criminals. Now they’re basically all going to the matt for a mafia wannabe who never saw an adolescent girl he didn’t want to fuck, very much including his own daughters, and who nakedly breaks the law essentially on a daily basis and dares everyone to do something about it.
The outcome of this will be that any action Democrats take will be returned to them a hundred fold, and the next Democratic president will be impeached (and almost certainly removed) over a banal triviality, regardless of whether Trump manages to get acquitted if and when the impeachment vote passes the House.
Fuck, at least Nixon had the decency to resign and spent his retirement writing books. I’ve heard some of them are pretty good, even.
Seth:
You mean you haven’t read every last one of them from cover to cover, making copious notes (at least in the margins) all the way through?
What sort of a scholar are you?
;-)
The Constitution got a lot of things intentionally wrong (Electoral College; punting on slavery; allowing slaves to be counted in the census, thus giving the south disproportionate power), but the big thing they got unintentionally wrong was the failure to anticipate the rise of parties. The underlying assumption of Madison et al. was that the main rivalries would be sectional and institutional, and they set up the Constitution to take advantage of those rivalries. But as long as the Republicans in Congress are more concerned about party (and being reelected) than institutional power, they won’t do anything to check Trump.
The only hope is that enough of them in the Senate are hiding their cards until the vote for removal comes, and then they will shock the country. I’m not optimistic.
I’m surprised that letter wasn’t written in crayon. Or at least specked with spittle.