Political Expediency And Saving Our Democracy
One of the most corrosive themes to emerge yesterday from the release of Barr memo, a short document that is full of classic legalisms and faulty reasoning that is designed to obscure rather than illuminate the truth, is that it is actually a good thing for Democrats that impeachment is finally off the table because now they will be able to focus on developing policies and candidacies to win the 2020 election. Of course, anyone who has been paying attention to the current crop of Democratic candidates knows that they have barely even mentioned the Russia investigation on the trail and that the issue rarely is being brought up by the voters.
Despite the punditry otherwise, Democratic candidates have been remarkably focused on developing policies that address the multitude of problems that the country currently faces and restructuring the American government and economy for the coming century. The Democrats in Congress can fulfill their constitutional duty of executive oversight while still having candidates who run issue-oriented campaigns. They can walk and chew gum at the same time. It is the clickbait “breaking news” media which has the inability to do the same. In fact, it could be argued that the media obsession with all things Russia has provided great cover for those Democratic candidates to actually connect directly to voters without a constant stream of “Democrats in disarray” or “war within the Democratic party” stories that are bound to now happen as those candidates become more of a focus for the media.
The other corrosive element to this theme is that there is one group that will not stop relitigating the 2016 campaign and will make the Russia investigation an important element in the 2020 campaign. That group, of course, is Donald Trump and the Republican party. Sarah Sanders was on CNN this morning accusing Democrats of being the hidden hand behind the Mueller investigation in an attempt to overturn the 2016 election and negate the will of the American people. She came up to the borderline of calling Democrats treasonous. Lindsey Graham has now declared it is time to investigate Hillary Clinton’s actions during the 2016 campaign, again.
The corollary to this theme is the perfectly understandable rationale of some Democrats that impeachment is a useless and damaging prospect because there will never be the 67 votes to convict in the Senate. Impeachment will harden the split in the country even further and make it harder for Democrats to win in 2020. There is not much that can be said to disagree with that analysis. But there are times in the life of every man and every nation when more than political expediency is required. Lincoln and the two Roosevelts are proof enough of that.
And what has political expediency gotten us over the last half century other than more and more grievous crimes against our democracy. Nixon’s treason with North Korea was never exposed and Ford pardoned him for his Watergate crimes. The whitewashing of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the possible election deal between Reagan and the Iranians was never fully pursued and the participants in the Contra part of the scandal also engaged in its cover-up and then were pardoned by Bush. The lies of the Iraq war, which killed hundreds of thousands, the torture, the spying on US citizens, all pass without punishment “for the good of the country”. The thieves on Wall Street who nearly brought the world’s financial system to its knees walked away with golden parachutes because “the country needs to move on”. And now, even under the most benign interpretation of our limited view of the Mueller report, the Russians attacked our election and the Trump campaign willingly and gladly accepted their help, even if they never explicitly asked for it. The Trump team then engaged in multiple efforts to obstruct the inquiry into that attack.
How can we move past this for the reasons of political expediency when our very democratic system is under attack from within and without? Tell me what will stop the Russians or any other foreign actor from massively interfering in the 2020 election for their own interests? There is no doubt the Trump administration will not stop that if that interference is to their benefit. What future campaign will not similarly engage in a “wink-wink” quid pro quo for foreign help?
In addition, the Mueller investigation began because of the initial counter-intelligence investigation of the President in his team. What is the result of that counter-intelligence operation? As we saw with Hillary’s email investigation, a national security issue may not be a crime. We don’t know if Trump and the Kushners are still national security threats even if Mueller could not decide whether they have committed crimes. Only Democratic oversight can provide these answers. And the answers may lead us to impeachment.
A second damaging assumption that many seem to be making is that the Mueller report will answer so many of the still unresolved questions when we finally see it. Dollars to donuts, we will never see anything near the full Mueller report before the 2020 election. Barr has already indicated he will follow DOJ policy and not release the grand jury proceedings. The Trump administration has also indicated that it will try to exert claims of executive privilege over other parts of the report, an action that will take years to litigate if they decide to do so.
Finally, I take no solace in those who are cheering the fact that Mueller concluded his investigation as a triumph for the “rule of law”. First, as John Flannery pointed out last night, we have no idea what standard Mueller and Barr used to reach their conclusions nor what the specific underlying crimes that were investigated actually were, making it difficult to judge whether this was a triumph of the rule of law or another failure of prosecutorial discretion endemic to our two-tiered system of justice, the same kind of prosecutorial discretion that keeps cops from being indicted when they kill innocent black men or refuses to pursue white collar crimes. Flannery continued that the standard had to be far higher than that required by a grand jury for an actual indictment.
In addition, Benjamin Wittes writes, “That Mueller was able to complete his probe into a sitting president without having his investigation blocked—despite ongoing presidential braying against the probe and menacing of the Justice Department’s leadership—is no small thing”. Of course, Mueller did find evidence that Mueller was having his investigation blocked but just refused to make a determination of whether that amounted to a crime. If the standard has now become that we should be thankful that an investigation into a sitting president was only obstructed and not prematurely terminated, then we are farther down the road to autocracy and banana republic status then we could imagine. Sadly, that seems to be the case.
Rant over.