Tough, Dark Times Ahead – Talking Points Memo

The raging bull's daily outbursts - nearly irrebuttable in practice - leave us waiting for the guillotine to fall on Mueller.   - gwc
Tough, Dark Times Ahead – Talking Points Memo
by Josh Marshall

I want to return to a point I made indirectly yesterday. I want to make it more directly. We’re heading toward a genuine constitutional crisis with the President. “Constitutional crisis” is sort of a meaningless word. But let me try to give it more specific meaning: a threat to the rule of law and adherence to the constitution which the constitution itself does not provide a ready to solution to, not under present political circumstances.

The President is getting rid of staunch right-wing ideologues because they will not allow him – whatever their other faults – to prevent the rule of law to applying to him and his family. To use a analogy, they’ll help him with his misdemeanors but so far at least not with his felonies. That’s what the laying the groundwork to fire Jeff Sessions is about. That’s what the firing of Don McGahn is about. When your boss announces you are leaving and you didn’t know you were leaving, that’s called being fired. Even the inability to state this obvious fact is a symptom of a larger problem: since there’s no apparent solution to the President’s push to make himself invulnerable to the law, we prefer not to say what is happening.

We don’t know the precise order of events. But the President is apparently intent on pardoning Paul Manafort – something that even by Trumpian standards has no real justification other than obstructing justice – and either ending Robert Mueller’s investigation or putting it under the control of a loyalist who will defang it.

This is happening before our eyes. There’s as yet no apparent path by which any of this will be prevented. The one partial path, which is political in nature as it should be, is if the House of Representatives moves to Democratic control in January. The issue isn’t impeachment. For my part, I think the discussion of this misses the point and is largely a distraction. It’s not that impeachment isn’t justified or is too radical. By any reasonable measure, Trump’s erratic behavior alone would have merited his removal from office months ago. The key is oversight and investigation: of the countless threads of post-2016 corruption but particularly the Russia investigation.

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