gracchusdixit

In the first book of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno, the poet is guided by the spirit of his Roman predecessor and artistic idol, Virgil, to the gateway of hell.  He encounters these chilling words, inscribed above the lintel: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.  “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”  This admonition not only sums up Dante’s vision of the damnation awaiting sinners, it is a fitting description of the political world we inhabit today.

After months of dithering and delay, the United States House of Representatives has finally launched an official inquiry into the possible impeachment of Donald Trump, which is moving faster than anyone could have imagined.  It has long been clear that Donald Trump eked out the narrowest of electoral college victories in 2016 by conspiring with a hostile foreign power.  Once he was installed in office, it quickly became clear that he is the most corrupt president in American history—a self-absorbed huckster determined to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies.  

Despite all this, it took an absolutely unprecedented act of criminality to get the impeachment ball rolling.  That act was Trump’s brazen attempt to extort a promise from the president of Ukraine to investigate his political nemesis, Joe Biden.  It is hard to imagine a more egregious and shameful abuse of presidential power.  If any of his predecessors had tried to do such a thing, they would have been hounded from office.  It is therefore vitally important that Donald Trump should be held accountable and pay a price for his wrongdoing.  

But that won’t be enough.  Even if Trump is impeached, even if he is driven to resign, even if he suffers a resounding defeat at the polls, two fundamental problems will continue to plague us.  

The first is that Trump’s presidency has already done widespread and irreversible damage to the country, both here and abroad.  The second is that our country itself suffers from a political and social pathology, of which Donald Trump is not the cause, but, rather, the culminating symptom.  Removing Trump from office, however necessary that may be, will not cure the disease.

The damage done by the Trump presidency should be obvious to anyone who isn’t willfully blind, deaf, or dumb.  He has turned his back on a host of major international treaties and agreements, breaking our nation’s promises to the world; he has vilified and bullied our closest allies, causing them to look elsewhere for global leadership; and he has done everything possible to undermine the very institutions we created after the Second World War to prevent future wars and to foster a stable and prosperous world order.  Worse than any of that, Donald Trump has complimented, cultivated, and kowtowed to dictators, demagogues, and outright killers, as if they were examples to be emulated rather than monstrous evil-doers to be reviled.  Why should the nations of the world ever trust us again, now that they know we are capable of electing such a man?  Donald Trump’s removal from office, if it comes, may mitigate some of this damage, but it cannot restore our reputation or rebuild that trust.  We will continue to be a formidable nation because of our military power and the sheer size of our economy.  But we will never again be trusted as “the leader of the free world”. 

The damage done at home is no less consequential.  Trump and his Republican confrères-in-crime have gutted the regulations that have for decades protected the health, safety, and financial security of the American people.  The Environmental Protection Agency has become an agent of climate-change denial.  The Food and Drug Administration has been stripped so bare that it can barely ensure the safety of the food we eat or the medicines we take.  The Federal Communications Commission has become the mouthpiece of the very monolithic media companies it is supposed to check and contain.  The Department of Education, created to support the public schools that are the bedrock of our democracy, is now little more than a lobbyist for the private, for-profit education industry.  The Department of Justice, charged with the sacred task of enforcing the law without fear or favor, has become an instrument of Trump’s political paranoia.  Worst of all, the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court of the United States are now in the hands of right-wing judges, who will make any attempt to reverse all this damage all but impossible. 

More importantly, Trump’s removal, departure, or defeat will do nothing to cure the toxic political and social pathology of our country—a true sickness that undermines our long-standing claim to be a “city upon the hill,” a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.

The most obvious expression of this sickness is the Republican Party’s descent into the degrading muck of racism to achieve its fundamental economic purpose, which is to make the richest Americans even richer than they already are.  Donald Trump’s corruption is the personal embodiment of this cynical goal.  Which is why the Republican Party has embraced him.  Which is why Republicans are prepared to defend, excuse, and explain away his every crime.

This degrading spectacle did not begin with Trump. William F. Buckley Jr., the founding father of “movement conservatism,” steadfastly defended racial segregation. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1964, famously proclaimed, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” all the while he refused to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, presumably because the “liberty” of white people was more precious to him than the rights of African-Americans.  Ronald Reagan, who is adulated by Republicans as the epitome of all they stand for, was even more cynical.  All the while he joked and charmed his way into the public’s favor, he decided to give one of his first speeches as a presidential candidate in rural Mississippi, just a few miles from the spot where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan 20 years before.  Rather than acknowledging, let alone condemning, that atrocity, he chose to extol “states’ rights,” code for racial segregation and the suppression of black people throughout the Deep South. The rot at the core of the Republican Party, in short, did not begin with Donald Trump, not will it will end with his departure.

The same is true of the rot eating away at the heart of the American body politic.  Every time Donald Trump commits a new outrage, we hear the following assurance from the bien pensants who populate academia, the media, and the upper echelons of government; indeed, we have heard it more than once from Barack Obama:  “This is not who we are; we are better than this.”  

If the Trump presidency has taught us nothing else, it is how empty this sentimental cliché truly is.  A large swath of the American people are not, in fact, “better than this”.  On the contrary, they are far worse.  They knowingly voted to elect a corrupt demagogue and would-be tyrant, they persist in ignoring his crimes, and they are determined to stick with him to the end.  To them, social grievance and the settling of cultural scores take precedence over country and common decency.  We may yet be lucky enough to rid ourselves of Donald Trump.  But we must not kid ourselves.  Those who voted for him will remain mired in their ignorance, their prejudices, and their hate.  In 1860, such people plunged our nation into a savage civil war that lasted five years and took more than five hundred thousand lives.  

Let us hope that the poet Dante Alighieri was wrong.  Let us hope that something better will prevail.  And let us pray that hope itself need not be abandoned.  

The Constitution of the United States begins with the famous phrase, “We the People”.  Those words are now so familiar that we take them for granted, paying scant attention to what they mean.  They are, in fact, deeply problematic, because they beg a fundamental question, the resolution of which has plagued us for more than 200 years.  The question is:  To whom does the phrase, “We the People,” refer?  Which of us, in other words, are entitled to call ourselves Americans?  

Neither the Constitution nor the earlier Declaration of Independence, which also invoked “the people,” answers the question.

Between the two documents, the Declaration was by far the more radical, because it asserted the independence of a nation that did not yet exist.  In pledging “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to pursue an armed rebellion against the British Crown, the 56 men who signed it were committing treason, and they knew it.  

They also knew that such an audacious act required a plausible philosophical rationale to prevent the newly proclaimed “Thirteen United States of America” from becoming a pariah among nations if—and it was very much an “if”—the rebellion managed to succeed.    They grounded their rationale in the assertion that “one people” had the right to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”.  

The intellectual forebears of the Declaration’s signers were the English political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.  It was they who promulgated the idea of an implicit “social contract” between those who are governed and those who do the governing.  However, Locke and Hobbes concerned themselves entirely with the rights of individual persons rather than a collective “people,” and they had nothing whatever to say about the right of “one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”. 

Which brings us back to the question:  Whom did the founders have in mind when they talked about “We the People”?  That they failed to answer this question opened the door to countless competing narratives of what it means to be an American.  

Although the Constitution defines “citizenship” clearly, this has never satisfied right-wing conservatives, who think that being a citizen isn’t good enough to qualify as being a “true American”.  Donald Trump’s speechwriter and alter-ego, Stephen Miller, is the latest and most egregious example of this poisonous point of view.  In his eyes, only white people of European descent qualify.  As reprehensible as Miller is, the evangelicals who populate Trump’s “base” are even worse.  To them, only born-again Christians pass the test.  

Such lunatic notions would be little more than ridiculous, if it weren’t for the fact that a not insignificant chunk of the electorate agrees with them.  Worse yet, they have been bolstered by a fable that has wormed its way insidiously into the public subconscious, to such an extent that it is now taken for granted across the political spectrum and for the most part without objection, even by people who should know better.  

This fable claims that there is a “real America” out there, situated in a mythical “heartland”.  According to this tale, everyone else lives in “coastal bubbles,” chock full of  undeserving interlopers, illegal immigrants, and condescending elites, hostile to or out of touch with the interests of the honest-to-god Americans who inhabit “fly-over country”.   

To the “heartland” fabulists, it does not seem to matter that a rather large majority of Americans live in those “coastal bubbles,” or that they are responsible for most of the country’s economic activity, intellectual energy, and cultural achievements, or that their tax dollars subsidize the “heartland,” helping to keep the so-called “real Americans” who live there from going broke.

My wife and I got a glimpse of this mythic world a couple of weeks ago when we visited friends in Pierre, South Dakota.  We found ourselves, not in the American “heartland,” but in the beating heart of Trump country.  

As someone who knew next-to-nothing about South Dakota, let me say that the physical landscape of the state is nothing less than majestic.  The soaring pinnacles of the Badlands, the looming shadows of the Black Hills, the undulating grasslands and limitless horizons—all are simply breathtaking. 

The human landscape is another matter. 

Sixty-two percent of South Dakotans and 61 of its 66 counties voted for Trump in 2016, and there is no sign that anything different will happen in 2020.  

Although than 300 South Dakota municipalities call themselves “cities,” all but two are smaller than the small town in Connecticut where I live.  The population of the entire state is considerably less than the population of the one Connecticut county in which that small town is located.  

Eighty-six percent of South Dakotans are white, and 79 percent declare themselves to be “Christian”.  Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians, who comprise almost 40 percent of the nation as a whole, are as rare as unicorns and as unlikely to be seen.  The Jewish population is the smallest in the United States, amounting to fewer than 400 souls.  There is only one mosque to be found in South Dakota’s 77,184 square miles. 

The only dollop of diversity in the state resides in its Native American population.  After 150 years of broken promises, systematic theft, and more than occasional attempts at extermination, the descendants of the once great Sioux Nation are now cooped up in a handful of reservations, where the poverty level is three times the national average and the health statistics would be a scandal even in the most desperate of third world countries.  The only Native Americans we encountered were waiting on tables in a hotel restaurant, where they served carloads of white ranchers in identical straw cowboy hats with what can only be described as sullen subservience.  It was a depressing spectacle.

I have belabored—and no doubt bored—you with these facts and figures for the sole purpose  of posing two questions:  

How is it possible for South Dakota, or any place like it, to present itself as being uniquely “American”?  There is next-to-nothing in the so-called “heartland” that embodies or expresses the sprawling diversity of our country, the rich complexity of our culture, or the sheer energy that makes us who we are.

More importantly, why do we allow such places to exercise a political stranglehold over the fate and fortune of the entire nation?  By what logic do the two Dakotas, with a population less than half  the population of the small state of Connecticut where I reside, have twice the number of Senators and as many votes in the Electoral College?

The true heart of this country does not lie in the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual void of the so-called “heartland”.   The true heart of this country is located, firmly and forever, in the vibrant, chaotic diversity of our great cities and, yes, in the “coastal bubbles,” where countless immigrants from around the world jostle and struggle to make their way, where millions of true Americans—“We the People” one and all—enrich this nation and breathe life into its future. 

The surreal annual gathering of an organization called DEF CON just came to an end in the no less surreal city of Las Vegas.   Inspired by the 1980s movie War Games, in which a runaway computer simulation pushes the world to the brink of nuclear war, DEF CON began life as an “underground” conclave for amateur computer wizards and hackers.  Since its founding more than 20 years ago, DEF CON has morphed into something far more significant than a playground for counter-culture whiz-kids.  Amateurs still populate the convention in droves, but so do countless cyber-security professionals, Defense Department recruiters, and the denizens of our nation’s various intelligence agencies.

One of the central attractions of DEF CON is a series of “contests,” in which the precocious attendees vie to see who can most quickly “hack” supposedly secure digital devices or websites.  One of the targets of this year’s contests were the electronic voting machines used by just about every state in the country.  Only three companies—two American, one Canadian—manufacture these machines, and the security of their devices has been the subject of controversy for years.  It therefore surprised no one that the digital geniuses at DEF CON were able to hack and compromise each and every one of these machines in a matter of minutes.

Since the “election” of Donald Trump, we have been assured by the powers that be— the heads of our intelligence agencies, the political establishment in general, and compliant journalists—that Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential election was limited to the fabrication of conspiracy theories, the dissemination of phony news, and the manipulation of social media.  Time and again, we have been told that “no evidence” exists to suggest that such “meddling” had any effect on the votes themselves.  This has always been an improbable proposition, just as the euphemistic word “meddling” vastly understates the true extent of what the Russians actually did.  

The system by which votes are counted in this country amounts to a hopelessly complicated Rube Goldberg machine.  This system lacks uniform standards and is nearly impossible to monitor or police, because, for reasons that have never made any sense, we leave it up to the states to administer what is the most fundamental and universal of democratic rights—the right to vote.  Some of those states have shown themselves to be quite willing to manipulate elections themselves; others are merely incompetent.  Many do not require paper ballots to back up and verify electronic votes, and the three private companies that manufacture the machines that tally those votes are less than entirely reputable.  The political allegiances of their owners are suspect, their digital infrastructure is antiquated, and the security of their devices is (to put it mildly) questionable.  That the hackers at DEF CON could so quickly compromise these devices merely underscores flaws that have been apparent for years.

Given the extensive cyber capabilities of the Russians and their clearly malign intent, why would anyone imagine that they are capable of anything less?  The argument that the Russians would content themselves with operating at the margins of our vulnerable election system, when they could attack that system directly, has never been plausible.  They have launched direct attacks on European elections on more than one occasion.  It defies logic that they would attempt anything less here.  

Yet the pretense continues.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently published the first of what will be several reports of its investigation of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.  Because the report is heavily redacted, only about 30 percent of what it has to say can be read by the public.  It is not surprising, but nonetheless disturbing, that the most heavily redacted portions deal with Russia’s direct attack on our voting systems.  Even so, the public bits are ominous enough.  

The report provides a detailed and chilling account of nothing less than a systematic attack by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, on every aspect of our electoral system, ranging from the private companies mentioned earlier to state and local boards of election, from voter databases to election websites, from electoral candidates to election officials themselves.  

Despite all this, the report bends over backwards to reassure us that it “has seen no indications that votes were changed, vote-tallying systems were manipulated, or that any voter registration data was altered or deleted”.  This almost pathetic protestation, like all the assurances that have preceded it, rings increasingly hollow. 

Indeed, the committee’s report finally admits that its “insight is limited,” because it did not “examine the servers or other relevant items” belonging to the victims of the Russian attack.  It goes on to concede that “a sophisticated actor could target efforts at districts where margins are already small, and disenfranchising only a small percentage of voters could have a disproportionate impact on an election’s outcome”.

That, of course, is a plausible description of what happened in 2016.   

Donald Trump eked out the narrowest of electoral college victories in the face of a decisive popular vote defeat.  His win was the consequence of 77,000 votes cast in three states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where his margins amounted to substantially less than one percent of the total votes cast.  It may be that these razor-thin margins were legitimate.  It strains credulity, however, to persist in the belief that Russia’s attack played no role in producing them.  

Yet that is what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would now like us to believe.  Despite all the evidence, despite its own admissions, despite logic and common sense, the committee, much like the nation as a whole, declines to confront the terrible but all too likely possibility that the 2016 presidential election was hacked by a hostile foreign power, thereby producing an illegitimate result. As long as we fail to confront this possibility head-on and resolve the fundamental political issues it raises, our democracy is at risk.  We may soon find that it has not only been hacked but hacked to death.

In 1735, after a tumultuous political career, during which he was accused of treason, fled in exile to France, and was pardoned more than once, Henry S^t John, 1^st Viscount Bolingbroke, retired from public life.  In a letter to his friend and political ally, Sir William Wyndham, Bolingbroke observed:  “My part is over; and he who remains on the stage after his part is over deserves to be hissed off.”  Our nation would be well served if at least two of the Democratic presidential primary candidates heeded Bolingbroke’s advice.  Those candidates are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

Several months ago, I said in these pages that it was time for Biden, after a long and largely distinguished political career, to call it a day, because for him to seek the Democratic nomination would in all likelihood ensure Donald Trump’s reelection, an event that would be catastrophic for the country.  My point was not that Biden is unqualified or inexperienced.  Far from it.  My point was that he is out of touch, out of step, and tone-deaf to the sensitivities of the age we live in,  and thereby incapable of offering the new vision of the future that so many Americans are longing for.

Because I believe Joe Biden to be a fundamentally decent man, it gives me no pleasure to say that his performance in the first Democratic primary debate last week proved the point—in spades.  Throughout, Biden seemed vague, tentative, and disoriented, unsure of his answers and, more tellingly, unsure of the questions themselves or their implications. 

The revelatory moment came when Biden was confronted by Kamala Harris about his boast that, during his days in the United States Senate, he was able to do business with unflinching white racists like James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.  He was attempting to make the case that compromises are required to get things done and that he has a long record of forging such compromises.  The problem, of course, is that the two men whose names he invoked were utterly despicable, determined to “keep negroes in their place,” defend segregation, and uphold white supremacy. 

No one believes for a moment that Joe Biden shares, or ever shared, such virulent prejudices, nor did Kamala Harris make that accusation.  As a victim of racial prejudice herself, she merely wanted to know what “greater good” could possibly have justified Biden in accommodating such men.  It was a fair question, to which he had no convincing answer.  Instead, he continued to prevaricate, denying blame and defending his record, as he has been doing for weeks.

Biden’s supporters, of course, are furious at Harris for daring to question his record.  It was all a very long time ago, they say, and they ask:  Isn’t it unfair to criticize Joe Biden for political actions that were normal and customary in their day?   The answer to that question is:  No.  

Joe Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972, four years after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, in part for refusing to “compromise” with virulent racists like James Eastland and Herman Talmadge.  Other men and women of principle, on both sides of the political aisle, did the same.  If Joe Biden hopes to become our next president, he must be held to a higher standard than “normal and customary” behavior.

He must also answer for his treatment of Anita Hill, whose public humiliation during hearings that eventually gave Clarence Thomas a seat on the Supreme Court Biden did nothing to stop.  He has said several times that he owes Anita Hill an apology, but he still hasn’t bothered to pick up the phone.  

No less damaging was Biden’s feebleness on the debate stage.  If he couldn’t make his case clearly, if he couldn’t defend himself against reasonable criticism by fellow Democrats, how will he be able to withstand the torrent of vitriol that inevitably spews forth from orifice that is Donald Trump?  Biden’s candidacy is predicated on the promise that he can win a rhetorical knife-fight with Trump.  His ability to deliver on that promise now seems questionable.

The problem Bernie Sanders faces is different.  He made no missteps during the debate, nor did he show any signs of vagueness or disorientation.  On the contrary, he stayed the course, singing the same song, with the exactly same fervor.

And precisely that may be the problem.  

Bernie Sanders remains the old, grumpy, unrepentant socialist he has always been.  Let me confess that I have a great fondness for old, grumpy, unrepentant socialists, being one myself.  What’s more, the nation owes Bernie a debt of gratitude it can never repay for putting fundamental issues of social and economic justice front and center in our public debate.  

The fact remains, however, that Bernie Sanders is no longer the most persuasive advocate for the principles he holds dear, nor is he the most plausible candidate, with the best chance of turning those principles into reality.  That mantle goes to Elizabeth Warren.

Warren’s rallying cry, “I have a plan for that,” is more than a glib motto; it is a statement of fact.  She has developed a series of political proposals that are specific, tangible, and persuasive.  Next to that, Bernie’s ideas seem more aspirational than real.   Like it or not, Bernie Sanders has been outclassed by a candidate who is no less authentically a progressive but is smarter, more articulate, and utterly fearless.

Biden and Bernie will in all likelihood plod on to the end, because to do otherwise would be to admit that their “part is over”.  For political figures who have spent their lives in the public arena, such an admission must surely seem like psychological suicide.  We can sympathize with their predicament.  But that predicament is inescapable.  Better to go now, with their dignity intact, for if they insist on remaining on the stage, they will eventually be hissed off. 

Little more than a week ago, Robert S. Mueller III surprised the nation by holding his first, and what he declared would be his last, press conference regarding the investigation he led into Russia’s assault on the 2016 presidential election.  Although the press conference itself came as a surprise, most of what Mueller had to say did not, since he largely confined himself to reciting what had already appeared in his written report.  Even so, Mueller’s low-key nine and a half minutes at the podium were deeply troubling.

From the day two years ago, when Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel, we have been told repeatedly that he is little less than an American icon:  a decorated war hero, an upholder of the rule of law, and an utterly non-partisan public servant.  There is little reason to question any of this.  On the contrary, everything in Robert Mueller’s life and career points to it being true.  

What does deserve questioning, however, is the nearly universal assumption that Mueller’s virtues should insulate him from scrutiny.  One truth does not rule out another.  Robert Mueller’s estimable virtues do not foreclose the possibility that he is capable of making mistakes or may be flawed by personal, professional, or ethical failings.  We cannot responsibly accept the verdict of his two-year investigation without asking ourselves whether such failings, if they exist, may have influenced the outcome. 

When I use the word, “ethical,” I do not mean to suggest that Robert Mueller is tainted by any sort of compromise or corruption.  By all accounts, he is capable of neither.  I use the word in a broader sense, to mean professional conduct that serves the greater public good.  And in that sense of the word, Robert Mueller truly failed us.

To begin with, he decided to play strictly “by the book,” despite the blatant and unprecedented lawlessness of the person he was investigating.  To quote Mueller’s own words from the podium:

If we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.  We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.  The introduction to the Volume II of our report explains that decision.  It explains that under long-standing Department policy, a President cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.  That is unconstitutional.

This statement is frankly inexplicable coming from an attorney as experienced as Robert Mueller.  The “policy” he refers to is simply an opinion—and a highly questionable opinion at that—from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice.  As such, it has no constitutional force.  Indeed, the DOJ has no authority to determine the constitutionality of anything.  It is not a judicial institution but a law enforcement agency, created almost a hundred years after the constitution was written.  Neither the DOJ nor Robert Mueller is empowered to decide whether a president may be indicted while in office.  That is up to the courts.    

Moreover, Mueller was plainly wrong in asserting: 

The Special Counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice and by regulation, it was bound by that Department policy.  Charging the President with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider.

Robert Mueller was not “bound” to abide by a Department of Justice policy based on a mere legal opinion.  He was perfectly free to have challenged that opinion.  In fact, his Trump-appointed boss, Bill Barr, said as much.  That Mueller declined that “option” was a choice that he, and he alone, decided to make.

More baffling still, Mueller chose to treat Donald Trump as if he were any ordinary defendant in an everyday criminal trial, thereby failing to address the unprecedented threat posed by the Trump presidency to our most fundamental democratic institutions:

And beyond Department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness.  It would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.

To state the obvious:  Donald Trump isn’t “somebody;” he is the President of the United States.  He certainly doesn’t need a “court resolution” to defend himself against charges or accusations, because he is capable of mustering the virtually unlimited power of the federal government to that purpose.  It is hard to fathom why Robert Mueller thought otherwise.  It is even harder to understand why he imagined that “principles of fairness” should be applied to a man who has shown nothing but contempt for such principles.  Mueller’s duty—his “ethical” obligation—was to call Trump’s corruption to account.  Instead, he chose to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Finally, there is no way of sidestepping the unpleasant reality that Robert Mueller’s high-minded righteousness is marred by a whiff of arrogance:

Now I hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner.  I am making that decision myself.  No one has told me whether I can or should testify or speak further about this matter  There has been discussion about an appearance before Congress  Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report.  It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made.  We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself. And the report is my testimony.  I would not provide information beyond that which is already public in any appearance before Congress.

It is not up to Robert Muller to decide that a press conference will be “the only time” he speaks to the American people, nor is it his prerogative to say whether he will or will not appear before Congress.  

No matter what he had to say during his press conference, Mueller’s work does not “speak for itself”.  On the contrary, it leaves many important questions hanging.  What became of the intelligence community’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s numerous contacts with the Russians?  Why did Mueller allow Trump to get away without testifying personally?  Why did he write a letter to William Barr, protesting the latter’s characterization of his work?  

Robert S. Mueller III was hired by the American people to do a job.  It is no part of that job to insist that he “would not provide information beyond what is already public in any appearance before Congress”.  If he is called to testify before Congress, if he raises his hand and swears to tell the whole truth, it will be his ethical duty to do so.   If he refuses, he will have failed the nation once again.

In 1897, Mark Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens—thought by many to have been the greatest master of the American language—embarked upon a world-wide speaking tour in the hopes of raising enough money to pay off his considerable debts.  For all his enormous literary talent and commercial success, Twain was a big spender and had for years lived beyond his means.  The tour was a chance to recoup his fortunes.  

It also required him to be gone from our shores for a very long time.  As a result, rumors began to circulate back home that Twain had died.  Indeed, one newspaper actually printed his obituary.  This was the age of the steamship and the telegraph, not the smartphone or the internet.  There were no text messages or email.  Thus, to be on the opposite side of the Atlantic was not far from being marooned on the moon.  

An American journalist was finally able to contact Twain during a stop-over in London and eagerly asked the famous author to confirm for his readers that he was still among the living.  Twain responded with his usual wry concision:  “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”  

Much the same can now be said of the European Union.

Seven days ago, the citizens of the 28 member states of the EU went to the polls to elect a new parliament that will govern, not the individual countries to which they belong, but the entire continent of Europe.  After years of declining interest on the part of the European electorate, voter turnout surged to its highest level in two decades:  51 percent overall and in some countries almost 90 percent.

For months before this election took place, we were bombarded by a steady drumbeat of doomsaying about its likely outcome.  We were told that Europeans would lurch to the right, that the “European project” was poised to collapse, that the toxic racism and bellicose nationalism of Donald Trump would soon become the new political paradigm for the entire Western World.  

As it turned out, the Europeans surprised all the doomsayers, proving once again that they are too complicated to be boxed in by trite simplifications and too decent to give up hope without a fight.   Germany is no Georgia, Ireland isn’t Iowa, and Spain is most certainly not South Carolina.

There is no denying that right-wing, anti-immigrant political parties gained ground in these elections, particularly in Britain, France, Italy, and the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium.  But they did not sweep the continent, as so many pundits had predicted, nor did they gain enough seats to control the European parliament or come even remotely close.  

What’s more, the fear that Europe’s far-right parties would unite in some grand coalition of rage and repudiation turned out to be a delusion, perhaps because the deluder-in-chief wasn’t even a European.  He was Donald Trump’s doppelgänger and one-time advisor, Steve Bannon, 

After being kicked out of the White House, Bannon moved his xenophobic sideshow to Europe, where he sought to ingratiate himself with right-wing politicians like Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy.  How seriously such politicians took Bannon we shall probably never know.  What we do know is that his scheme for a grand alliance foundered on the rocks of reality—the reality that Europe’s far-right parties were just as eager to gobble away at one another as they were to gnaw at the marrow of their left-wing opponents.  Unless Maestro Bannon’s luck changes soon, he may once again be looking for another stage to host the opéra bouffe he calls a political program.

Such operatics aside, the electoral gains made by the far-right were more than offset by gains on the left.  In Spain, for example, the Socialist Party and its Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, emerged stronger than ever.  In neighboring Portugal, the governing Socialists and their Prime Minister, António Costa, did the same.  In the Netherlands, the big winner wasn’t the far-right Freedom Party, led by a Trump wannabe named Geert Wilders; it was the decidedly left-wing Labor Party.  In Denmark, the right-wing People’s Party, which has been gaining ground by demonizing immigrants, simply collapsed, with the result that country’s Liberal Prime Minister is now securely in charge.

More surprising still was the surge of Europe’s Green Parties.  In Ireland, the Greens swept into second place, a hair’s breadth behind the governing center-right party.  Much the same thing happened in Finland, Portugal, Estonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, and Germany.  The outcome in Germany was particularly stunning.  Not only was it a humiliation for Angela Merkel’s middle-of-the-road Christian Democrats, it was also a clear signal to the Social Democrats on the left that the old way of doing business has come to an end.   Once the largest socialist party in Europe, Germany’s SPD has for years been migrating to the so-called “center,” accommodating its principles to the neoliberal consensus imposed upon Europe by the United States. The rise of the Greens in Germany and elsewhere is a repudiation of such accommodations.

Because there is no true American analogy to Europe’s Green political movement, our pundits and prognosticators have had a great deal of difficulty wrapping their heads around the significance of this development.  Many imagine that the political agenda of the Greens is focused narrowly on the environment and the threats posed by climate change.  The reality is that the Greens are no less focused on the political, social, and economic causes of the environmental crisis.  In their view, the cause of the crisis is the unfettered waste and greed of global capitalism.

If there is one unambiguous message in the outcome of the European election, it is that the EU must change its ways if it hopes to survive.  The right-wing parties of Europe would tear up the EU if they could.  The left-leaning parties hope to preserve and transform it.   The “European project” is not dead, at least not yet, but the neoliberal economic consensus that has governed its behavior for the last 30 years most assuredly is.  If the bureaucrats in Brussels don’t wake up, they will soon find themselves out of work.

Imagine that you are home one night, all alone.  There is a knock on the door.  You open it a crack and peer into the dark.  With a violent shove, a stranger pushes his way in.  He demands the right to occupy your home, to be fed and cared for, and you are too afraid to say no.  As the weeks go by, the stranger refuses to leave, and you begin to wonder if your nightmare is ever going to end.  Then, you finally get a moment alone to call 911.  The police arrive, and you tell them your story.  They issue a warning, not to the stranger who has invaded your home, but to you.  You have no rights, they say.  Your only choice is to suffer the intrusion.  When you try to protest, they turn their backs and, with a dismissive shrug, walk away.

This, in effect, is what just happened to the more than two million women who live in the State of Alabama.  They have been told by the legislators of that state, almost all of whom are white men with a median age of nearly 60, that they must endure pregnancies they do not want, must allow their bodies to be occupied against their will, and have no say about how they will live the rest of their lives.

Alabama has just passed the most sweeping anti-abortion bill in more than half a century.  It bans all abortions, with the sole exception of a “serious” threat to the life of the mother, defined in the narrowest way possible.  It explicitly outlaws abortion from the moment of insemination, even if a woman is the victim of rape or incest, regardless of her age.  Under this law, a 10-year-old girl, raped by her father, will be required to give birth to her own brother-son, and any physician who helped her to put an end to this moral tragedy would be declared a felon, indicted for homicide, and sent to prison for 99 years.  

How, it must be asked, can those who so loudly insist on the “sanctity of life” so readily desecrate the lives of the living?

The answer is that the Alabama anti-abortion bill is a stalking horse, designed, not to become law, but to topple existing law.  Its target is Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that, for the first time in our history, granted women the right to make their own reproductive decisions.  The Alabama bill is extreme, precisely because its sponsors hope to provoke a judicial showdown, in which the newly empowered conservative majority on the Supreme Court will either neuter or reverse Roe.

The rhetoric of the Alabama anti-abortion bill and others like it exudes an odor of feverish desperation in a struggle to assert that zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are “persons”.  Without legal “personhood,” they cannot be said to have any rights, let alone rights that supersede those of the women whose bodies they inhabit.  Hence the desperation.

The assertion that fetuses are entitled to the rights of “personhood” relies on some combination of three arguments:  legal, medical, and theological.  None of them holds up under even the slightest scrutiny.

Our legal system derives from English “common law,” in which fundamental principles evolve slowly from the convergence of statutes, judicial precedent, social consensus, and common sense.  The definition of “personhood” under that system goes back nearly 300 years to the seminal Commentaries of the English jurist, William Blackstone.  That definition was crystal clear then and hasn’t changed since.  “Personhood,” with all the rights and obligations it involves, begins at birth, because it is only then thats a “person” actually exists in the world.

The Alabama anti-abortion bill tries to skirt this inconvenient history by invoking “natural law,” a philosophical tradition, which holds that universal and timeless moral precepts can be derived from human nature and the nature of the world itself:

In the United States Declaration of Independence, the principle of natural law that “all men are created equal” was articulated.  The self-evident truth found in natural law, that all human beings are equal from creation, was at least one of the bases for the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the American civil rights movement.  If those movements had not been able to appeal to the truth of universal human equality, they could not have been successful.

This is a preposterous perversion of “natural law”.  It is also deceptive and deeply offensive.  

It is deceptive, because it twists the language, “all men are created equal,” to mean “all human beings are equal from creation,” insinuating that “creation” and “conception” are one and the same.  The Declaration of Independence says nothing whatsoever about “conception,” nor, for that matter, does “natural law.”

This language is offensive, because it suggests that women who want the right to make their own reproductive decisions are as guilty or sinful as slave-owners and Nazi war criminals.  Coming from the State of Alabama, which once committed treason to preserve the institution of slavery, such a charge is, to say the least, worse than ironic. 

The medical or biological arguments for fetal “personhood” fare no better than the legal ones. There is, in fact, no scientific concept, category, or classification called “personhood”.  Medical science cannot therefore be called upon to validate a concept it does not recognize.   That, however, is precisely what the Alabama anti-abortion bill tries to do:

Abortion advocates speak to women’s rights, but they ignore the unborn child, while medical science has increasingly recognized the humanity of the unborn child.  Recent medical advances prove a baby’s heart starts to beat at around six weeks. At about eight weeks, the heartbeat can be heard through an ultrasound examination.  A fetal Doppler can detect a fetal heartbeat as early as 10 weeks. As early as six weeks after fertilization, fetal photography shows the clear development of a human being. The Alabama Department of Public Health publication “Did You Know . . .” demonstrates through actual pictures at two-week intervals throughout the entire pregnancy the clear images of a developing human being.

This is a stew of bogus science and outright fabrication.   Consider just one of those fabrications:  

Recent medical advances prove a baby’s heart starts to beat at around six weeks.  

The purported “medical advances” this statement cites aren’t named or sourced, because they don’t exist.  Nor,  at six weeks, does a “baby’s heart,” because there is no “baby” at six weeks, let alone a “heartbeat”.  There isn’t even a fetus.  There is only an embryo the size of a pea.

The Alabama bill was able to invoke “medical science” to justify its nonsense, because the Supreme Court of the United States did something similar when it handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade.  Rather than recognizing a woman’s unconditional right to make decisions about her own body, the Court declared that abortion was permissible only up to the moment of “viability”.   This supposedly “scientific” standard was problematic from the day the Supreme Court adopted it. 

To begin with, it begs the question of what “viability” actually means.  Does a brain-dead fetus qualify as “viable,” because its pulse can be sustained outside the womb with respirators and feeding tubes?   Does a fetus destined to be born without limbs or a spine meet the same standard?  These are cruel questions, I realize, but the greater cruelty is that the Supreme Court didn’t bother to ask, let alone answer, them. 

Moreover, what “viability” meant in 1973 is not what it means today or will mean in 2023.  We now have the capacity to sustain biological life for years or decades without there being any semblance of meaningful human life.  On what logical or moral grounds should the lives of women be chained to such an elusive standard?

Thus is it that anti-abortion zealots are left to fall back on theology and religion to justify their case.   Which only makes their case even worse.

The Bible says nothing about abortion and little about the beginning of life, and most of what it says about the latter is vague or ambiguous.  Christian fundamentalists who claim a Biblical imprimatur for their denunciation of abortion are simply making it up.  The Catholic Church’s view that life begins at conception is dogma, not scripture, but is no less fictional.  It was invented out of whole cloth in 1869 by the ultra-conservative Pope, Pius IX, to whom we also owe the loony notions of an “immaculate conception” and “papal infallibility”.  

Even if there were a bona fide religious justification for opposing abortion, it would be irrelevant.  The Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from religion.  No particular set of religious beliefs can be imposed upon those who do not subscribe to them, nor can they be used to make laws that apply to the nation as a whole.  Religious arguments against choice and abortion are thus the weakest arguments of them all.  They have no claim on those who hold different beliefs or on those of us who have no religious beliefs at all.  

None of which will stop the so-called “pro-life” movement.  Its acolytes are determined to end reproductive choice, control the lives of women, and punish them for their sexual behavior.  They are little different from the Puritan fanatics who condemned and hanged 19 innocent people for “witchcraft” in Salem in the 1690s.  No amount of logic, reason, or precedent is going to deter them.

The mistake made by those who support choice has always been their moderation in the face of unyielding and fanatical opponents and their willingness to accept offers of half a loaf in the hope of getting a few crumbs.  Roe v. Wade was never strong or comprehensive enough.  The protection it provided to women was explicitly “qualified”.  Its foundational argument, that women have a limited “privacy” right under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, was questionable and weak.  That weakness made Roe vulnerable from the start, which is why it is now under attack.

If women ever hope to enjoy the freedom they deserve, if they ever hope to defeat those who are hell-bent on denying them their freedom, it will not be enough to preserve Roe v. Wade.  They must demand more than conditional or “qualified” rights.  It is time for them to demand choice without compromise. 

Several days ago, Jerry Nadler, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, declared:  “We are now in a Constitutional crisis.”  These words came in response to a sweeping and unprecedented move by the Trump administration to defy Congressional demands for evidence arising from the investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and, more broadly, to deny the Constitutionally-mandated responsibility of Congress to oversee the actions of the executive branch.

Although Nadler‘s somber warning is undeniably correct, it is not clear how many Americans will pay attention.  There has been so much talk about a looming constitutional crisis for the last two years that many people either have become numb to the prospect or have resigned themselves to its inevitability.

It is tempting to say, as indeed many have, “We have been here before,” and thus to imagine that all will be well in the end.  Those who hold this view invariably cite the example of Watergate, when Richard Nixon also defied Congress, and like Trump, attempted to hide his crimes and cling to power.  That Nixon’s campaign of obstruction collapsed in the end, that he chose to resign rather than face impeachment, is held up as a hopeful harbinger of Trump’s eventual fate.

The trouble is that the crisis we now face is not even remotely comparable with Watergate, either in its nature or in its magnitude, nor is Donald Trump’s defiance of Congress anything like Richard Nixon’s.  Those who analogize the two crises and the two men are deceiving themselves.

To be sure, “Tricky Dick” was a conniving paranoid, who was quite happy to use corrupt and underhanded means to gain, and hold onto, public office.  But he was not an authoritarian megalomanic, suffering from delusions of grandeur.  Nor was it any part of his plan to overturn our democracy and install a de facto dictatorship in its place.  Nixon was a “crook” in the old-fashioned sense.  All the while he committed crimes, he was fully aware that they were crimes.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a different sort of criminal, one who is prepared to exalt himself at the cost of destroying everyone and everything that stands in his way.  Although he may be too ignorant to realize it, he is no less a fascist than Mussolini or Hitler, and he is walking in their footsteps.

Few dictators seize power all at once.  Instead, they undermine democratic institutions one corrosive step at a time.  Before most people come to realize what they are up, it is already too late.  That is the game Donald Trump is playing, and that is the game played by his predecessors.

Mussolini first came to power by democratic means and only then began to turn Italy into a one-party dictatorship, using the legislature, the courts, and the secret police to suppress his opponents, silence the free press, and consolidate his control over his country’s governing institutions.  Hitler followed a similar course, with far more devastating results.  After a “democratic” election that led to his appointment as Chancellor of Germany, he had himself declared “Führer,” a new and unconstitutional office that amounted to a permanent dictatorship.  He bided his time for a year, allowing him to consolidate his power, and then ordered “the Night of the Long Knives,” in which thousands of his political opponents were systematically slaughtered.  Two months later, he demanded that the redoubtable Wehrmacht swear an oath of personal allegiance to him and him alone.  The German officer corps, populated by Prussian aristocrats presumed to be men of unflinching courage and honor, meekly complied.

Lest you think such comparisons amount to hyperbole or hysteria, consider what Trump has already accomplished:

(1) He has completely co-opted the Republican Party, turning this one-time bastion of conservative economic and social principles into a personality cult, dedicated to the adoration and protection of its new leader.  In the face of undeniable evidence that Trump has committed countless financial crimes and colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, Republicans have decided, not merely to turn a blind eye, but to assert the opposite of the obvious.  Having gone this far, they have no choice but to go all the way.  They will stick with Trump to the very end—if there ever is an end.

(2)  With the installation of William Barr as Attorney General, Trump has seized control of the Department of Justice and thus the entire apparatus of national law enforcement.  The Congress of the United States can investigate Trump all it wants, but its subpoenas, censures, and penalties cannot be enforced.

(3)  One of Congress’ few enforcement weapons is the power of the purse.  In theory, it could discipline obstructive agencies like the Department of Justice by refusing to fund them.  But both the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service are now completely under Trump’s thumb.  They are responsible for providing the actual money the federal government needs to operate.  There is no reason to think that Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, would shut off the spigot, even if Congress ordered him to do so.

(4) Trump has turned the immigration system into an instrument of domestic terror and intimidation.  The main unions representing the agents who work for ICE and CBP, the two agencies that control our borders, endorsed Trump in 2016, have enthusiastically embraced his policies, and see his presidency as a chance to “get tough” on people they think don’t deserve to be in this country.  There is little doubt that they would turn their strong-arm tactics against any American who gets in Trump’s way.

(5) Trump has packed the federal courts as well as the Supreme Court with right-wing judges, who are more than willing to follow him down the road toward authoritarianism.  Many of his judicial appointees are unqualified ciphers, who will simply obey orders.  Others are zealous ideologues, eager to subject the country to their social, cultural, and political agenda.  Even as Trump tramples on the Constitution, we cannot depend upon them to stand in his way.

(6) Trump’s recent declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern border involves, among other things, using the military to enforce so-called law and order domestically.  This is blatantly illegal.  If the courts let this declaration stand, and Pentagon officials comply, nothing will prevent him from using the armed forces to suppress future “emergencies” as he sees fit.  Little imagination is required to think that Donald Trump might deem an electoral defeat in 2020 to be a national emergency, requiring the imposition of martial law and the arrest of his political opponents in the name of protecting the nation.

When Jerry Nadler proclaimed, “We are now in a Constitutional crisis,” he fell short of the mark.  The crisis we face is existential, and it is far from certain that our 243-year-old experiment in democracy is going to survive.

If you ever decide to wade through the 448 pages of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, you may find yourself coming away deeply frustrated.  I certainly did.  Not only because the report declined to indict Donald Trump—though that is depressing enough—but also because it is, in crucial ways, incomplete, inconsistent, and illogical.  For all its careful language and copious footnotes, for all its fastidious attention to legal detail, the Mueller report is marred by a series of logical mistakes.  

I am no lawyer.  One doesn’t have to be trained in the law, however, to understand legal reasoning.  A legal argument is no more complicated than a simple syllogism or a proof in Euclid’s geometry, which millions of kids used to study in high school.  Such arguments state a problem, identify the postulate or premises that apply to the problem, and draw the conclusions that necessarily follow.  Legal arguments are no different.  They lay out a contested issue or crime, identify the applicable laws, and then draw conclusions regarding liability or guilt.  

The Mueller report violates this logical framework at several crucial points, beginning at the very outset, on Page 1 of Volume I:

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

The problem here is the concept of “coordination,” which is invoked to reach a conclusion regarding the crime of conspiracy, even though “coordination” has no agreed-upon legal meaning.  So, the Mueller team decided to make one up:

Like collusion, ‘coordination’ does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law.  We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.  That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.  We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

If “coordination does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law,” what justifies the Mueller team’s arbitrary stipulation that it “requires more than two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests”?  That’s not what the Oxford English Dictionary, the ultimate authority on our language, says.  It defines “coordination’ as nothing more than “the harmonious functioning together of different interrelated parts”.  That definition surely applies to Donald Trump’s infamous proclamation, “Russia, I hope you’re listening.”

It is impossible to read the findings of Volume I of the Mueller report without concluding that Trump and his people knew what the Russians were up to, declined to rebuff their advances, failed to report their illegal acts to law enforcement, and gleefully looked forward to benefitting from Russia’s malign interference in the election.  For reasons never explained, however, the Mueller team declined to consider any indictments for such behavior.  Volume I limits itself solely to the question of “conspiracy,” even though the Special Counsel’s mandate was much broader, extending to “any links” between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

Volume II of the report is even more problematic.   It details a dozen cases of perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and the intimidation of witnesses, in several of which Donald Trump was directly involved.  His criminal behavior is therefore not in doubt.  

Mueller and his team nonetheless declined to indict him—not because they believed him to be innocent but, rather, because of a Justice Department opinion that a president cannot be indicted while in office, on the grounds that such an indictment would interfere with the performance of his executive duties.

The political motivations animating this opinion have always been suspect—and for good reason.  The notion that presidents are immune from indictment or prosecution is not embodied in law, does not appear in the Constitution, and has never been ruled upon by any court.  This notion was first promulgated in 1973 by Richard Nixon’s Justice Department, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, and then affirmed by Nixon’s Solicitor General, Robert Bork, a man whose nomination to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan was overwhelmingly rejected because of his extreme and partisan views.

What’s more, a veritable army of constitutional scholars vehemently disagree with the claim of presidential immunity on substantive grounds.  Not only does such a claim violate the foundational principle that no person is above the law, it also gives presidents free reign to commit even the most heinous of crimes.  Carried to its logical conclusion, this claim would allow Donald Trump, as he once boasted, to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot someone, and pay no price.  This makes no legal, constitutional, or moral sense.

Even if one were prepared to accept the Justice Department’s opinion, the Mueller report’s application of that opinion is absurd.  After invoking presidential immunity as a reason not to indict Trump, the report refuses to say whether he would otherwise have been indicted.  This refusal is justified on the grounds that it would be “unfair,” because Trump would have no chance to defend himself in a courtroom.  The report say, in effect:  Because we can’t indict Donald Trump, we can’t try him, even if he’s committed a crime; and we can’t tell you whether he’s committed a crime, because we can’t indict and try him.   

This is the legal equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail and doesn’t qualify as a logical, let alone a legal, argument.  It is, rather, a tautology—a false and circular argument, in which premise and conclusion, cause and effect, are one and the same.  

It is also ridiculous on its face.  Donald Trump is not a defenseless private citizen, who needs to be protected against the mighty weight of the law or the state.  He is the head of state and has more than enough power—armies of lawyers, unlimited access to the media, nearly unfettered control of the executive branch of government—to defend himself against any and all charges.

Mueller’s final and most serious mistake comes at the end of Volume II, which concludes with these words:  

At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.  Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.  Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

This language completely undercuts the earlier argument about the “unfairness” of proclaiming Donald Trump’s guilt, even if the Justice Department won’t allow him to be indicted.  By declining to exonerate Trump, the Mueller report effectively insinuates his guilt without stating it.  This is a sleight of hand, which isn’t “fair” to anyone, least of all to the American people.

Either Donald Trump committed crimes or he didn’t.   If Mueller had probable cause to think he did, he should have said so.  If he didn’t, Mueller should have said that.   But he chose to do neither.  In making that choice, Robert Mueller made the worst mistake of all:  he failed in his duty to uphold the law and defend the nation against the most corrupt and dangerous president in our history.

When Donald Trump nominated William P. Barr to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as Attorney General of the United States, a chorus of voices across the political spectrum expressed the hope, and in some cases the absolute confidence, that Barr would uphold the rule of law, respect our constitutional norms, and defend both the Mueller investigation and the Department of Justice against partisan attack.  This optimism was based on the premise that Barr is a long-time member of the Washington legal establishment and an “institutionalist,” in other words, a man with a professional and public reputation to protect.

During his confirmation hearing in the Senate, Barr himself played this putative role to a tee.  Although he declined to be pinned down on certain not inconsequential matters concerning the Mueller investigation, he skated through by mumbling the usual pieties about “transparency” and “the rule of law”.  Since his confirmation was never in doubt, even those Senators who were opposed to his nomination did not do very much to press their objections.

We now know that Barr’s testimony was nothing more than a charade, designed to lull a supine audience, and the hope that he would honorably fulfill his obligations as Attorney General was naive or delusional.  Since taking office, Barr has revealed himself to be little more than a shill for his boss.

The shilling began, four weeks ago, when Barr publicly misrepresented the conclusions of Robert Mueller and arrogated to himself the authority to pass judgment on Trump’s guilt or innocence, an authority he does not legally possess.  It became embarrassingly clear, four days ago, when he did it all over again, pretending that the Muller report does not say what it actually says.

Those who were hoping for something better are now calling Barr a “political hack” and are mystified that such a savvy political player would lie about the contents of the Mueller report just hours before it was released, surely knowing that his lies would be exposed.  These people do not understand who our newly minted Attorney General really is.

William Barr has never been the traditional Republican “institutionalist” he was imagined to be.  He is, instead, a radically conservative Catholic, a cultural revanchist who abhors the secular modern world and would, if he could, turn back the clock several hundred years.  In his view, the purpose of the law is not to mete out justice in an even-handed and dispassionate way; it is a weapon of war, a shield for defending the righteous and a sword for slaying the wicked.  Barr lies so brazenly, because he has no regard for truth in its own right; the only “truth” he cares about is the ideology that commands his absolute faith.  He is a theological warrior, who would be perfectly at home in the brutally ruthless religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries.  

If all that sounds hyperbolic, don’t take my word for it; take William Barr’s.  In 1995, shortly after he had served his first term as Attorney General, Barr published an article in a journal called (I’m not kidding) The Catholic Lawyer.  Here are his opening words:

We live in an increasingly militant, secular age.  We see an emerging philosophy that government is expected to play an ever greater role in addressing social problems in our society.  It is also expected to override private interests as it goes about this work.  As part of this philosophy, we see a growing hostility toward religion, particularly Catholicism…We are locked in a historic struggle between two fundamentally different systems of values.  In a way, this is the end product of the Enlightenment.  On the one hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.  On the other, we see the steady erosion of the traditional Judeo-Christian moral system.  

This article aimed to conflate the principles articulated by the Constitution with Christian theology—or at least Barr’s peculiar version of that theology—and to decouple the Constitution from the skeptical tolerance and learning of the Enlightenment.  His argument was dishonest throughout, cherry-picking statements by the Founders illustrating their religiosity, ignoring statements demonstrating their religious skepticism.  Nothing in Barr’s subsequent record suggests that his views, or his rhetorical tactics, have changed in the least.  On the contrary.

Like any American, William Barr is entitled to his religious beliefs.  What he isn’t entitled to—indeed, what our Constitution explicitly prohibits—is the power to impose his particular religious beliefs on other Americans.  That, however, is the sort of power Barr has always sought.

He believes, for example, that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court, that abortion should be outlawed, and that women who choose to have abortions should be criminalized.

He believes that capital punishment should not only be upheld but expanded, on the excuse—against all evidence to the contrary—that it deters crime.

He advocates mass incarceration for the same specious reason and believes that, far from reducing the unparalleled number of people penned up in American prisons, we should imprison even more.

He believes that marijuana should be outlawed by the federal government, even when its use is purely medical, not because it is the “gateway drug” Jeff Sessions claimed it to be but rather because its use is sign of moral depravity and social decay.

He believes that homosexual relationships of all kinds are sinful and that those who piously discriminate against gay Americans are merely exercising their Constitutionally-guaranteed “freedom of religion”.

Worst of all, he seems to think that crimes committed in the name of the ideology he believes in are not crimes at all.  During his time as George H. W. Bush’s Attorney General, Barr led the campaign to pardon officials in the Reagan administration, who had been convicted in the Iran-Contra affair, a secret and illegal scheme in which weapons were sold to Iran and the proceeds were used to fund right-wing paramilitary groups—the “Contras”—to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua.   To William Barr, there was nothing wrong in scheming to topple a popular but godless socialist government, no matter how criminal the means.  

Barr’s role in this unseemly affair perfectly illuminates his ideological agenda.  It also explains his eagerness to join the Trump administration as well as his brazen defense of Trump himself.  In Donald Trump, William Barr discovered a willing (if sometimes witless) instrument to achieve the end he desires, which is to impose his medieval moral code on an unwilling country.  

Because such chances come along only rarely, William Barr seized it, launching a campaign to replace Jeff Session as Attorney General.  To that end, he wrote an unsolicited 19-page memo, claiming that a President of the United States can never be prosecuted for obstructing justice, because the President is the ultimate authority when it comes to administering justice.  This is the legal equivalent of saying that, when the fox is in charge of the hen house, he cannot be punished for gobbling up the hens.  Barr’s argument was a transparent and shabby sleight of hand, but it was good enough for Donald Trump, who, in a state of paranoid panic, was prepared to accept any lifeline, however tenuous.   He took the bait by nominating Barr, and from that moment, the fix was in.  For William Barr, it always was.