We are not even big Trump fans around here. Or even Trump fans at all. But we basically don’t care about rogues in the White House, the Republic has survived them before. Arguably it has been better off when the People were more or less indifferent to the occupant on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The true oddity since the election of 2016 is not that we have a rogue in the White House; it’s the incredible shrieking and howling of the chattering classes. They lurch from one breathless and overheated imbroglio to another, from week to week, with an hysterical clamor that should embarrass them – but of course does not. Lots of living and dying and genuine turmoil is taking place in the world but the swamp, like some self-absorbed psychopath, is mired in its terminally parochial drama.
We wish we could just tune it out at this point, but that’s impossible without cloistering ourselves.
So, we have another brief comment, for what it’s worth. And we’re putting it up here because we are quite surprised, even shocked, that virtually no one is pressing this rather important point, the only really important point in all of this.
The Beltway has been most recently hand wringing and agonizing over Trump’s supposed damage to our institutions of justice. See here. And here. And here.
But this is an inversion of reality by a Beltway establishment that is patently unglued.
The independent counsel – a prosecutor with one case and one target – has always been an especially dangerous threat to the Republic. But we at LoS cannot recall even these – and let’s explicitly turn the tables here – basically rogue officials ever having taken the fateful step of prosecuting a lawyer to get to the lawyer’s client. That is the most profound subversion of the functioning of the third branch of government that has ever taken place in our lifetime. And of course, the third branch was barely functioning, if even that, even before all this insanity.
But it’s one thing for the independent counsel to do it. Idiotic excess can be expected of rogues. It’s quite another for the rest of the Beltway establishment to cheer it on with no one – other than us, apparently – at least hesitating and pointing out the obvious. Or what should be obvious to every lawyer, and the swamp is nothing if not the most lawyer laden place on earth.
And speaking of lawyers, there are lawyers outside the swamp – some of them prolific commentators about current events in the law – and in the prevailing madness all this seems to have gotten by them, too.
The real threat to our institutions, in other words, is not the rogue president; it is the unhinged Beltway establishment’s very braying, howling and shrieking about the rogue president being a threat to our institutions. The chaos is, at this point, a perfect inversion of the truth.
Which is not a Good Thing.
Finally, and parenthetically, it is worth pointing out that the Trumpster is nowhere near as off base with his comments that “flipping” witnesses should be illegal. A three judge panel of the 10th circuit Court of Appeals once, and not that long ago, wrote an opinion (very short-lived, but not because it had no merit) holding that very thing.. Maybe Rudy Giuliani should have pointed that out. But his reflexes are all awry doing defense work it seems.
Lawyers on Strike 