Attorney General William Barr, who is really just a lumpy choad with a stupid face drawn on the tip, jowled and jawed before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. It was a weird, weird hearing, with Republicans like Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn seeming to act like Hillary Clinton is the greatest villain in American history. She is essentially the president of their imaginations, omnipresent and all-powerful, her emails and the Steele dossier the touchstones of a depth of criminality that few ever even dared to attempt. Or something. Who the fuck knows at this point. Frankly, it'd be a relief if it turned out someone was fucking some kids in a pizza joint just so any of this weird, weird bullshit had any grounding in what we once referred to as "reality."
On the Democratic side, nearly every question could have been "Are you fuckin' kidding me here?" Kamala Harris drilled into Barr like she was digging for gold in a sloppy mound of mud. Asking about whether or not the Attorney General had reviewed the underlying evidence on obstruction of justice before declaring that there was none, she may as well have said, "Are you fuckin' kidding me here?" to Barr saying he hadn't bothered. Richard Blumenthal asked Barr whether or not he had discussed any ongoing criminal investigations of the White House with the White House. When Barr hedged before saying he didn't think he had or he didn't remember (seriously, this bulbous motherfucker's been in the job for 10 weeks but can't remember shit), Blumenthal may as well have concluded his questioning with "Are you fuckin' kidding me here?"
Ultimately, what came across from Barr is a visceral contempt for any kind of oversight of the president. As far as Barr is concerned, it doesn't matter if the president orders people to lie on his behalf to investigators. It doesn't matter if he dangles pardons for them to break the law. It doesn't matter if the president ends an investigation if he doesn't like how the investigation is going. Literally.
Barr said, in answer to a question from Patrick Leahy, "The point I was trying to make earlier is that in the situation of the president, who has constitutional authority to supervise proceedings. If in fact a proceeding was not well-founded, if it was a groundless proceeding, if it was based on false allegations, the president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused and he would be worried about the impact on his administration. That's important because most of the obstruction claims that are being made here, or episodes, do involve the exercise of the president's constitutional authority. And we now know that he was being falsely accused." Leahy disagreed that Trump was being falsely accused.
And that right there, that answer from Barr, is fucking ludicrous. It is essentially saying that if Donald Trump doesn't believe he's guilty of anything, he has the right to shut down any investigation looking into his criminality. Trump gets to determine what the impact would be on his administration. Trump gets to determine whether an accusation is false. Trump gets to be his own judge. What more could he fucking want from life?
This kind of bullshit is center to the cancerous theory of the unitary executive, which says that, in essence, the executive branch works for the chief executive, the president, and that president can do whatever the fuck he (and, perhaps, some day, she) wants. So that means that every department is filled with the president's employees (and not the nation's), and every office is merely an extension of the president and a conduit of that president's policies. And, to an extent, that has to be true. Except, of course, there are also laws and, you know, a Constitution. However, according to Barr (and a shit-ton of Republicans), the president can say, "Yeah, I don't like how the laws are being used by my employees, so let's shut that shit down." And if you shove through a bunch of judges who will give you a pass, hey, shit's shut down.
You can either be a nation based on laws or a nation based on the whims of a leader. You can't be both. We cannot be the nation that Barr and the obsequious worms in the GOP would like us to be. That is not this nation. And if we do say that this is who we are now, then fuck us.
And let's be clear: This only goes for Republican presidents. For Democrats? Republicans would have already torn down the White House in order to build a gallows had a President Hillary Clinton done a fraction of this shit. Hell, Republican members of Congress talked about impeaching Obama over everything from his immigration policy to Benghazi to, really, his birth certificate. The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee had a hearing in 2013 on "The President's Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws."
Look, every president fucking hates it when Congress holds him to account. And every president has fought congressional committees on witnesses and documents and other shit. Of course, Democrats are more likely to call out their own president while Republicans are more likely to throw their bodies in the way of their presidents. Seventeen Democrats voted for the contempt citation against Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder for withholding documents on the non-scandal scandal of Fast and Furious (look it up, kids, and you'll see why the fuck we say that Republicans are hypocritical twatmites). And if you want to beat your head against a wall, look at how many Democrats supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Democrats have to stop playing this game like they are opposed by honorable people. Republicans are having a shit fight in a monkey house while Democrats are trying to soothe them with the gentle music of reason. No, the way you win is by dumping so much shit on the monkeys that they can't move.
