They must raise their voices and stand up for the Constitution.
With former President Donald Trump facing third-world dictator-style impeachment and arrest by his political rival, the GOP’s Senate leadership has suddenly fallen silent.
Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate GOP Whip John Thune, and other GOP senators have shirked their responsibility as leaders. Not to mention the leaders of their party and the country. (Read more from Jeffrey Lord: Biden’s Banana Republic)
6 Reasons DOJ’s ‘Get Trump’ Documents Case Is Seriously Flawed
The Associated Press reports:
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refused to criticize the former president or assure the nation that justice would be fair, refusing questions about the unprecedented indictment.
And over at the Hill was this:
Senate GOP leaders break with House on Trump indictment.
This gem is reported as follows:
Senate Republican leaders, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have remained silent on the indictment of former President Trump on 37 criminal charges, clashing with House Republican leaders who have rushed to flip him on air and come to Trump’s defense.
The Senate GOP leader’s top deputies — Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) – also indicated that Trump does not want the party to win the 2024 presidential nomination.
Unlike Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), they, along with McConnell, are unraveling Trump’s legal problems without coming to the former president’s defense. Criticizing the Justice Department before an indictment does not impress the public.
“They want him gone, so they won’t be too upset if this is the thing that finally gets him out,” a former Senate Republican aide said of Senate Republican leaders’ silence on Trump’s impeachment.
That is definitely not leadership. This silence by Republican senators, not to mention the Constitution, is inexcusable when President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are facing a serious and unprecedented attack on democracy itself. Biden’s targeting of former President Trump by the Department of Justice is a flagrant violation of their constitutional duties as United States Senators.
Not to mention that former Vice President Mike Pence made this mind-blowing statement last week:
Anyone who bases themselves on the Constitution should not be President of the United States. And anyone who asks someone to put it on the Constitution should never be President of the United States again.
This is a perfect description of Joe Biden. Not Donald Trump.
There is zero constitutional justification for a president to use the Justice Department to indict and arrest a political opponent. It’s the stuff of banana republic dictatorships.
Here is a short list of world leaders who have reportedly arrested their political opponents:
- Vladimir Putin, president of Russia
- Robert Mugabe, former president of Zimbabwe
- Denis Sassou Nguesso, president of the Republic of the Congo
- Hosni Mubarak, former president of Egypt
- Hun Sen, prime minister of Cambodia
- Members of Myanmar’s military junta
- Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda
- Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran
- Edgar Lungu, former president of Zambia
- Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela
- Manuel Noriega, former Panamanian dictator
- Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine
- Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korean
The list goes on and on and yes, it includes three of the most infamous dictators in history – Russia’s Stalin, Germany’s Hitler, and China’s Mao.
There is no way on God’s green earth that any American president should be on this list or any similar list.
Yet, quite willingly, President Joe Biden has now joined this list of ignominy. In doing so, he brought deep and lasting historical shame upon himself, his presidency, and the nation.
And in the face of this monumental humiliation – the Republican leaders of the Senate have nothing to say? what’s wrong
On the other hand, this AP title has:
‘Stand with Trump’ becomes rallying cry as Republicans amplify attacks on U.S. justice system
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has in fact stepped up to the plate, with the AP reporting:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Moments after Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he hoarded classified documents and then conspired to obstruct an investigation about it, the Republicans in Congress had his back.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy dashed off a fundraising email decrying the “witch hunt” against the former president and urging donors to sign up and “stand with Trump.”…
And at a public meeting in the Capitol basement, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the case against Trump to the federal prosecution of people at the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, suggesting in both instances it was the Justice Department, not the defendants, under scrutiny.
The mounting legal jeopardy Trump finds himself in has quickly become a political rallying cry for the Republicans, many of whom acknowledged they had not fully read the 49-page federal indictment but are rushing to stand by the indicted former president, adopting his grievances against the federal justice system as their own.
Meanwhile, over there in the New York Times was this gem of reporting:
The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden
Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president.
Incredibly, the Times reports of a move to overturn “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.”
Say what? The idea that the Department of Justice is independent is utterly laughable. Recall this story from the Washington Post on Jan. 31, 2017, a mere 11 days after Trump was inaugurated. Here’s the headline:
Resistance from within Federal workers push back against Trump
The Post reported (emphasis my own):
The signs of popular dissent from President Trump’s opening volley of actions have been plain to see on the nation’s streets, at airports in the aftermath of his refugee and visa ban, and in the blizzard of outrage on social media. But there’s another level of resistance to the new president that is less visible and potentially more troublesome to the administration: a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing any new president’s agenda.
Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make….
At the Justice Department, an employee in the division that administers grants to nonprofits fighting domestic violence and researching sex crimes said the office has been planning to slow its work and to file complaints with the inspector general’s office if asked to shift grants away from their mission.
“You’re going to see the bureaucrats using the time to their advantage,” said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Through leaks to news organizations and internal complaints, he said, “People here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable.”
The resistance is so early, so widespread and so deeply felt that it has officials worrying about paralysis and overt refusals by workers to do their jobs….
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a Trump adviser and longtime critic of the bureaucracy, said the pushback against the new administration reveals how firmly entrenched liberals are and how threatened they feel by the new regime. He cited an analysis by the Hill newspaper that showed that 95 percent of campaign donations from employees at 14 federal agencies went to Hillary Clinton last fall.
“This is essentially the opposition in waiting,” Gingrich said. “He may have to clean out the Justice Department because there are so many left-wingers there. The state is even worse.”
Bingo.
In other words? In other words, the Department of Justice is filled with left-wing, Trump-hating career employees. There can be no surprise that they have weaponized the DOJ to target Trump.
This is to say, when Trump says that if reelected, “I will totally obliterate the Deep State,” there is more than plenty of reason not only to say it but to do it. Starting with the Department of Justice.
The hard fact here is, as Gingrich notes, that the “career” bureaucrats who fill the federal government are nothing more than hard-core left-wing, Trump-hating partisans.
All of this means that Republican leaders not only must not be silent about the targeting of Trump—like McConnell — but must start work on the serious reforms that are needed to make sure the banana republic–style politics of Joe Biden that are running the Department of Justice and the rest of the federal bureaucracy are cleaned out.