Playing with Fire

Speculating recently about the frightening possibility that Republicans might regain control of the House of Representatives after the midterm election, someone innocently asked "How long do you think it will take them to get around to impeaching President Biden?" 

 

Meanwhile, it seems Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has identified a more immediate target: “At a minimum, [Attorney General Merrick] Garland must resign or be impeached. The search warrant must be published. [FBI Director] Christoper Wray must be removed. And the FBI reformed top to bottom.”

 

Well, Josh, your Dear Leader and his lawyers already have a copy of the warrant and could publish it at any time. Trump hasn't, however, and appears unlikely to do so, since, as David French recently wrote in The Third Rail, "Holding on to the warrant might be bad for the country - leaving us largely in the dark, fighting furiously over hypotheticals - but now it's very good for Trump."

To get a judge to issue such a warrant, one must demonstrate probable cause. Clearly in a case of such explosive sensitivity as this, one can reasonably infer that the judge in this case was compellingly convinced of the seriousness of what was alleged about the materials to be searched for and retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

 

None of that seems to matter to those on the political Right who seem increasingly addicted to a systematic and cynical undermining of our institutions.

Thus, in the firestorm of garbage being spewed by Republicans in response to the FBI's search of ex-President Trump's home and apparent retrieval of boxes of documents which Trump took with him from the White House, Hawley's invective may have been among the milder. Compare that with this bizarre tweet of a former NY Lieutenant Governor, Betsy McCaughey: “When Republicans take back Congress, they should abolish the FBI, shut every field office, fire all staff, and start anew.” Then there was Arizona Representative Paul Gosar saying: “I will support a complete dismantling and elimination of the democrat brown shirts known as the FBI.”

The deliberate use of such vile, very offensive language - as in the increasingly horrifying practice on the Right of calling Democrats "groomers" or, in this instance, calling FBI agents "democrat brown shirts" - has become increasingly common. Back in 1995, the NRA sent out a fundraising letter, which famously referred to federal agents as “armed terrorists dressed in Ninja black … jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens.” In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of a federal office building a few days later, in which 168 of our fellow Americans were murdered, former President George H.W. Bush rightly reacted to the NRA's extremist incendiary language. In a May 3, 1995, letter he publicly resigned his NRA membership, writing: “your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country. It indirectly slanders a wide array of government law enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us.”

That was then. Obviously, the Republican Party that was, the Republican Party of George H.W. Bush, the Republican party that honored America and honored law enforcement is not today's Republican Party of Donald Trump and his fanatical cult followers. Nor is this defund-the-FBI-party any longer (if it ever really was) a party of "law and order."

Everybody here is playing with fire - dangerous thing to do because fire destroys.

For this reason, I have long counted myself among those reluctant to encourage the criminalization of politics and political dissent - something infamously associated with failed democracies, societies such as those sometimes referred to insultingly as "banana republics." The answer to Trump's infamous 2016 "lock her up" chant (something so fundamentally anti-democratic that it alone ought to have been sufficient to disqualify him from any public office) cannot just be "lock him up." If, however, unlike his 2016 opponent, there may be reason to suspect that Trump and his cult followers may have actually violated laws - not trivial technical violations of complicated regulations, etc., but actual crimes against the constitutional order, which the American Justice system can ill afford to ignore - then some sort of legal as well as political reckoning will  inevitably be called for.

There is, of course, a constitutional. provision for dealing politically with offenses against constitutional governance. It is impeachment. Our Justice system would have been spared this present problem if the twice-impeached president had been convicted and disqualified from ever again holding federal office. Impeachment, however, has never worked as intended (at least not at the presidential level). This has saddled the country with one more instance of the perennial problem of some other branch of government or governmental institution having to pick up the slack and do the job that the proper branch or institution has proved too dysfunctional to do.

So the Justice system - on the federal level, the Department of Justice; on the state levels, the processes already in motion in New York and Georgia - becomes the fallback to fix our systemic political failure. In doing so, however, no matter how lawfully the Justice system acts (as it did in this instance seeking a receiving a proper search warrant), the fact remains that it is playing with fire - as, more obviously and less legitimately, are Trump's cult followers playing with fire with their threatening language and divisive behavior.

January 6, 2021, showed the world where the Right's threatening language and divisive behavior lead.  It is not a desirable direction. Fire destroys.

(Photo: FBI Headquarters Building, Washington, D.C., March 2012, Carol M. Highsmith, Photographer. Library of Congress.)