This puts a lot of heat on Garland, this guy's opinion counts in the legal world. I figure Garland has lot's of time to prosecute Trump, but first the 1/6 committee and a grand jury will recommend indictments. Also it will be much easier to go after Trump once NY puts him in a state maximum security prison and muzzles him, while everybody and their dog are suing him. That should put Trump's trial for conspiracy to commit insurrection around election season and Trump ain't on the ballot.
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Eminent constitutional law expert: If Biden and Garland won't go after Trump, country is in "desperate trouble"
www.salon.com
Laurence Tribe: If Garland doesn't prosecute Trump, the rule of law is "out the window"
Eminent constitutional law expert: If Biden and Garland won't go after Trump, country is in "desperate trouble"
f American democracy were a hospital patient, the diagnosis would be "critical".
The Jim Crow Republican Party and larger neofascist movement are escalating their war on democracy by passing laws across the country designed to stop Black and brown people from voting. A
new report from the Brennan Center details this:
After the 2010 elections, for the first time since the peak of the Jim Crow era, states across the country began to enact laws making it more difficult to vote. This wave of voter suppression was intertwined with race and the nation's changing racial demographics and was, at least in part, a backlash against rising turnout among communities of color contributing to the election of the nation's first Black president. Efforts to suppress the votes of communities of color accelerated in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. In the eight years since, and especially in 2020, these trends continued.
Fascist violence continues unabated. In Portland, Oregon, last weekend
right-wing street thugs attacked people they believed to be anti-fascists. The violence included a gun battle in downtown Portland.
Police did not intervene, which is not entirely surprising given that America's police have long supported fascists and other
right-wing extremists.
And
let's not forget — as so many in the mainstream American news media have already done — that less than two weeks ago a Trump supporter
threatened to detonate a car bomb near the Capitol if his demands were not met. He was apprehended after an hours-long standoff. (He did not actually have a bomb, but no one could be sure of that at the time.)
America's political institutions have shown themselves to be greatly weakened in the battle against Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement. A series of recent Supreme Court decisions have been made by fiat through what is known as the "shadow docket" process. Instead of acting as a final check against fascism and authoritarianism and other abuses of power, the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court have proven willing to restrict Joe Biden's presidential powers in ways they refused to do under the Trump regime.
The Supreme Court is no longer calling "balls and strikes," as the cliché holds. It is putting a fist on the scales of justice in favor of the far right. This is by design: Donald Trump and the Jim Crow Republicans packed the court, essentially for that purpose.
At the Daily Beast, commentator and author David Rothkopf
offers this warning about America's crisis of democracy:
Fox News has run
an article about the "news" that last week
I tweeted: "The Taliban, all of them together, plus every Al Qaeda fighter in the world, do not pose the threat to the United States that Trump or Trumpist extremists do."
That was not the first time I have said that nor will be it the last time. Because it is true. They did ask me if I wanted to comment on what I'd already said publicly, and I emailed the following:
The Taliban and Al Qaeda are among the most vile, dangerous violent extremist organizations in the world. They pose a threat that must be taken very seriously and actively combatted. They do not, however, pose an existential threat to the United States or our way of life. Trump and his supporters have, with support of one of America's most dangerous enemies, actively sought to undermine democracy in America. The coup attempt on January 6th and the propagation of the Big Lie are an example of this.
Their efforts to suppress the vote are an example of this. Trump's active obstruction of justice is an example of this. Should they succeed, democracy in America will be gutted, our way of life ended, our values undermined and our standing in the world destroyed. They may yet succeed. As a consequence, the threat they pose is far greater to the United States as a whole....
For these reasons, it is irrefutable that Trump and many of the people seeking to advance his agenda or claim it for themselves are poised to have a far greater negative impact on Americans and the country as a whole than foreign extremist groups.
In response to
the dagger being pointed at the heart of American democracy by Donald Trump, his followers and the Jim Crow Republican Party, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are not acting with the necessary urgency.
In a new op-ed for the Boston Globe, Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Harvard, offers this warning:
We need to begin with the fundamental precept that not all crimes are created equal. Those crimes — regardless of who allegedly commits them — whose very aim is to overturn a fair election whereby our tradition of peaceful, lawful succession from one administration to the next takes place — a tradition begun by George Washington, continued by John Adams, and preserved by every president since except Donald Trump — are impossible to tolerate if we are to survive as a constitutional republic. …
Trump's relentlessness has laid bare the defects in many of those accountability mechanisms. Now Garland stands as the final line of defense for our constitutional democracy. No prior attorney general has confronted so daunting a challenge. For what might be the first time in his life and what will surely be the last, Garland could hold the future of the last best hope on earth in his hands.
I recently spoke to Tribe in search of more details on his deep concerns about the future of American democracy. In our conversation, he also reflected on how the current political crisis,
in conjunction with the coronavirus pandemic and other problems, has caused many Americans to sink into a state of exhaustion, and an almost total withdrawal from politics. Tribe warned that such feelings represent a form of defeatism that will end in surrender to the neofascists.
Tribe also shared his thoughts on why Garland and the Department of Justice have (at least to this point) not attempted to prosecute Donald Trump and his confederates for their apparent crimes against democracy and the rule of law – and warned that not to do so would be a critical mistake, potentially fatal to the future of America's democratic project.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, as usual.
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