Matthew Whitaker’s appointment is the latest Trump Tax the GOP is paying

A nominee whose only qualification is his unfitness

Matthew Whitaker is, by any standard, a wildly unsuitable choice to serve as Attorney General of the United States.

He’s a small time crook who finished fourth in the Iowa GOP Senate primary back in 2014. He apparently got his job as Chief of Staff in the Justice Department because Trump liked his TV hits, experience that would at best qualify him to one the DOJ’s chief spokesperson not to be chief of staff and certainly not to run the Justice Department. Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway’s husband, a prominent Washington attorney, says Whitaker’s appointment is illegal.

The point, however, is that in a normal administration the question of legality would simply never arise here. The Justice Department is full of competent, professional, Senate-confirmed officials who would be more suitable than Whitaker on both substance and procedural grounds. It’s commonplace in liberal circles to see Whitaker as an inappropriate selection in light of his previous comments about Robert Mueller’s investigation, but the truth is the Mueller issue is his only conceivable qualification for the job. Trump’s problem with the senior staff at the Justice Department is he has no way of knowing whether or not they share with Jeff Sessions and Ron Rosenstein a reluctance to fatally compromise the rule of law in pursuit of Trump's personal self-interest.

With Whitaker he’s sure, and that’s good enough for him.

Republicans are paying a heavy Trump tax

Ezra Klein has written of the “Trump tax” Republicans are paying in electoral terms.

It’s simply hard to believe that candidates like Dean Heller, Mia Love, Steve Russell, Dave Bratt, and Karen Handel would have lost their seats as incumbents running with a strong economy at their backs unless there were a vicious, unpopular, clown in the White House.

The Whitaker situation is along those lines in the sense that “president fires the attorney general in order to replace him with someone unqualified for corrupt reasons” is a bad news cycle for the GOP, but realistically voters will have moved on from this long before there’s another election. There is, instead, a different and more profound Trump tax at work here on the policymaking level.

Parties usually like to hold the presidency in order to accomplish things in government, and that “accomplishing things” is done by cabinet secretaries and the heads of other executive departments. It’s precisely because Trump is a Republican rather than a Democrat and, thus, has appointed Republicans who agree with Republican Party policy to run these agencies. But by definition any Republican president would do that. The Trump Tax is that from time to time Trump feels impelled to install a nincompoop like Whitaker in an important job to help cover up his own corruption or else because Trump, personally, is corrupt it encourages other appointees like Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, and Ryan Zinke to think less about the GOP policy agenda and more about their own personal agenda.

None of this is exactly a win for Democrats, either, but that just goes to show that politics is not a zero-sum game — having a bad president in office is just bad, because he makes decisions for bad reasons that put bad people in other jobs.

The ship could turn but it won’t

Trump has been president for nearly two years now, so we know that Mitch McConnell isn’t going to walk over to the White House with a dozen senators across different factions of the party and demand that Trump swiftly nominate a permanent AG from a very short list of well-qualified candidates.

Attempting to muscle Trump could, of course, prompt Trump to blow up on Twitter and assail his own party which might force Republicans to consider whether Trump’s blatant, ongoing efforts to obstruct the rule of law combined with his complete refusal to conduct his business affairs in a remotely acceptable manner aren’t impeachable offenses after all. Then Mike Pence would be President, liberal Democrats would still be mad because Mike Pence is a conservative Republican, and Republicans would have the field clear to give their best shot at some semblance of competent, honest conservative government.

It might be a disaster for them or it might work out, but realistically of course we’re not going to find out.

Republicans are paying the Trump tax at the polls, they’re paying it on policy, but most of all they’re paying it in their own heads where they’ve somehow convinced themselves against all evidence that things are going well.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2qGqoD2

The Ugly History of Dual-Loyalty Charges

When Representative Ilhan Omar recently complained about “the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” many noted accurately that she had deployed a trope—dual loyalty—that had been used against Jews for years. But this accusation has a broader history in the United States, having been used against several religious minorities—including Muslims like Omar. Indeed, many battles over religious freedom have revolved around dual-loyalty claims. [ Read: Ilhan Omar just made it harder to have a nuanced debate about Israel ] In the 19th century, many attacks on Catholics stressed that these immigrants were pawns of a foreign power. In the 1830s, Samuel Morse—then a prominent painter and later the inventor of the telegraph—urged Americans to build “walls” and “gates” to keep out Catholic immigrants, who would always be loyal to Rome. Because these Catholic immigrants were decrepit —“halt, and blind, and naked”—they were easy to co...

KnightViral

Search This Blog