Bill Barr's theory of executive power places presidents above the law.

The Dangerous Ideas of Bill Barr

Adam Serwer back with another great piece on how this republican ethos governs their worldview and how they govern.

quote:

---

One of the stranger aspects of the Donald Trump era is the open competition for the president’s affection. From Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs saying that Trump’s presidency is “the most accomplished … in modern history” to the president forcing his Cabinet secretaries to praise him on camera to his former fixer Michael Cohen once declaring that he would “take a bullet” for his former employer, it seems like each of the president’s myrmidons is daily attempting to outdo the others in employing Soviet-style hyperbole in praise of the president.

---

quote:

---

If there’s a comfort in this spectacle, it’s in the recognition that this is performance, that it’s a schtick, and that its ubiquity is a marker of the president’s deep insecurity. It is not a projection of strength, but one of weakness. The performativity of the spectacle suggests that at least some of these people recognize they are doing a bit. Others seem to have been corrupted by their proximity to Trump. Career civil servants such as Rod Rosenstein, who swore oaths to uphold the Constitution, have somehow been reduced to shuddering with fear at the thought of being fired in a tweet, begging the president for the opportunity to ensure that the law bends to his will.

---

quote:

---

Barr is not protecting Trump because he thinks Trump is the most accomplished president in modern history, because he fears Trump, because the real-estate mogul has some psychological hold on him, or because he has been corrupted. Barr is defending Trump because Barr is a zealot.

In March, Barr released a letter summarizing the long-awaited conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election. That letter mischaracterized Mueller’s conclusion that the Trump campaign took advantage of, and benefited from, Russian interference, only quoting the part of Mueller’s report that found that Trump-campaign officials’ conduct did not amount to a prosecutable crime.

---

quote:

---

The logic here is breathtaking: The president can end an investigation on the basis that he is “falsely accused.” The entire point of an investigation is to determine culpability; if the president can end an investigation into himself or any of his allies simply by asserting his own innocence, then he is effectively above the law. Under this standard, President Richard Nixon was perfectly within his rights when he attempted to end the investigation into the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, which implicated several of his campaign operatives and ultimately led to his resignation.

---

quote:

---

Nixon famously declared in 1977, in an interview with the reporter David Frost, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” That was not mere sophistry, but ideology, and it is an ideological strain that has run through nearly every Republican administration since Nixon.

---

quote:

---

This has been particularly true of the expansive conservative conception of the president’s constitutional war-making powers. If Reagan openly defied Congress and the law, the first President Bush ratified his actions by pardoning those involved in the scheme. The next Republican president, George W. Bush, covertly defied the law by building a network of secret prisons across the globe, indefinitely imprisoning those suspected of terrorism, and sanctioning warrantless surveillance of American citizens, all based on dubious legal theories that amounted to little more than Nixon’s insistence that the president is above the law. Less articulate was the former George W. Bush Justice Department official John Yoo’s response to being asked whether the president could order a child’s testicles crushed: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

---

What do you do when the rule of law only applies to some?