April 24, 2019
In the six days since the public release of the Mueller Report, the Democrats have been furiously calculating how best to respond to its revelations. Among the Presidential candidates, only Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and Kamala Harris have expressly called for impeachment, while Bernie Sanders has urged caution. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that “going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,” preferring to rely on an election some 18 months hence, (Source: “Senior Democrat Steny Hoyer: Impeachment of Donald Trump ‘not worthwhile’ at this point,” by Maureen Groppe, Eliza Collins and Christal Hayes, USAToday.com, 4/18/19). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been trying to tamp down her Caucus’ push for impeachment, “arguing…that Democrats can hold Trump accountable through aggressive investigations,” (Source: “‘We’re not there yet:’ Pelosi pushes back on impeachment as more Democrats call for proceedings,” by Rachael Bade, The Washington Post, 4/23/19).
Trump immediately demonstrated the foolhardiness of that belief by stonewalling every Congressional effort to investigate him. Unconstrained by the rule of law, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has not turned over the Trump tax returns requested by the Ways and Means Committee, despite an explicit statutory requirement that he do so, (Source: “Treasury Secretary misses deadline to provide Trump tax returns to House panel, says he will make a final decision by May 6,” by Damian Paletta and Erica Werner, The Washington Post, 4/23/19).
Carl Kline, the Trump official allegedly responsible for granting security clearances to seriously compromised individuals (including Jared Kushner), refused to appear in response to a Congressional subpoena, (Source: “House panel moves to hold former White House official in contempt after he obeys Trump administration’s instruction not to testify,” by Tom Hamburger, The Washington Post, 4/23/19). Unconstrained by logic, Trump is weighing asserting executive privilege to prevent former White House Counsel, Don McGahn from testifying before Congress, despite the fact that Trump waived any claim of privilege by allowing the Special Counsel to have the unfettered ability to question him.
In the face of such naked contempt, Pelosi’s faith in the investigative powers of Congress to check this President is positively quaint. It is like relying on the Marquess of Queensberry rules in a knife fight. Congress needs to start holding every non-compliant official in contempt, since power is the only thing these people seem to respect.
Yet while we have been watching this power struggle between two co-equal branches of government unfold, we have missed ominous developments in the Supreme Court that show just how asymmetrical this battle is. On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it was taking up appeals in three cases to decide whether Title VII, the landmark law prohibiting employment discrimination, applies to LGBT employees. In a bizarre twist, lawyers for the administration and lawyers for the EEOC appeared on opposite sides of the issue in one of the underlying cases, with the EEOC arguing that Title VII covers LGBT workers, and other government lawyers arguing that it did not, (Source: “Supreme Court To Decide Whether Landmark Civil Rights Law Applies to Gay and Transgender Workers,” by Adam Liptak, The New York Times, 4/23/19). As Ian Millhiser details in ThinkProgress, this case has the potential not only to jeopardize the rights of LGBT workers, but to upend 50 years of sexual harassment and sex discrimination jurisprudence.
Yesterday, in the oral arguments in the case challenging the Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, the five conservative justices signaled that they were likely to side with the Trump administration. Inclusion of the citizenship question is likely to lead to a population undercount in diverse urban areas, with serious negative implications for federal funding and apportionment, (Source: “The Latest: Court conservatives seem okay with census question,” by The Associated Press, The Washington Post, 4/23/19).
The conservatives on our highest court are clearly willing partners in the administration’s efforts to codify a rigid race and gender based caste system in which the majority of Americans who are not straight, white, Republican men have no power and no rights. Our Democratic leaders need to face the harsh fact that an entire political party is more dedicated to white supremacy than democracy. They’d better wake up before we find our democracy left for dead, bleeding in an alley.