June 10, 2017
We have all long taken for granted that we are a nation of laws, not men. We have never stopped to consider how governance by people with utter contempt and disregard for that basic principle would impact the smooth functioning of our republic. Five months into the Trump administration, we are beginning to have the answer. The consequences were vividly on display with the testimony this week of James Comey. What was striking about Comey’s testimony was not simply his refreshing willingness to call a lie a lie, but his candor in describing his paralysis in the face of a President whose demand for personal loyalty revealed that he fundamentally did not subscribe to the view that no person is above the law. It is understandable that all 6’8″ of James Comey was flummoxed when faced with the combination of betrayal of baseline Constitutional values and the enormous power of the presidency.
As riveting as Comey’s performance was, it confirmed what we already knew: Trump is an immoral reprobate untroubled by any concern with ethics. Yet, as the saying goes, “the fish rots from the head.” Trump’s entire administration is laced throughout with individuals who share his contempt for the rule of law and view government, not as a mechanism to ensure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for citizens, but as an instrument of raw power to be leveraged to dole out undeserved punishment to the marginalized and unearned wealth to the connected.
Two Justice Department actions this week are indicative of this perspective in action. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo this week prohibiting the practice of directing portions of large civil settlement payments to third party groups. Although this seems like an arcane policy decision, in practice, the newly rescinded policy allowed for mitigation of large-scale environmental and social harms by companies like BP and Duke Energy. When the Sessions memo takes effect, these settlement funds will instead go into the Treasury or to identifiable victims of the corporate wrongdoing. The decision by Sessions effectively kills a program that was leveraging civil settlements to pay for environmental and consumer protection in order to satisfy the desires of the Koch Brothers.
In addition, this week Sessions made a mockery of his oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” when he had his Justice Department lawyers make the cynical argument that payments by foreign governments or foreign government officials to Trump’s businesses did not violate the Emoluments Clause of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution as long they did not exceed fair market value. In Sessions’ worldview, it is perfectly legal for the President of the United States to sell influence and access, as long as he does not overcharge!
In his testimony, Comey darkly intimated that Sessions’ involvement in the Russian scandal might go beyond three meetings with Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Pause for a moment and consider how much disregard one must have for the rule of law to allow a person who has admitted to commission of a felony (perjury before Congress, 18 U.S.C. 1621, 1001) to be the highest law enforcement officer in the land. Sessions, like his boss, makes no secret of the fact that his priorities have nothing whatsoever to do with justice.