Nothing constrained Trump more than independent law enforcement. Nothing would strengthen him like the power to use it for his own benefit. “The authoritarian leader simply has to get control over the coercive apparatus of the state,” Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes write in their new book, Unmaking the Presidency. “Without control of the Justice Department, the would-be tyrant’s tool kit is radically incomplete.”
When Trump nominated William Barr to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general, the Washington legal establishment exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Barr had held the same job almost 30 years earlier, in the last 14 months of the first Bush presidency. He was now 68 and rich from years in the private sector. He had nothing to prove and nothing to gain. He was considered an “institutionalist”—quite conservative, an advocate of strong presidential power, but not an extremist. Because he was intimidatingly smart and bureaucratically skillful, he would protect the Justice Department from Trump’s maraudings far better than the intellectually inferior Sessions and his ill-qualified temporary replacement, Matthew Whitaker. Barr told a friend that he agreed to come back because the department was in chaos and needed a leader with a bulletproof reputation.
Before Barr’s confirmation hearings, Neal Katyal, a legal scholar who was acting solicitor general under Obama, warned a group of Democratic senators not to be fooled: Barr’s views were well outside mainstream conservatism. He could prove more dangerous than any of his predecessors. And the reasons for concern could be found by anyone who took the trouble to study Barr’s record, which was made of three durable, interwoven strands.
The first was his expansive view of presidential power, sometimes called the theory of the “unitary executive .. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/trump-myth-unitary-executive/605062/ ”—the idea that Article II of the Constitution gives the president sole and complete authority in the executive branch, with wide latitude to interpret laws and make war. When Barr became head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George H. W. Bush, in 1989, he wrote an influential memo listing 10 ways in which Congress had been trespassing on Article II, arguing, “Only by consistently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can executive branch prerogatives be preserved.” He created and chaired an interagency committee to fight document requests and assert executive privilege.
----- [INSERT: Donald Trump Is the Culmination of an Irresistible Conservative Chaos Theory The great modern conservative project, launched by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, has finally reached its inevitable end-point in the kind of president* that project made inevitable. By Charles P. Pierce Jul 20, 2020 [...] That required them to ignore the grand favors Barr already had done for embattled Republican presidents back to George H.W. Bush, to whom Barr recommended pardons for any figures in the Iran-Contra scandal that might have damaging testimony regarding Bush’s own involvement in that exercise in illegitimate unilateral presidential action. P - The now infamous “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, beloved by the likes of Barr and Yoo, and the rationale for almost all of this administration*’s major offenses against self-government, was born in its modern form in the mind of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. In his dissent in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, Scalia wrote: https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157027555 .. and .. TRUMP, BARR, AND THE RULE OF LAW Serving as Trump’s Attorney General—and keeping the job—seems to mean treating anything that does not serve his interests as an urgent threat. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148627512] -----
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