The Garland We Don't Need at Christmas

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.) 

"Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake." -Barton Gellman.

By all appearances, Attorney General Merrick Garland looks and sounds like a nice, inoffensive, anodyne law professor you'd see collecting dust at Georgetown Law School. He's an adorable little lawn gnome-like figure who just makes people want to pat him on the head. In fact, Garland is about as close as anyone in the human race could come to being a nice, little lap dog.

    But those are precisely the qualities you do not want in an Attorney General. You want your nation's top cop to be willing to enforce the law. Not a gung ho law and order type like Janet Reno (who truly fucked up Waco), not the president's personal attorney like Bill Barr, not a sycophant like Alberto Gonzales and not a doddering old placeholder who'll be gone in a year like Michael B. Mukasey.

    You and the president should want an effective Attorney General who investigates crimes or possible crimes then acts on it through his vast army of attorneys regardless of political affiliations or considerations. And this growing frustration isn't just coming from legal laymen like me but from those within the Justice Department.

   The teeth-gnashing and wall-punching began last spring when Garland, effortlessly finding his inner Bill Barr, appealed a judge's ruling that stated Trump could indeed be sued for defamation in E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit. Garland's DOJ filed a brief appealing it, essentially once again making the Department of Justice Trump's personal, free law firm.

    The month before, Judge Amy Berman Jackson had ruled that the DOJ release an internal memo sent to Bill Barr regarding the Mueller probe. Once again, Garland appealed the ruling and the full Barr memo still hasn't seen the light of day, to Judge Jackson's great irritation.

  There are countless other instances of Garland's seeming spinelessness in the face of bipartisan anger at him. Democrats are angry at him for not being a Democratic Rottweiler and going after more Republicans. Republicans, of course, accuse him of being just that- Biased to the point of political and judicial activism.

    Of course, neither are true. While being surrounded, seemingly, by capable people largely hand-picked by President Biden, Garland is, at best, jurisprudence's answer to Hamlet: To prosecute or not prosecute? Not prosecute. And now may be the time to do that since things are rotten to the core in the state of America, where the putrefaction of corruption is wafting up to the nostrils of the angels who are spitting down on our heads.

    Another major complaint is Garland slow-walking the Steve Bannon thing. By now, it's common knowledge that Bannon was subpoenaed by the January 6 Select Committee and Trump's former Chief Strategist wasted no time giving his pudgy middle finger to the committee and not only defying the subpoena but not even collecting the documents they'd demanded. Garland's DOJ took so many weeks to get a grand jury to indict him and put out a warrant for his arrest, it looked for all the world as if Garland did so reluctantly.

    

This Was the Guy the Right Wing Was Afraid Of?

 

Five years, going on six, is an eternity and a half in political time yet that's when President Obama advanced Garland for consideration for the Supreme Court. In 2016, with the general election coming up, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, offended that a black president would exercise his Constitutional prerogative, refused to even give Garland a single confirmation hearing much less a full up and down vote. His reasons were cynical and disingenuous- With an election coming up, we should let the people decide who the next Supreme Court justice will be when they elect a new president.

     Of course, that rationale didn't hold enough water to fill a thimble when Trump was up for reelection last year and they broke their triple-chinned necks to get Brett Kavanaugh then Amy Comey Barrett confirmed. Then suddenly, the vox populi didn't count for shit anymore, especially when it shouted Donald Trump out of office.

    But back in 2016, Merrick Garland was a hippie straight of 1968 Haight-Ashbury and reeking of patchouli oil and burnt banana skins, according to the right wing that saw no problem installing over 300 ideologues of their bent. He was the liberal Boogey Man that Republicans have been hallucinating since before the days of Joe McCarthy and HUAC. (Since then, Garland's been replaced with an Antifa that's just as fictional as a liberal Merrick Garland.)

    In hindsight, Garland was a perfect and even typical choice for Obama to make since his two successful nominees, Kagan and Sotomayor, are hardly liberals in the mold of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If they seem like it in their majority and minority opinions, look at the Nazis with whom they have to work. And if, on the offchance he actually got his day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Garland would now be getting head pats and hind leg-activating belly rubs from the rest of the high court.

     In a democracy, one almost never, if ever, gets the government they want, much less deserve, and that includes the president's appointments and nominees. On the campaign trail last year, Joe Biden promised us a safe, normal, boring, pull-my-finger, grandfatherly kind of government so that's what over 81,000,000 of us gave the nation. Nearly a year into the neoliberal Biden presidency, it's like the Eisenhower administration, minus the highways.

     Barton Gellman published a cautionary tale in the pages of the Atlantic that ought to be required reading. In it, Gellman sounds the alarm about the price the nation might face if Democrats don't start taking seriously the threat the Republican Party represents and acts on the threats they're arrogantly snarling about from behind podiums. It's a daily irritation for me to see so many of my colleagues write about the Republicans taking over the House this November as if it's a foregone conclusion and the midterm elections merely an empty, pro forma exercise in democracy.

     But if the Nazis win the House and even the Senate, Democrats need to start digging their trenches, ramparts and redoubts right now while they can. Because if the Republican Party takes over the legislative branch of government, you can kiss democracy bye bye, blackbird (or Iron Eagle, as it were.).

   Think I'm exaggerating? Take a listen to this litany of threats made by Matt Gaetz (R-Mann Act) just today when, flanked by his 3G network of Louis Gohmert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, he threatened to usher in the Age of Them, Jim Jordan and even Speaker Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the 650 or so insurrectionists being prosecuted by Garland's Justice Department are getting slaps on the wrists, guaranteeing they'll be on the loose and more radicalized than ever long, long before the 2022 midterms and the general election in 2024.

     Make no mistake about it- January 6 was merely a dress rehearsal.