By Patrick Martin
9 May 2019
The US House Judiciary
Committee voted Wednesday afternoon to hold Attorney General William Barr in
contempt for refusing to provide Congress with an unredacted copy of the
Mueller report and other documents supporting the report’s findings.
The action came on a straight
party-line vote, with 24 Democrats approving the contempt citation and 16
Republicans opposing it. The committee spent hours in debate, with Democrats
condemning President Trump’s decision to invoke executive privilege to withhold
the documents and Republicans denouncing the Democratic investigation as a step
towards impeachment.
Trump’s assertion of executive
privilege was unprecedented in its sweep. All previous presidential claims of
executive privilege—even including Richard Nixon’s efforts to suppress White
House tape recordings during the Watergate crisis—have involved maintaining
privacy in communications between the president and his closest advisers, or
keeping certain national security information secret.
Much of the Mueller report,
however, concerns the 2016 election campaign, before Trump became president,
and is thus entirely outside the conceivable scope of executive privilege. As
for communications between President Trump and top aides in the White House,
the subject of the second half of the report, which concerns Trump’s efforts to
block the investigation, privilege was waived when aides such as former White
House Counsel Don McGahn testified under oath to the Mueller inquiry.
During the debate on the
contempt charge, many Judiciary Committee Democrats characterized Trump’s
actions as unconstitutional and dictatorial. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee
of Texas declared, “I can only conclude that the president now seeks to take a
wrecking ball to the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Representative Pramila Jayapal
of Washington state said, “We are at a brink of importance between democracy
and dictatorship if we ignore checks and balances. And I fully support holding
this attorney general in contempt for refusing to comply with constitutional
foundations.”
At a press conference after
the vote, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler declared, “This was a
very grave and momentous step we were forced to take today to move a contempt
citation against the attorney general of the United States. We did not relish
doing this but we have no choice.”
The executive branch, at
Trump’s direction, was refusing to subordinate itself to legislative oversight,
he said, noting that since the Democrats assumed control of the House of
Representatives in January, “not a single page” has been produced in response
to congressional requests or subpoenas.
“We’ve talked for a long time
about approaching a constitutional crisis. We are now in it,” Nadler said. “Now
is the time of testing whether we can keep this type of republic, or whether
this republic is destined to change into a different, more tyrannical form of
government.”
The apocalyptic language
raises an obvious question: if Trump is trampling on the Constitution and is
hell bent on establishing an authoritarian form of rule in the United
States—and he certainly is—then why do the Democrats categorically reject
bringing charges of impeachment against him?
And why do they continue to
seek collaboration with this “more tyrannical form of government” on a wide
range of policies, from the federal budget, to immigration, to the projection
of American military force in the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea and
throughout the world?
The conflict between Congress
and the White House is not merely partisan warfare in advance of the 2020
elections, but represents the breakdown of the institutional framework through
which American capitalist politics has operated for more than two centuries.
The structure of “checks and balances” has been undermined over a protracted
period, with the president taking on virtually unchecked powers, both as
“commander-in-chief” in foreign and military policy and increasingly in
domestic policy as well.
In February, Trump declared a
national emergency on the US-Mexico border, ordering the Pentagon to shift
funds to provide the resources to build his border wall, in direct defiance of
congressional refusal to authorize such spending. This was a flagrant violation
of the most important constitutional power of Congress, the “power of the
purse,” but the Democrats did nothing but file a lawsuit and warn that the next
Democratic president might assert similar emergency powers to accomplish their
own policy goals.
The Democrats may now protest
that the president is assuming unconstitutional authority, but they do not come
to the table with clean hands. Under the Obama administration, they endorsed
the “right” of the president to launch a war of aggression against Libya
without congressional sanction, and they applauded when Obama ordered drone
missile strikes that killed thousands across the Middle East and North Africa,
including American citizens.
Equally important, their
“opposition” to Trump has from the beginning taken the form of support for a
palace coup by the national-security apparatus, based on the allegations of
Russian “meddling” in the 2016 elections. This reached the point of full-blown
McCarthyite witch-hunting, with claims that Trump is a stooge of Russian
President Vladimir Putin who does Moscow’s bidding in the White House.
The Democratic congressional
leaders do not actually believe such claims, but find them useful in seeking to
divert popular opposition to the Trump administration in a right-wing,
pro-imperialist direction. And by hammering Trump on the alleged Russian
connection, they have sought to push the administration to a more aggressive
foreign policy in Syria, in Ukraine, and more generally against Russia. This
has now found its most noxious expression in the preparations by the Trump
administration to provoke a war with Iran—to which the Democrats would give
near-unanimous backing.
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[8 May 2019]
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