The Narrative Is The Stumbling Block

 Start here:

What I care about is that at a time when we need to start establishing means of accountability for a second Trump term, much of the Democratic world has chosen instead to wallow in false claims about the Trump investigation in order to make Garland a scapegoat, rather than the guy directly responsible, John Roberts. It’s classical conspiracy thinking. Something really bad happened (Trump got elected), it’s not entirely clear why (because almost no one bothers to learn the details I’ve laid out here, to say nothing of considering the political work that didn’t happen to make Trump own this), and so people simply invent explanations. Every time those explanations get debunked, people double down on the theory — it’s Garland’s fault — rather than reconsidering their chosen explanation.

And those explanations have the effect of distracting attention from Roberts. Rather than talking about how six partisan Justices rewrote the Constitution to give the leader of the GOP a pass on egregious crimes, Democrats are choosing to blame a guy who encouraged prosecutors to follow the money in March 2021.

It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that guarantees maximal impotence. It’s a choice that eschews actual facts (and therefore the means to actually learn what happened). It’s a choice that embraces irrational conspiracy thinking (which makes people weak and ripe for manipulation by authoritarians). It’s a choice that distracts from Roberts’ role.

The full explanation is not here (it’s over there, in the source material), but the summary is what matters here. Garland is once again being blamed for all our problems, as if the Roberts Court never found presidential immunity under the floorboards of the Constitution, and somehow was never going to if Trump had been indicted sooner.

Basically: sentence first, verdict afterwards. Or the very thing the FBI is now doing by raiding John Bolton’s house. Trump gave that game away. The DOJ is looking for evidence of something to charge Bolton with. The very definition of a “fishing expedition.”Screw due process, let’s get on to punishment.

George Conway (who should know better), is even talking this way:

If the Garland prosecution of Trump took too long, the fault can be laid only on due process. And if it had gone quicker, apparently the argument is Roberts would have been snookered into thinking he had more time to work out that immunity theory, but alas, he was too late.

Besides, Trump was convicted of fraud in civil court, and criminal fraud as well; and the electorate didn’t seem to give a shit. The 14th Amendment had something to say, but the Sinister Six waived that off.  And nothing in Art. II says only a federal felony conviction counts as a bar to holding the Presidency.

Because the lawfare against Trump just taught him what to do. And in that, as John Luttig puts it, he has a willing helper:

The chief justice is presiding over the end of the rule of law in America,” Luttig told the Guardian.

In Luttig’s view, the court under Roberts is “acquiescing in and accommodating the president’s lawlessness. And it is doing so without briefing, without argument, without deliberation – and without even a single word of explanation of its decisions.”

For Luttig, this is more than just the 6-3 supermajority of the court expressing its conservatism. This is a fundamental distortion of the American legal system.

“The supreme court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.”

When it comes to assessing the chief justice’s record, Luttig has special standing. He was himself a one-time contender for a supreme court seat, and has known Roberts as a friend since they worked together in their 20s in the Reagan administration. Roberts asked Luttig to be a groomsman at his wedding in 1996.

“I have had four decades of knowing and respecting him,” Luttig said.

Having had a ringside seat for so many years, Luttig has no doubts about how the chief justice is conducting himself in the current fraught moment.

“John Roberts knows exactly what he is doing,” the judge said, “and he knows exactly the message he is sending to America.”

All of this but for Merrick Garland? Sure, why not?

And really, George, it’s not “lawfare,” period. What Trump U.S. doing is the erasure of law. Just like John Roberts is doing. The end here is not war; it’s anarchy.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” After that, you don’t need any laws. After all, as Luttig says:

“The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said. “The chief justice has no higher obligation than to protect the federal judiciary from attacks by this president, and in my view he has utterly failed.”

And where does that leave Merrick Garland?