Attack on the US Department of Justice

Over the course of his candidacy and presidency, Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the US Department of Justice (DoJ).  Despite a president’s formal control of the Justice Department, its independence from presidential influence is a long-standing and important tradition for precisely this type of conflict.

President Trump’s assault is one part of his attempt to discredit large portions of the Federal Government, including especially the many branches of the intelligence community, sowing dangerous public distrust of a broad community, many parts of which are essential for the security of our country.

Some background:

 The DoJ is part of the executive branch of government (legislative and judicial are the other two) and is headed by the attorney general, who is appointed by the president and is a member of the president’s cabinet.  The president has the absolute right to fire his attorney general and appoint a new one but, in practice, it has been considered a dangerous departure from normal politics.

Indeed, during the Watergate crisis in the early 1970s, President Nixon fired the attorney general and also the succeeding assistant attorney general for refusing to end their investigation.  This “Saturday Night Massacre” was technically legal, but the consequent threat of impeachment eventually precipitated Nixon’s resignation.  In other words, Nixon’s flouting of the tradition of DoJ independence was considered cause for impeachment. In light of this, how do we understand Trump’s repeated disregard for the same tradition?

This disregard has been evidenced in several instances over the course of Trump’s candidacy and presidency. 

1.  Time after time, Donald Trump has attacked the DoJ about its investigation of the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia.  Early on, the President was highly critical of his own appointee for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself entirely from the Russia investigation.  Because of the Senator’s conflict of interest due to his own contact with Russian government officials during the campaign, the recusal was entirely appropriate, indeed, essentially required. Nevertheless, Trump has periodically angrily attacked Sessions.

2. A second breach of the line separating the President from the DoJ has been Trump’s ongoing insistence that the DoJ investigate Hillary Clinton.  The attorneys general are the head, of the DoJ and it is they who are responsible for initiating criminal probes, and the president is to stay out of it.  Furthermore, even proper procedure would have been an unprecedented legal attack on a former political adversary, more consistent with a dictatorship or banana republic.  If a future candidate believed, for instance, that the winner could “lock her up” after the campaign, the damage to the democratic process would be incalculable.

3. As I’ve written earlier, the President attacked the FBI for abusing its surveillance authority when it sought a secret court order to monitor a former Trump campaign official.  On May 20th, the President went further:

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes.  

Dubbing this “Spygate,” the President tweeted that it “could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!”

The FBI is an agency within the DoJ, so this, too, is an inappropriate order.  And there is absolutely no evidence for such abuse.  First, no agent was “implanted” into the campaign as the President insists.  Stefan Halper, the agent in question, was a counterintelligence operative quite appropriately assigned to interview and question several campaign members who had previously been suspected of involvement in a ongoing case about illegal Russian participation in the 2016 election.  There was no FBI surveillance on the campaign, much less “spying.”

4. Most recently, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes and President Trump insisted that the FBI release confidential files about Halper, who was at that time undercover.  Intelligence agencies warned in no uncertain terms that “turning over Justice Department documents could risk lives by potentially exposing the source.”  FBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “[t]he day that we can't protect human sources is the day the American people start becoming less safe."  Ultimately, the FBI caved, releasing the documents, which eventually made Halper’s name public, exposing him and others.

The President could certainly have requested to see the confidential files himself without having them broadcast.  Ordinarily, the president would have a strong interest, however, in protecting such a source.  Before Halper was outed and since the FBI has taken extreme measures to protect the agent, the other sources, and the ongoing investigations. 

After Edward Snowden and others’ damning revelations about the intelligence community, there is good reason for suspicion about some of their activities.  Intelligence agencies have in some important situations clearly overstepped their boundaries, acting illegally and counter to the best interests of the country.  But Trump’s broad-brush attack on even the necessary and proper functioning of the intelligence community to further his own narrow political purposes is an irresponsible tarring of proper intelligence and counterintelligence activities.  The President is apparently willing to attack our democratic institutions for his own protection, further weakening legitimate trust in government.  Inserting his own unwarranted personal concerns into the necessary debate over the proper role of the intelligence community, especially when there is no evidence of FBI misbehavior, is shocking, even for Donald Trump.

Slide from Democracy: Part 4: Political Polarization

This is the fourth in the series of posts on “Sliding from Democracy,” in which I’m exploring how our history, especially since 1970, has both foreshadowed and prepared for the attacks on democracy during this Administration. 

In the first post I suggested that America’s democratic history has not been so glorious as it has sometimes been portrayed.  In the second post I concentrated on the 1945-1970 time period during which American prosperity seemed boundless and Western liberal democracies were considered “the end of history.”  We were tempted to let down our guard against the dangers threatening democracy. 

In the third post I examined the rise of corporate political power during the 1970s and the movement from more government regulation of the economy (Keynesianism) toward a greater free-market capitalism.

In today’s post I want to look at the rise in political polarization since the 1970s and its impact on democracy. 

Before I begin it’s important to recognize that Washington’s political polarized dysfunction does not necessarily exist at the local level.  The Atlantic’s James Fallows has spent several years crisscrossing the United States as a journalist and reports:

Dysfunction at the national level genuinely is a problem, as the world is reminded every time the federal government shuts down. Some of that pathology has spread to the state level. But [outside of Washington, America is] a country that is still capable of functioning far more effectively than national-level paralysis would indicate.

Political polarization (or hyper-partisanship) is characterized by populations that divide themselves sharply into political factions and who support their party’s policies to the exclusion of almost any kind of compromise.  In the extreme this leads to a distrust, dislike, rejection of the other side as a legitimate partner in the debate.  Each side sees the other as actually threatening to themselves, to the nation, to our way of life, even to the moral order. 

According to most measures, the United States is more politically polarized than at any time since the Civil War. 

One measure of political polarization is the degree of overlap between Republicans and Democrats.  In the 1970s there were 240 house representatives, who were either

• Republicans who were more liberal than the most conservative Democrat or
• Democrats who were more conservative than the most liberal Republican. 

By 2012 there were none.  (The Senate was similar.) 

The reasons for this political polarization are not clear.  Some have pointed to the moral debates around abortion or homosexuality, which have become litmus-test issues allowing no compromise.  Others have suggested that fifty years ago each party was more a mixture of conservatives and liberals, who have now sorted themselves into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.  And for still others the problem is that

To some extent, people “vote with their feet” and gradually separate into different jurisdictions based upon political views and lifestyle preferences. This process is aided by technology that allows citizens to communicate only to those already in agreement.

[Furthermore,] over time in any political system the rival “teams” will accumulate grievances against one another to the point where they lose any interest in communicating across party lines.

Whatever the cause, the primary problem with ideological polarization is the near impossibility of compromise. 

From the late 1930s into the 1960s, roughly half the members of the House and Senate were “moderates” as measured by their voting records. The parties had not yet separated into rival ideological camps.

The existence of a large body of moderates in Congress facilitated compromise and a fair degree of consensus between the two parties. Thus, it was necessary to craft bipartisan coalitions in order pass important legislation. All of the important legislative achievements of that era were passed with bipartisan majorities, including the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, Medicare and Medicaid (1965) … [even] the nation’s Cold War policies from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. There were no threats of “government shutdowns” during that entire era. (InsideSources)

Congresspeople mixed socially across party lines.  One’s best friend might be from the other party.  Compromise was always necessary; that was the art of being a politician.

Most problematic today is the antipathy of one party for the other.  If one side doesn’t trust the other or questions their integrity, the priority in politics becomes to wound the other side, to beat it in the next election, rather than to come together for the good of the country.  The most important issues of the day—climate change, inequality, poverty, deteriorating infrastructure, foreign policy, and health care —cannot be addressed.  Even Obama’s Affordable Care Act has been effectively destroyed by the following Republican Congress.

When the government is polarized, nothing happens.  When government can’t get anything done, people get angry with the government.  The stage is set for those who want to blow government up and do something—anything—different.  The stage is set for Donald Trump.

Sliding from Democracy Part 3: The Resurrection of Corporate Power

This is the third in the series of posts on “Sliding from Democracy,” in which I am exploring how our history, especially since 1970, has both foreshadowed and prepared for the attacks on democracy during this Administration. 

In the first post I suggested that America’s democratic history has not been so glorious as it has sometimes been portrayed.  In the second post I concentrated on the 1945-1970 time period during which American prosperity seemed boundless, tempting Americans to let down our guard against the dangers threatening democracy. 

In today’s post I’ll look at two simultaneous attacks on democracy during the 1970s that were largely ignored at the time.  The first of these was a drastic increase in corporate political power as individual corporations began working in concert; the second was the return of free-market economic policies.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, wrote a confidential memo to the president of the Chamber of Congress laying out his belief that

 “the American economic system is under broad attack, [not only from] Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, [but also] from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

 Powell then suggested remedies: coordinating corporate lobbying; founding think tanks to present conservative, pro-corporate ideology; founding educational and political initiatives to change attitudes in higher education; and several others. 

Up until that time, most business lobbying had been relatively minor and directed specifically toward the often competing objectives of individual corporations or industries.  Powell believed that business needed to unite and fight back corporately in defense of the capitalist economic system as a whole. 

Under the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce and the American Business Roundtable, the corporate community began implementing Powell’s memo, presenting a coordinated response in defense of corporate power.  At the same time, due in large part to the dramatically increasing role of television, campaign expenses were skyrocketing so quickly that individual donations could not keep up. 

The combined resources of the corporations, however, could make the donations.  Large political contributions began flowing into political coffers, ushering in an era of overwhelming corporate influence on government that has only intensified with the years.

As reverses in congressional deliberations soon demonstrated, the impact of this coordinated corporate power was immediate:

Prior to the 1976 election, for instance, the Democratic Congress passed a number of liberal bills such as the legislation to create an Office of Consumer Representation.  Republican President Gerald Ford, however, vetoed the bill and several other of the similarly progressive proposals passed by Congress.  When Democrat Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election and the Democrats maintained of control of Congress, easy approval of these bills was expected and they were promptly revived.  Polls showed that the Consumer Representation bill, for example, was backed by the public 2 to 1.  But corporations had found their power; none of the bills survived.  

 

Both Republicans and Democrats, especially those running for office for the first time, needed the now-available corporate money.  60% of the new Democrats, for instance, voted against the consumer representation bill.  Since that time very few bills have passed Congress over the objections of corporations and the elites.

 

Today’s political environment—in which few national politicians, Republican or Democratic, can afford to remain independent of corporate support—was now established.[1]  Over the next forty years, culminating in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the political power of the average American would be decimated.

The second of the 1970s attacks on democracy brought about the resurrection of extreme free-market doctrine.

Prior to the Great Depression, capitalism in the US was mostly unregulated by government.  Such unfettered capitalism was well known for its relative instability with its cycles of booms and busts.  With the chaos of the Great Depression, however, Franklin Roosevelt’s government began an era of a “regulated capitalism” comprising a large government role in the economy and the encouragement of strong unions.  Implementing Keynesian economic theory, the government injected money into the economy through government works programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Civilian Conservation Corps.  In addition, it acted to alleviate the suffering of the people most hurt by the Depression through such programs as Social Security and federal unemployment insurance, which, not incidentally, also injected money into the system. 

Especially with government spending during World War II, Keynesianism created the institutions for the successful recovery from the Depression and for the dramatic increases in standard of living in the immediate post-war years.  It was generally accepted that some version of Keynesianism was necessary to stabilize a nation’s economy.  Free-market, laissez-faire capitalism was marginalized.

The Arab oil embargo of 1973, however, created an economic crisis in which high unemployment and high interest rates could not be controlled by government spending.  This threatened Keynesian doctrine and gave free-market advocates fodder for attacks on Keynesian government spending.  Free-market economists believed that government intervention in the economy was itself the problem and free-market economics the solution.  Led by the theories of Milton Friedman—and supported by the increasing political power of corporations, conservative donors, and academicians—government policy quickly swung back 180º toward free-market capitalism leading in 1980 to “Reaganomics”: repeated tax cuts for the wealthy, ongoing reductions in social programs, decreasing government control of business and weakening of the unions that have continued into the Trump Administration.

 

Echoing the free-market economists, President Reagan’s campaign slogan that “government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem” ushered in forty years of uninterrupted attacks on government.  The resulting government policies have been good for the “economy” (ie the stock market), but terrible for the average American.  While corporate taxes have been slashed and corporate profits have soared since the 1970s, the income of the average American has remained flat.  The average American’s legitimate sense that they had been left behind began to grow.

The next post will examine the rise of extreme partisanship and its powerful negative impact on democracy.

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[1] This process is well summarized in Jacob S Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics, pp 116 ff.

Sliding from Democracy - Part 2: The Golden Years

This is the second post in the series “Sliding from Democracy,” in which I’m examining some of the anti-democratic events of the past forty-five years that have paved the way for the chaos of the Trump presidency.  The first post acknowledged that we have never been a perfect democracy and that some of our undemocratic behavior prior to the 1970s actually foreshadowed our current political crisis. 

In this second post I want to set the stage for our turn away from democracy by examining the unusual period from the Great Depression to the mid-1970s.  I say “unusual” because average Americans benefited much more from government and had a greater impact on governance than at any other time in our history.  It was a time of prosperity for the many and great confidence in our democracy.  Most historians, in fact, believed democracy itself would protect any long-term, stable democracy like ours from backsliding; under normal circumstances, they believed, they could not retrogress.

Unfortunately, that period of confidence left us poorly prepared to recognize the magnitude of the danger of subsequent events.

Historically, and in most countries during most time periods, the wealthy and powerful have either ruled or had enormous power with in government.  As we saw in the last post, even the American Constitution was deliberately written to give the elite outsized power.  Only 6% of the population could vote.  “Democracy” only applied to wealthy landowners.  It wouldn’t be until the early 20th century that women could vote and the 1960s that people of color had, in actual fact, the right  to vote.

Prior to 1930, even with universal suffrage, the wealthy had most of the political power in the United States.  With the world-wide Great Depression and then the destruction that came of World War II, however, this changed dramatically; many of the politically powerful lost much of their wealth and, consequently, some of that power.  This set the stage for the increase in equality that was coming.

During the prosperous years following WWII and up until the 1970s, the income of the average worker rose in tandem with the growth of the economy, which meant that average workers saw regular increases in their standard of living throughout the post-war period.  Retirement and health benefits became the norm.  Income taxes were sharply progressive (ie, the higher the income the higher the rate of taxation), further redistributing wealth.  CEOs made about 20 times as much as their average worker (compared to well over 200 times as much today).

The average workers and the economic elite shared the rises in productivity.

Understandably, trust in government remained steadily high.  The US had won the war and was helping Europe and (to a lesser extent) Japan to rebuild their economies, giving us a sense of magnanimity and power.  Unions were powerful and protected the rights of many workers; government social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, Medicaid, and many others), were either well-established or on the drawing boards.  In the early years of the Lyndon Johnson administration, public trust in government was almost 80%.  Most important, the standard of living for most people was increasing; you could count on your children doing better than you.

Democracy seemed unshakeable. 

Even terrible injustices, such as the Vietnam War, seemed to many of us to be unique exceptions and didn’t destroy our confidence in democracy itself.  To take my own example, I was so opposed to that war that I refused induction into the military, an action that could have led to imprisonment.  I was very aware of the evil of the war.  Nevertheless, even I did not question the system of democracy itself.  We who were against the war just needed to convince the voters. I remember thinking: This is not who we are.  Even through President Nixon’s betrayal in Watergate, I remained confident our democracy would ultimately get through it.  I was not prepared for what came next and was very slow to recognize the danger slouching toward America.

I was not alone.

In the next post, I will explore the stunning explosion in corporate political power that changed American democracy for the foreseeable future.