Posted on 12/28/2017 8:20:15 AM PST by Louis Foxwell
Edited on 12/28/2017 8:27:52 AM PST by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
The Mueller Test and the Paper Civil War on Trump A last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest control from the president. December 28, 2017 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow who focuses on Islamic terrorism and the radical left.
The original civil war was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new civil war is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.
From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, from political sabotage at the DOJ by Obama appointees like Sally Yates to Patagonia’s lawsuit over national monuments, the cold civil war set off by the left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.
“The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government,” Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of New York recently declared. The radical leftist pol who had once vowed to do everything possible to elect Hillary Clinton was explaining his hundred lawsuits against the government on everything from net neutrality to the travel ban meant to keep out the Islamic terrorists running over tourists near Ground Zero and bombing commuters in the tunnels off Times Square.
Islamic terrorists have killed thousands of people in New York City in the last two decades. Net neutrality’s current death toll hovers around zero. The Federal government is far less of a threat to New Yorkers than their own government which insists that Islamic terrorists should be able to kill them. But it is a great threat to a class of political lawyers whose ranks include AG Schneiderman, Hawaii’s Judge Derrick Watson, Mueller’s team, Sally Yates, the ACLU and countless other #resistance combatants.
The blatant secessionism of the AG’s premise is no longer extraordinary. Not when California’s Jerry Brown tours the world signing independent environmental treaties. Schneiderman is one of a number of blue state attorney generals who have decided that their primary focus shouldn’t be enforcing the law, but resisting the Federal government. But Scheiderman is also articulating the central tenet of the new #resistance which, despite Antifa’s antics, is more dedicated to legal sabotage than actual violence.
It’s still a paper civil war. For now.
The loss of the two elected branches of government has forced the left to default to the unelected third. Like AG Schneiderman, the left’s legal civil war appears to reject the authority of the Federal government. But despite the posturing, blue staters aren’t serious about seceding. Nor have they become newfound converts to the rights of states to go their own way when they disagree with D.C.
New York and California’s #resistance apparatchiks aren’t rejecting the authority of Federal judges. They’re turning to them and relying on them. Instead they’re rejecting the authority of elected Federal officials. Their secession isn’t Federal, it’s democratic. They want a strong central government. They just aren’t willing to allow the American people to decide who gets to run it.
That’s what the civil war is about.
Will the American people govern themselves? Or will Mueller, Schneiderman, Watson, Yates and ten thousand other elites with law degrees be allowed to turn elections into a meaningless farce?
Federal judges have seized previously unimaginable amounts of power by not only blocking orders that had always been considered an essential part of presidential authority on flimsy premises that when dissected amount to a critique of President Trump’s character (not to mention the sovereign entitlement of the University of Hawaii to set national immigration policy for the entire country based on its urgent need for Syrian grad students), but by demanding that agencies under the control of the President of the United States enact their orders, such as accepting transgender military recruits.
The absurd outcomes of these rulings, that the University of Hawaii can set national immigration policy, but not the President of the United States, and that fitness to serve in the military can be determined by a Federal judge, but not by the military or the commander in chief, are only an irrational side effect of a conflict between the elected branches of government and an unelected class of political lawyers.
The Mueller investigation has to be seen in the context of a battle between the democratic powers of the people to choose their own representatives and the lawyers who actually run the government. Elections are being replaced by investigations and litigation as the engines of government. You don’t need to win an election to investigate elected officials. You don’t need public support to sue either.
Government by litigation and investigation shifts power away from voters to lawyers. What was meant to be a last resort for redressing serious violations instead becomes the primary test for holding political office. When investigation and litigation become more powerful tools than en election, then a politician must court the political legal class ahead of the country’s voters and put his obligations to them first.
That intended outcome is also the cause of the conflict.
President Trump refused to put the political class ahead of the voters. The legal civil war is being fought to reaffirm the centrality of the establishment over the voters. The civil war is a conflict between the political class and the people. It’s a struggle over the tools of government being waged with those tools.
Populism isn’t always a threat to the establishment. Obama’s populism didn’t threaten the establishment because its purpose was to reaffirm its power. Hope and Change just meant building a coalition that would vote for more government power in exchange for political goodies. But Trump’s populism challenges the existence of the establishment and its ability to distribute those goodies.
Politicians often run against the political machine. But most just want to pull the levers. Trump has challenged its power and its existence. And that is what set off the civil war.
Legal conflict is the last stage before physical conflict. The lawyers’ war is a last ditch effort by the establishment to wrest physical control of the government from President Trump. Unable to give the orders as the representatives of the people, the left is asserting every possible valid and invalid legal stratagem to run the government anyway. And to run President Trump out of town.
If its legal gambit fails, the left will default fully to mass protests, street violence and terrorism.
But the beauty of the legal gambit is that it allows the left to make common cause with establishment non-radicals like Mueller or the FBI’s Strzok who disprove of President Trump without sharing the left’s larger political agenda. A civil war fought by lawyers is cleaner and less ugly than one fought with bombs and bullets. If President Trump can survive the lawyers’ war, his opposition will be split between radicals who support violence and an establishment that wants to keep things running.
That is the Mueller test.
If the Democrats can’t sweep into office on the investigation’s coattails, the whole thing dies with a whimper. As Trump reshapes the judiciary, the judicial activism will matter less. The lawyers’ war will either end with the next election. Or it will begin in earnest. And only voter turnout will decide that.
Meanwhile the civil war continues. It’s a civil war fought with paperwork. But its outcome will determine whether the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that President Lincoln invoked in the Gettysburg Address will thrive or “perish from the earth.”
Governments are run by bullets and paper, by force and process. Today’s civil war is still a paper war. But if the paper civil war fails, the rest of it may be fought the same way as the original civil war.
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Yeah. It isn’t bullets....yet.
But, the dumbazzes are pushing it though.
The bag limit on lawyers really needs to be removed.
Lawyers, like other rats, are a scourge on society.
He nails the core of the struggle.
Fantastic article. Trump is the first beachhead attack into the capital since Reagan. Hopefully he can hold, and even extend his position, but the swamp is deep, and he's already been betrayed by some of his own appointees. It's important that we fight even harder than we have so far, after being given this rare opportunity. Call your Congressmen, and let them know whose side you're on, and that you don't consider the battle nearly won yet. The battle is actually just finally being joined.
The same goes for most of the MSM.
If it comes to bullets their side is it going to be very happy
our side has all the bullets all the ammo and all the training
so Democrats better watch out that her play to game right or they will end up dead in the street
Nuff sed
His appointees saw how powerful the deep state is. Some chose to fight it with Trump. Others believe it’s too powerful to defeat so they chose to join it.
The bag limit on lawyers really needs to be removed.
Lawyers, like other rats, are a scourge on society.
If you look at most of our nation’s problems, too many extremist liberal lawyers (many become judges).
It doesn’t matter the subject. Crime? So many get arrested again and again. Our courts are a joke. They protect the criminals. There is no longer a “justice system.” It has become nonsense. Healthcare? You name it? Lawyers are a drain on our society.
DC is a bunch of non-productive types costing us trillions while living off what liberal lawyers have created.
Brilliant and concisely written.
How the Left must hate him.
Doing healthcare reform without tort reform is just...stupid.
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This column needs to be read in the House of Representatives at the same time that articles of impeachment are submitted to remove Derrick Watson.
What is now happening in the judicial system poses a grave threat to our system of government. Dishonest, agenda driven lawyers and judges are our Achilles heal.
I agree. I am particularly incensed at reading “The 9th Circuit Court today issued an injunction against the President’s order...”
He did nail it.
“The Mueller investigation has to be seen in the context of a battle between the democratic powers of the people to choose their own representatives and the lawyers who actually run the government”
This is the core of it. Mueller is part of a conspiracy which was outraged that Trump would have the temerity to think that he could dislodge one of them - a permanent upper class of bureaucratic elites for whom “the law” is merely a tool in their box of control.
That is what they are doing to Trump now: using “the law” in a way that it was never intended to by the Anglo-Protestant founders of the federal union. Not to achieve justice in the case of a real crime but merely as a tool of coercion to deprive their political enemies of power.
Everything that 800 years of legal evolution from the Magna Carta was supposed to have driven out.
This is all evident now from the exposition of the conspiracy within the FBI but which we could all see by the tolerance of Clinton’s own behavior. Comey was the lead conspirator and should have been fired on 21 January 2017 at 0800.
That Trump waited was his own unfamiliarity with the government and the reasonable notion of wanting to have a fig leaf of internal investigation before doing what he KNEW had to be done: get the chief threat to him out of his administration.
We cannot wait for this to play out by tolerating it. That’s their game. Trump and his real allies must stop playing it. He knows that. But he must act soon. Mueller has already discerned that he is somewhat invulnerable, that they can play the threat of impeachment every time someone points out that he’s got nothing and indicting yet more people for obscure paperwork “crimes” isn’t going to change that. Mueller needs to be disabused of this notion of invulnerability, and we start with Rod Rosenstein for that: he was responsible for this, and he let it cross all legal boundaries, so he has to be dismissed and a neutral manager be put in place.
It’s either that or this will devolve into actual shooting, because the government will be seen as a farce.
Ask Senator Steve Scalise if it’s just a word war.
He is certainly that and more. President Trump is The Echo of Our Framers' Uncorrupted President.
But they pick and choose where to resist. The problem is not resisting federal government power, but resisting Trump's efforts to scale back federal government intervention in everything. That is what many of the lawsuits concern. These are not Sharif Arpaios trying to uphold the law, but to use judicial activism to overturn rule of law.
f its legal gambit fails, the left will default fully to mass protests, street violence and terrorism
Like the march on Washington from Charlotesville?
It is ironic that Gandhi's success and Mandela's success were in large measure the result of judges who followed British common law precepts. Here in the U.S. we want to dispose of that common law. A further irony, for those who are fans of Scalia is that Scalia was not a big fan of the common law, preferring statutory law. He was much more of an authoritarian than a genuine conservative. It's the difference between the Napoleonic Code and US Constitutionalism - a heritage we are doing all we can to forget.
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