Merrick Garland

In two weeks, with great sorrow, our nation will mark the second anniversary of the culmination of an unprecedented self-coup attempt by a sitting president: the January 6 Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths. The callous barbarism we witnessed that day was nothing less than a brazen assault on the fountainhead of American self-governance, the Constitution. No amount of Tucker Carlson’s documentaries or Revolver News clickbait can change that inconvenient fact. Conservatives who dismiss what happened as nothing more than a false flag operation designed to initiate a “patriot purge” are doing themselves a grave disservice. Since July of last year, the January 6 Committee has been charged with investigating the events of the fateful day and what precipitated it.

What would you do if you were Merrick Garland? Would you prosecute Trump? Or would you walk away, concerned you were playing politics? Step one appears easy: put off any decision until after the midterms. Trump is not a candidate, key issues driving the midterms (inflation, Roe) are not his issues, and while Trump is actively stumping for many candidates, initiating any prosecution before the midterms is just too obvious. Nothing else about Mar-a-Lago has had an urgency to it (months passed from the initial voluntary turnover of documents and the forced search) and announcing an indictment now would be a terrible opening move. So if you're Garland, you have some time.

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids. The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

Get it yet? The point of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the January 6 hearings is all about one man. Nope, not Donald Trump: Merrick Garland. Either the FBI is trying to get Garland to indict Trump for something, and failing that to indict the highest ranking person near Trump, or Garland is already on the case himself. The reason for this is that nothing else worked. Democrats pointed the full national security apparatus at Trump, with the FBI doing yeoman-like work. They turned Robert Mueller loose with unlimited resources for a full year, going as far as to suggest Trump had obstructed an investigation that found him innocent. Alice in Wonderland stuff, that.

If you followed the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Merrick Garland, or the news after Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, you might have concluded that the country has never been more divided on what makes a good Supreme Court justice. Kavanaugh’s hearings were among the most divisive and brutal in history, but he at least had a hearing: Garland’s nomination was dead on arrival in the Senate. The selection of justices has become a preeminent political issue.

Attorney General Merrick Garland was confirmed to the top post in the Department of Justice in March 2021 by a Senate vote of 70-30. Twenty Republicans crossed party lines to vote for President Joe Biden's nominee, who was previously denied a seat on the Supreme Court during the Obama administration. Here are the Republicans who voted to confirm Garland: Sen. Roy Blunt Sen. Richard Burr Sen. Shelley Moore Capito Sen. Bill Cassidy Sen. Susan Collins Sen. John Cornyn Sen. Joni Ernst Sen. Lindsey Graham Sen. Chuck Grassley Sen. Jim Inhofe Sen. Ron Johnson Sen. James Lankford Leader Mitch McConnell Sen. Jerry Moran Sen. Lisa Murkowski Sen. Rob Portman Sen. Mitt Romney Sen. Mike Rounds Sen. John Thune Sen.

‘Oh the hypocrisy!’ cried the Democrats after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would bring President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee to the floor for confirmation hearings and a vote ahead of the election. The screeching continued as swing vote after swing vote — Sens. Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley and Mitt Romney, for example — said they also supported taking a vote. Republicans are indeed treating the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away on Friday night, far differently than they did the one left by Antonin Scalia in 2016. The GOP had control of the Senate then, too, but refused to advance President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, citing the proximity of the presidential election.

When you have power in Washington DC, use it. That saying is true for both parties. There has been much distress on social media in the past few hours, with people declaring that a Supreme Court vacancy prior to this election will tear the country apart, putting unimaginable stress on the Republic as it attempts to hold together in the face of Trumpism. TikTok users are screaming into their phones while driving. CNN personalities are threatening to ‘burn the entire thing down’ if Mitch McConnell attempts to push through a nominee. Writer Laura Bassett proclaimed that ‘if McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots.’ That seems a threat more than a prediction.

Inquiring minds want to know: should Nancy Pelosi, who has hitherto prudently fended off calls from her left flank for impeaching Trump, adopt the lesser tack of launching an impeachment inquiry? Progressives want progress, which is to say they’re intent on ousting Trump from office by any means necessary. Their thinking is that starting an inquiry may not be tantamount to impeachment, but will help erode Trump’s defiance of Congress, thereby allowing it to inform the public of his various transgressions. Trump has instructed his former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II not to meet Congress, an edict he obeyed this morning to the vexation of Jerry Nadler, the head of the House Judiciary Committee.