A soap opera in the Senate

Lindsey Graham said “f***” on live TV. Then a few hours later he said “hooker.” So did my least favorite all-American good boy Ben Sasse. That was neat, I guess.

Otherwise it is difficult to say what the no doubt vanishingly small number of Americans who tuned in for Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday got out of the experience. No one was there to learn anything. MSNBC interrupted Graham’s opening remarks to allow their contributors to pontificate about his world-historic dishonesty. No matter what Barr said he was going to be told by at least one of the Democratic senators who is running for president that he needed to resign.

Kamala Harris’s argument, if I understood it correctly, is that Barr has disgraced himself by making his decision not to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice — which is impossible anyway — largely on the basis of the 450-odd pages of the special counsel investigation’s report rather than after “personally” reviewing each of the millions of individual pieces of evidence. Later she walked into a verbal trap of her own making when she pressed Barr on whether or not Rod Rosenstein, the acting attorney general in charge of the special counsel investigation, ought to have been allowed to take part in the decision about obstruction in the first place. Maybe she agrees with some of the president’s supporters that Rosenstein should have been fired long ago. Who knows.

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Chris Coons (D-Del.) insisted that the three weeks between the conclusion of the Mueller investigation and the release of the full report were “critical.” For whom? The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president from whom his authority flows — not at the direction of the opposition party in Congress or their allies in the media interested in constructing a narrative for the ignorant, willfully or otherwise. No teapot is small enough to accommodate the tempest raised up by Coons and others over Barr’s decision to release the entire Mueller report as soon as possible rather than submit further summaries or excerpts to the press. If it had gone the other way and he had so far only produced the 19-page introduction recommended by Mueller himself in his pompous letter, Democrats would be making the opposite complaint.

There were a lot of temper tantrums. At one point Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) took off his jacket and his glasses in a kind of West Wing parody of how really serious politicians behave during a crisis. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) made a fool of herself by ranting at Barr for the entirety of her allotted time. “You seem to think that,” she said at one point, “if it’s not a crime, it’s not a problem.” The implications of this are almost as terrifying as her suggestion last year that members of the Knights of Columbus should not be allowed to serve as federal judges. She is an embarrassment to her party who should be relieved of her committee assignments.

At one point Cory Booker seemed to give the impression that he thought all contact between presidential candidates and non-Americans should be illegal. This is one of the many bizarre views of which our elected officials have unburdened themselves since the Russian mania began three years ago.

Another one is the new-found faith of Democrats in the ability of special counsel investigations to preserve the American constitutional order — and the equally opportunistic Republican skepticism. It was not so long ago that legal memos were being issued by the Clinton administration arguing — rightly in my view — that a sitting president by definition cannot be indicted for any crime. In those days the obvious bad faith of Ken Starr’s aimless investigation of everything from property deals to lies about bodily fluids was recognized by everyone but the GOP. There was widespread agreement among liberals that Justice Scalia had gotten it right when he excoriated the special counsel mechanism of the Ethics in Government Act as a “wolf [that] comes as a wolf” in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson in 1988.

The president is the head of federal law enforcement. Handing off his powers to the legislative branch — partisan lawmakers looking for an excuse to undermine the administration — will lead inevitably to a constitutional crisis. This is where we find ourselves now.

I for one am glad that the collapse of the American legal order is mostly just boring daytime television. Let's hope it stays that way.