Trump, Barr, and the Rule of Law
Serving as Trump’s Attorney General—and keeping the job—seems to mean treating anything that does not serve his interests as an urgent threat.
By Margaret Talbot 5:00 A.M.
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What Trump denounces as “Presidential harassment” is, in fact, the means by which our government, with its coequal branches, works. But the way he talks about those branches makes them sound as divorced from the public good as he is. He refers to the Supreme Court, with his two appointees, as a venue in which he’ll get “a fair shake,” which he doesn’t seem to think the lower courts offer.
In March, the Washington Post reported that federal courts had ruled against the Administration sixty-three times, “an extraordinary record of legal defeat” that Trump blamed on “Obama judges”—even though a quarter of the judges are Republican appointees, and the defeats resulted from a sloppy approach to rule-making and his own prejudicial comments on immigration and other matters.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/13/trump-barr-and-the-rule-of-law
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