Trump, Congress, and the Special Counsel Law

[UPDATE]  Many of you no doubt saw the recent news that Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg met recently with conservative leaders and assured them that Facebook was a strictly non-partisan entity that did not engage in censorship.  It's fair to let you know a link I posted to Facebook to this piece was in fact censored by Facebook shortly after it was posted there.

Almost forty-two years ago, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the office of the presidency.  He did so for two reasons:

• Because a then-extant independent national press corps did its job as protector of the public interest and hounded Nixon mercilessly for months, revealing as it did so the crimes of abuse of the FBI, abuse of the IRS, abuse of the Justice Department, obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury, among other things; and

• There were enough honest, conscientious Republicans in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to ensure Nixon would not only be impeached in the House, but also convicted in the Senate.

Eighteen years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached by a strong Republican majority in the House for most of the same crimes that had forced Nixon’s resignation, but was able to survive in Office for two reasons:

•  Because the national press corps had by then evolved into little more than an issues-advocacy arm of the national Democratic Party, refusing to report on the crimes of both Bill and Hillary Clinton in any meaningful way; and

• There was not a single honest, conscientious Democrat in the Senate who would do the right thing for the country and vote to convict a president from their own political party.

For the last eight years, we have had to stand by and witness as Barack Obama and his Administration commit, time after time after time, all of the crimes that forced Nixon from office – and many more – without congress taking any effective action whatsoever to curb his abuses of office, for two reasons:

• By now, the national “press corps” in fact exists only in memory and fantasy, having evolved at this point into nothing more than a de facto propaganda department for the current Administration, a reality about which Obama officials now shamelessly and publicly brag; and

• The Republican majorities in both houses of congress are too frightened of their own shadows to make any effort to cut through the media fog and make their case to the public.

The evolution – indeed destruction – of what used to be an independent national press corps into a de facto cabinet arm of a Democrat Administration is why we face our current choice for the presidency.  That choice is between a radical, non-politician presumptive GOP nominee who is often as critical of members of his own party as he is of the opposition, and a life-long criminal, most of whose own supporters will admit in private that she is a pathological liar.

Two of the main institutional pillars that have ensured the existence of our uniquely American form of democracy for more than two centuries are the existence of a strong adversarial national press corps and the presumption that the voters would elect men and women who respect the Constitution and who are capable of being shamed for their misbehaviors.  Bill Clinton proved beyond all doubt that a man who lacks the capability for shaming, combined with a press corps that has abandoned its duty as the protector of the public interest in favor of crass partisan politics can survive in the office of the presidency with impunity. 

Barack Obama learned that lesson well and has followed that model religiously with an even more lapdog-tamed press corps for the last eight years.  Hillary Clinton would have to also follow this model in order to stay out of prison, given the damage she has intentionally and knowingly done to our national security, and the influence-peddling racket she and her husband have run via their “Foundation” for the last dozen years.

The one tool that congress used to have at its disposal in order to curb some of the excesses of a criminal administration, the Special Counsel law, was allowed by the GOP-dominated congress to expire late in Bill Clinton’s second term in office.  This law provided for an independent panel made up of three federal judges that would consider the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate alleged executive branch crimes at congress’s request.

True, the law was heinously abused by Democrat-controlled congresses during the Reagan and Bush 41 years, which was the driving factor that led the 1999 congress to let the law expire.  But wouldn’t it have been a nice tool for congress to have had at its disposal over the last six years, as blatant abuses by this president of the IRS, FBI, Justice Department, EPA and Interior Department have gone largely unreported by the news media, and uninvestigated in any real sense by a completely corrupted Justice Department?

Should Donald Trump be fortunate enough to win this election and have GOP majorities in both houses of congress, one of his very first acts in office should be to propose renewal of the special counsel statute, even at the risk of having future Democrat congresses abuse it against Republican presidents.

Republicans like to brag that we respect the Constitution and separation of powers.  With the death of anything resembling an independent press corps, the existence of a special counsel law is one way to help protect the Republic against future outlaw presidencies like the one we have experienced for the last eight years.