American Politics Is Now Democrats Versus Authoritarians
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Democratic Party now confronts a predicament familiar to democratic political parties in authoritarian states such as Hungary and Russia. As those parties have learned, there is no good answer to the problem.
The proximate cause of the difficulty for Democrats is that Republicans are suddenly fond of subpoenas again. They plan to issue them to “a wide variety of Obama administration officials” in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week: “The American people deserve answers about how such abuses could happen.”
This is a lie, of course. Not the part about subpoenas. The untruth is the notion that imagined past abuses by Obama officials, rather than present abuses by Republican senators, will drive these investigations.
Republicans famously defied subpoenas issued by the House during its attempts to investigate discrete aspects of President Donald Trump’s sprawling criminality. Indeed, even the most somber constitutional endeavor — impeachment — was met with a near-blanket stonewall from the White House, which refused to make documents or personnel available.
In the midst of the current national emergency, the executive branch has largely refused to acknowledge the House, disregarding dozens of letters sent by its committees seeking information on the coronavirus pandemic. At least nine requests to Cabinet officials to attend a hearing, briefing or videoconference have been rejected.
McConnell and his Republican colleagues have aggressively abetted Trump’s lawlessness, including the coverup of his shakedown of Ukraine and the subsequent purge of officials whose professionalism, patriotism or honesty enraged him. Attorney General William Barr is working diligently to supplant the facts of the Mueller investigation into Trump’s dalliance with Russia in 2016 with a wonderland of right-wing fantasy. Meanwhile, armed Trump allies don militia gear to intimidate political opponents.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-politics-now-democrats-vs-120005143.html