Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Injustice

There are multiple long and medium term troubles caused by the rampant ill-government and corruption of the Trump Administration. While the focus has been on Trump's reactionary judges, an equally large concern is the decline of competent civil servants. There has been a mass exodus from the State Department, for instance.

Nothing is more concerning as we lead up to the 2020 election than the apparently complete co-optation of the Justice Department. In the aftermath of Nixon's abuse of the Justice Department during Watergate, certain reforms were instituted to insure that the DOJ could not be "politicized."  Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening now.

Authoritarian regimes routinely use a politicized legal process to discredit their opponents.  Putin routinely locks up opposition candidates that threaten to get embarrassing vote totals, much less openly defeat him.  Xi Xinping uses kangaroo courts to thwart domestic political rivals.  Trump is clearly angling for the same sort of Justice Department that will act as his personal legal team rather than serve as impartial servants of the law.

Hopefully, a Democrat wins next November, and we are able to pry Trump's fat ass out of the Oval Office.  However, a great deal of reforms that someone like Bernie Sanders is proposing are dependent on a Senate that is unlikely to help him out. Instituting governmental reforms, however, might be something that Republicans could support, once Trump is out of power.

Then again, betting money on Republicans to do the right thing is a great way to lose money.

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