Reckoning

 Josh Marshall lays out a case for NOT prosecuting Trump for wrongdoing during his presidency. There is a mealy-mouthed article from NBC suggesting Biden doesn't want to be bogged down re-litigating Trumpistan. The broader point of the NBC piece is true: the President should not direct the Department of Justice in their prosecutions. Presumably, there are a small mountain of charges facing Trump from tax evasion to money-laundering to accepting bribes to fraud that he will no longer be shielded from once he leaves office. Biden is right to take a hands-off approach to this. If crimes are just sitting there waiting to be prosecuted, I don't think Biden will stop them.

Marshall makes the point that Biden would prefer to "move forward" with a policy agenda that address real problems that Americans are facing. Sure. If he has the votes in the Senate, go for it.

My bigger concern is that we have normalized a certain amount of Republican lawlessness. Robert Bork was the hatchet man of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, and Reagan nominated him to be Supreme Court Justice. His rejection by the Senate remains a cause celebre among the Right. Several figures from Iran-Contra, Elliott Abrams springs to mind, showed up in Bush's fustercluck in Iraq. Obama made a decision not to prosecute the Torture Regime under Bush and now sociopathic asshats like John Yoo and John Bolton are still part of the Conservative Establishment.

If Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions and others are not tried for human rights violations for what they did on the southern border, then their behavior gets normalized. If Richard Barr's politicization of the Justice Department is simply exposed and not prosecuted, then his behavior gets normalized.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" only works if both sides of the aisle agree that germs and infections are bad. That's simply not the case anymore.