And he’s on a mission to use the “authority” of the executive branch to stop it.
Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American history? And why has this particular attorney general appeared at this pivotal moment in our Republic?
A deeper understanding of William Barr is emerging, and it reveals something profound and disturbing about the evolution of conservatism in 21st-century America.
Some people have held that Mr. Barr is simply a partisan hack — willing to do whatever it takes to advance the interests of his own political party and its leadership. This view finds ample support in Mr. Barr’s own words. In a Nov. 15 speech at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, he accused President Trump’s political opponents of “unprecedented abuse” and said they were “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”
It is hardly the first time Mr. Barr stepped outside of long-established norms for the behavior of attorneys general. In his earlier stint as attorney general, during the George H.W. Bush presidency, Mr. Barr took on the role of helping to disappear the case against Reagan administration officials involved in the Iran-contra affair. The situation demonstrated that “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office,” according to Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in that case. According to some critics, Mr. Barr delivered the partisan goods then, as he is delivering them now.
Another view is that Mr. Barr is principally a defender of a certain interpretation of the Constitution that attributes maximum power to the executive. This view, too, finds ample support in Mr. Barr’s own words. In the speech to the Federalist Society, he said, “Since the mid-’60s, there has been a steady grinding down of the executive branch’s authority that accelerated after Watergate.” In July, when President Trump claimed, in remarks to a conservative student group, “I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” it is reasonable to suppose this is his CliffsNotes version of Mr. Barr’s ideology.
Both of these views are accurate enough. But at least since Mr. Barr’s infamous speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, in which he blamed “secularists” for “moral chaos” and “immense suffering, wreckage and misery,” it has become clear that no understanding of William Barr can be complete without taking into account his views on the role of religion in society. For that, it is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion.
In Maryland, the department rushed to defend taxpayer funding for a religious school that says same-sex marriage is wrong. In Maine, it is defending parents suing over a state law that bans religious schools from obtaining taxpayer funding to promote their own sectarian doctrines. At his Department of Justice, Mr. Barr told law students at Notre Dame, “We keep an eye out for cases or events around the country where states are misapplying the establishment clause in a way that discriminates against people of faith.”
In these and other cases, Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the “religious liberty” rhetoric of today’s Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke “religious freedom,” it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.
This form of “religious liberty” seeks to foment the sense of persecution and paranoia of a collection of conservative religious groups that see themselves as on the cusp of losing their rightful position of dominance over American culture. It always singles out groups that can be blamed for society’s ills, and that may be subject to state-sanctioned discrimination and belittlement — L.G.B.T. Americans, secularists and Muslims are the favored targets, but others are available. The purpose of this “religious liberty” rhetoric is not just to secure a place of privilege, but also to justify public funding for the right kind of religion.
Barr watchers will know that this is nothing new. In a 1995 article he wrote for The Catholic Lawyer, which, as Emily Bazelon recently pointed out, appears to be something of a blueprint for his speech at Notre Dame, he complained that “we live in an increasingly militant, secular age” and expressed his grave concern that the law might force landlords to rent to unmarried couples. He implied that the idea that universities might treat “homosexual activist groups like any other student group” was intolerable.
This form of “religious liberty” is not a mere side issue for Mr. Barr, or for the other religious nationalists who have come to dominate the Republican Party. Mr. Barr has made this clear. All the problems of modernity — “the wreckage of the family,” “record levels of depression and mental illness,” “drug addiction” and “senseless violence” — stem from the loss of a strict interpretation of the Christian religion.
The great evildoers in the Notre Dame speech are nonbelievers who are apparently out on the streets ransacking everything that is good and holy. The solutions to society’s ills, Mr. Barr declared, come from faith. “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct,” he said. “Religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.” He added, “The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.”
Within this ideological framework, the ends justify the means. In this light, Mr. Barr’s hyperpartisanship is the symptom, not the malady. At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, the Democratic Party and its supporters are routinely described as “demonic” and associated with “rulers of the darkness.” If you know that society is under dire existential threat from secularists, and you know that they have all found a home in the other party, every conceivable compromise with principles, every ethical breach, every back-room deal is not only justifiable but imperative. And as the vicious reaction to Christianity Today’s anti-Trump editorial demonstrates, any break with this partisan alignment will be instantly denounced as heresy.
It is equally clear that Mr. Barr’s maximalist interpretation of executive power in the Constitution is just an effect, rather than a cause, of his ideological commitments. In fact, it isn’t really an interpretation. It is simply an unfounded assertion that the president has what amount to monarchical powers. “George III would have loved it,” said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine who once held Mr. Barr’s position as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, of Mr. Barr’s theory. It’s almost beside the point to note, as the conservative lawyers group Checks & Balances recently wrote, that Mr. Barr’s view of history “has no factual basis.”
Mr. Barr’s constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism. And that, really, gets to the heart of the matter. If you know anything about America’s founders, you know they were passionately opposed to the idea of a religious monarchy. And this is the key to understanding the question, “What does Bill Barr want?”
The answer is that America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about “originalism” and “judicial restraint” — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices.
Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus. Mr. Barr did not emerge in order to serve this one particular leader. On the contrary, Mr. Trump serves a movement that will cynically praise the Constitution in order to destroy it, and of which Mr. Barr has made himself a hero.
This Ohio farmer is considering a run against Rep. Jim Jordan
Christopher Gibbs, a farmer and former GOP official in Ohio, is now mulling a run against one of President Trump’s fiercest defenders, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). Gibbs voted for Trump in 2016 but lost faith in the midst of the trade war. #CNN #News
Does Roy Cohn Rule The Oval Office From The Grave? | Conversations with Jim Zirin
Roy Cohn was an unscrupulous lawyer who knew how
to beat the system. As a lawyer, he lit up the town
representing mobsters, prelates and his poster child
client Donald Trump. For 15 years Cohn was Trump’s
lawyer, fixer and political mentor. Cohn’s cousin, journalist
David Marcus, knows everything knowable about him.
He compares and contrasts for Jim Zirin the many parallels
between Trump’s combative tactics in office and the Roy
Cohn he observed in action.(Taped: 10/21/2019 )
Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment”
says well we’ve had all these years ofwarfare over religion we’ll stop askingimportant questions and all thesedecades these centuries after theEnlightenment here’s the world we’vereached this is the way I read you youcan correct my reading but let me finishquoting you instead of violent warsthere could be violent video gamesinstead of heroic featsthere could be thrilling amusement parkrides instead of serious thought therecould be intrigues of all sortsin a soap opera it is a world wherepeople spend their lives amusingthemselves to death close quotenow that is a devastating indictment ofmuch of contemporary America correctwell it is I mean I think this has been06:59the trend of modernity now it’s it’s07:02it’s not as though politics has07:04disappeared though it’s it’s often just07:05gets displaced in various ways but but07:08yes I think there is this this07:10incredible degree to which we’ve we’ve07:14we’ve substituted the realities of07:18politics for these sort of increasingly07:20fictionalized worlds and and it’s07:23probably uh that’s probably a very very07:25unhealthy thing there’s sort of a07:27slightly different frame that I’ve often07:29given on this is is that in in the last07:3340 or 50 years there’s been a shift from07:36exteriority which I which you know doing07:41things in the real world to the sort of07:43interior world which is sort of in a way07:46can be thought of this also the shift07:47from politics to entertainment or07:50something like that and and the the from07:54a dr. Phil a the powerful frame I give07:57is you know almost exactly 50 years ago08:00today and you know July of 1969 men08:03reached the moon and three weeks later08:05Woodstock began and with the benefit of08:07hindsight we can say that that’s when08:10you know progress ended and when the08:12hippies took over the country or08:14something like that and then we’ve had08:16we’ve had this incredible shift to08:18interior tea in the decades since then I08:20would include things like the drug08:22counterculture I would include08:24videogames you know maybe a lot of08:27entertainment more generally you know08:30there’s sort of parts of the internet08:31that can be scored both ways but but08:34certainly there all these things where08:36we’ve shifted towards the you know your08:39world of yoga meditation there’s a world08:41of interior culture that sort of and it11:04Rene Girard is in some ways theaddresses an aspect of human nature wellit’s it’s good it’s the very thing thatthe Enlightenment says no no don’t eventhink about such things rightyeah well the Enlightenment alwayswhitewashes violence it’s one of thethere are many things we can’t thinkabout an under Enlightenment reason butone one is certainly violence itself andand if you go to the anthropologicalmyth of the Enlightenment it’s the mythof the social contract so what happenswhen everybody is that everybody’selse’s throat what the Enlightenmentsays is everybody in the middle of thecrisis sits down and has a nice legalchat and draws up a social contract andthat’s maybe maybe that’s the foundingmyth the central lie of theEnlightenment if you will and whatGerrard says something very differentmust have happened and when everybody’sat everybody’s throat the violencedoesn’t just resolve itself and maybe itgets channeled against a a specificscapegoat where the war of all againstall becomes a war can of all against oneand then somehow gets resolved but in ain a very violent way and so I think youknow what what Gerrard and Schmidt orMachiavelli or you know the12:18judeo-christian inspiration all have in12:20common is this idea that human nature is12:22problematic its violent it’s um you know12:25it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s not12:27straightforward at all what what you do