Trump’s Giant Loophole: Executive Control Of The Judicial Branch Is The Final Step To Tyranny

What happens when the judiciary is captured — and the bad guys are true fascists? Well, they turn the law itself into an instrument of violence.

[Editor’s Note: This is an extremely important article to read and consider. Few people really understand the most dangerous moment we are facing in this nation. Whether by bumbling stupid luck or strategic calculation, Donald Trump has pushed the nation to the abyss of totalitarian fascism and time is short. — Mark L. Taylor]

By Umair Haque
Medium (10/25/19)

In case you didn’t notice, yesterday [10/24] was an especially dark day for America democracy. The Attorney General announced that his “administrative review” into the Russia inquiry was now a “criminal investigation.”

Let’s take it slow — even if you think you know all this stuff — to really understand it, because there are many, many layers of bureaucracy to penetrate here. The FBI launched an investigation of the President, which came to be known as the Mueller Report. Now, Mueller did a strange thing: he announced before he even finished that report, that he wouldn’t make a formal judgment. And he didn’t — though he did say he couldn’t find the President innocent of wrongdoing. Pundits took that to be “an impeachment referral” — but if it was anything of the sort, it was the weakest in history.

How do authoritarians gain the power to terrorize a people? Some use guns — the dumb ones. But the smart ones don’t have to. They just become the law. When the mafia is the law — who doesn’t live in fear?

In retaliation, Trump fired an AG who wouldn’t do what he wanted — stop, stall, or stymy the investigation into him, Jeff Sessions, and appointed a more pliant substitute. That substitute is now investigating the investigators, for “criminal” wrongdoing. What the?

Now, you don’t have to be the world’s greatest fan of Robert Mueller — Lord knows I’m not — to see something very, very troubling with this picture. What, precisely?

When the extremists capture the judiciary, my friends — that’s more often than not the final step in a true authoritarian collapse. The corrosion and capture of the judicial branch of government is one of the final steps in any true authoritarian collapse. And the AG investigating the investigators of a corrupt, unhinged President — as a criminal matter — that is the weaponization of the judicial branch. It is the use of the judicial branch as a political nuclear bomb. It crosses all the red lines of a democracy.

What happens when the mafia become the law? That, my friends, is a pretty good definition of authoritarianism. What happens when the fascists become the law? That’s a pretty good definition of even more extreme authoritarianism, ready and willing to use violence to rip a society apart. The question now is: which one of those destinations is America heading towards? …

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20 Lessons From The 20th Century

 

“#3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.”

— Timothy Snyder, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century on How to Survive in Trump’s America.