Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty)
I’m not a spiritual man, but I do sometimes envy religious people. Not the hypocrites who use religion as a disguise to enact racism and homophobia and whatever the hell Pastor Mark Burns is hocking these days. But the true believers, you know, monks and their like. The world makes sense to them. They wake up every day, they know pretty much what’s going to happen, what they’re going to do about it, and why. “Should I use the monk fighting skills every video game tells me I have to crush this racist Trump supporter?” That would be a really hard question for me to answer. I’d have to essentially recreate an entire moral and ethical code every single time to account for new facts and opportunities. But for the monk, the answer is simple. They have their God and they know what He expects of them. Their only question is how specifically to please Him. I think I would find that kind of order comforting, from time to time.
House Republicans, especially members of the Freedom Caucus, wake up every day and know what is expected of them. They have found their God, their King, their President. He is an angry, fickle God, but one that is not particularly complicated to comprehend. Every day, the only goal of the House Republican is to remake the world in their God’s bigoted, paranoid, irrational image. It must be nice, to know why you are here and what you are meant to do.
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Other people are talking about how the effort to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, led by 11 House Republicans, is stupid and wrong. Republicans are angry at Rosenstein for… existing, but they say they’re angry because he won’t turn over all of his documents to the House. The fact that those documents are part of an ongoing investigation means nothing to the people calling for Rosenstein’s impeachment, but they don’t have the votes to grind the Russia investigation to a halt in the House.
Even Alan Dershowitz, a man who has fully supplicated himself to the Trump God as much as any person, has ripped the effort as “shortsighted” and pointed out that it actually helps Democrats looking to impeach Trump.
This is a bad move. Republican leadership is already moving to table it. Though, it is worth noting that impeachment is one of the few votes you can bring to the House floor without consent of the leadership. They could have a straight up-or-down vote on impeaching Rosenstein today if they really wanted to. But they’d lose and they know it so this isn’t really going anywhere.
And yet I do find myself a little jealous of the House Republican willingness to be stupid even to the point of self-defeating as a measure of pure, unexamined faith. They don’t have the strength of character to light themselves on fire, but they are certainly willing to light you on fire, and are at least willing to be singed themselves in the process. They’d burn down the House just so the ashes couldn’t pass new taxes.
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The Democrats can’t match their commitment. They shut down the government for two days and caved so hard that they immediately gave up the weapon! “We are too weak to use this, let’s pass a budget resolution so we are never again tempted to fight for what we believe in.”
Call the Freedom Caucus stupid if you must. They… are. But they go to work everyday determined to effectuate their stupidity. They’re trying to figure out how to win. The Democrats, who have already lost, seem inspired only by the desire to avoid losing.
House conservatives just made their boldest move yet to undermine the Russia investigation [Washington Post]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.