A great article. Worth clicking over for the whole thing.
Stephen B. Presser:
“…Nevertheless, we are quite likely soon to witness the most important revelations that, as the president has maintained, he has been the wrongful victim of a witch hunt, of a manufactured conspiracy, of an attempt to frame and discredit him by officials of the Obama administration. This is the expected outcome of the report coming soon from the DOJ’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who is likely to report that criminal acts were performed in the original surveillance of the president and his aides on fabricated evidence of Russian involvement in his campaign.
This report, coupled with the recent transformation of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the beginnings of that surveillance into a criminal investigation, is, according to some astute observers, likely finally to result in grand jury indictments and trials of some senior officials, and may turn out to be the greatest political scandal of our era.
Even when this happens, however, and even if many independent and objective observers become convinced that great wrongs were perpetrated against this president, his most rabid detractors are likely to be unmoved. His principal tormentors, Congressmen Adam Schiff and Jerold Nadler, with exquisite chutzpah, have already denounced Durham’s investigation and Attorney General Bill Barr’s similar efforts, as a wrongful politicization of our criminal law.
What could account for such spectacular hypocrisy or, to be a bit kinder, such obduracy on the part of the Democrats? I have sought to argue here that what is going on is an ideological battle, one where reality is colored by cultural preferences, where one sees only what one wants to see, and where, given the now clear lines drawn between conservatives and liberals on charged matters such as race, religion, abortion, gender, wealth redistribution, and regulation, political compromise seems impossible.
And yet — if it is true that partisans in the Obama administration flagrantly and wrongly twisted the law to serve their own selfish political ends, perhaps this sorry episode will offer an opportunity for the nation to make a long-overdue renewal of commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution itself.
For too long all three branches of our government have been rejecting prior precedent, and have been making up law, policy, and procedure out of whole cloth, and the same has been true in many of our administrative agencies — the bureaucracy and the “deep state,” so much lamented by Mr. Trump.
All of this has led to the arbitrary actions most feared by our framers, an alarming loss of state and local political power, and a concomitant failure of local governance, as many of our cities become increasingly unlivable.
If the revelations of wrongdoing are as dramatic as expected, they just might shock Americans into realizing that the 2020 elections ought to be about returning this country to more honest, and, perhaps, more modest federal government, and restoring the original Constitutional doctrines of federalism and separation of powers…”