CT Blue

His politics weren’t so great, if I’m not mistaken, but T.S. Eliot got it right when he wrote this:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Maybe “whimper” should be in the plural, but we can put that aside. The latest whimper is yet another sign that our judiciary has decided that there are one set of rules for Democrats, and no rules for Republicans:

A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Congress could not sue to enforce its subpoenas of executive branch officials, handing a major victory to President Trump and dealing a severe blow to the power of Congress to conduct oversight.

In a ruling that could have far-reaching consequences for executive branch secrecy powers long after Mr. Trump leaves office, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed a lawsuit brought by the House Judiciary Committee against Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II.

On Mr. Trump’s instructions, Mr. McGahn defied a House subpoena seeking to force him to testify about Mr. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation. The House sued him, seeking a judicial order that he show up to testify, and won in district court in November.

But two of the three appeals court judges ruled on Friday that the Constitution gave the House no standing to file any such lawsuit in what they characterized as a political dispute with the executive branch. If their decision stands, its reasoning would shut the door to judicial recourse whenever a president directs a subordinate not to cooperate with congressional oversight investigations.

“Far reaching” isn’t the half of it. This is a declaration by Republican appointed judges that Republican presidents are subject to no limits. They can do as they like without consequence. Make no mistake, had the case concerned a Democratic president the outcome would have been different. The courts have now been so packed with Republican appointees that they are secure in the knowledge that they can get away with a double standard without consequence to them, at least in the short term.

In the long term, this decision, along with its brethren already decided and yet to come, paves the way for a dictatorship in which even those judges may find that they are deemed unnecessary by a president wielding untrammeled authority. Trump alone is too incompetent to have established that dictatorship on his own, but he has been enabled by a party more intent on retaining power and supporting autocracy than preserving democracy.

Our last hope is that we beat him in November. That’s why it’s so infuriating that we continue to hear people on “our side” insist that they will stay home unless their candidate gets the nomination.