Much of Attorney General Bill Barr’s dishonest, authoritarian, hour-long speech to The Federalist Society convention Friday was couched in language making it seem that it was the office of the presidency and the Constitution that he was defending. But Barr used the thin veil of “originalism”—the convention’s theme—to gift-wrap yet another attack on the foes not of the office of the presidency but of the actions of the man currently occupying the Oval Office. From his phony summary of the Mueller Report to his failure to recuse himself from the whistleblower investigation Barr has shown himself incapable of performing as a principled attorney general attentive to the rule of law should.
Barr got a standing ovation from the society’s audience. But there was not so much applause elsewhere. For example, Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey was infuriated and tweeted: “Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer. Barr says [T]rump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”
And Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted, “Bill Barr is the type of bare-knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”
Here’s Barr on Friday evening:
Since the mid-60s, there has been a steady grinding down of the Executive branch’s authority, that accelerated after Watergate. More and more, the President’s ability to act in areas in which he has discretion has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches. [...]
“One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this president constantly accuse this administration of shredding constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law,” he said. “Of course there is no substance to these claims.”
“In waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that has engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr said.
Where, one wonders, was Bill Barr when Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court was being blocked for more than nine months by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? Indeed, where was his discussion of congressional overreach when the Republicans in 2009—weeks before Barack Obama took the oath of office—conspired to block everything the new president tried to do, just as Rush Limbaugh suggested?
Barr’s view of the presidency runs counter to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s seminalThe Imperial Presidency in 1973, which argued that modern presidents have exceeded constitutional parameters. Richard Nixon’s rule led to numerous reforms in the 1970s. But those weren’t enough, wrote Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer in a January op-ed in The New York Times:
The president may seem weak, but the presidency remains strong. Mr. Trump has illustrated that even a feeble commander in chief can impose his will on the nation if he lacks any sense of restraint or respect for political norms and guardrails. True, Mr. Trump has not been able to run roughshod over Congress or ignore the constraints of the federal courts. But he has been able to inflict extensive damage on our political institutions and public culture. He has used his power to aggravate, rather than calm, the fault lines that have divided our country. [...]
Mr. Trump has revealed that the president can act “imperially” because norms matter as much as rules and procedure. The reformers of the 1970s missed the ways in which reforms simply cannot restrain a president who doesn’t care about institutions. The most important source of presidential restraint has been the character of the person in office.
For all his flaws, Mr. Nixon was unwilling to tear down the government to save himself. Mr. Trump has revealed that when a president is willing to cross what seemed to be clear lines, no one is there to hold him back.
Certainly Bill Barr has no plans nor inclination to rein in Trump. And, apparently, we can expect him to continue to prettify his stance with invocations of the alleged desires of the Constitution’s framers. Partisan blather is still just blather.