When Originalists Say "Kings are Good, Actually"

I'm not even a "simple country lawyer" like Oxford-trained good ol' boy Louisiana Senator John Kennedy tries to pass himself off as, but I do have to say that when Trump's other personal lawyer AG Bill Barr tells me in his Federalist Society speech on originalism that our grade-school civics education regarding the anti-monarchism of the Founding Fathers is way off base, I kind of think back on that Declaration of Independence letter that was written during a hot Philadelphia summer and reads like a "Dear George" letter to run down the English monarch for all his abrogating of citizen's rights and think to myself: Who the fuck is Barr kidding here? 

Now, I don't doubt the fine education and vast experience Barr has at being a dogsbody for privilege. I'm just saying that even if claims of Washington refusing a crown were overstated, the founders were, doubtless, republicans. If they were not, why were oversight (as part of the implied powers) and impeachment (as part of the explicit powers) ever considered the constitutional remit of Congress, and why was a Bill of Rights a part of our Constitution? (Because, unless I'm really mistaken, calling yourself a Federalist and not actually understanding the limits of any government with respect to individual rights is just irony, no?) We've all learned our little lessons about "check and balanced" in grade school, and then you get to a certain level of "big boy" education and, as the gang at the Badda Bing say, "Fuhgeddaboudit"?

Ah, Billy, you slay me. Just admit that the whole "unitary executive" thing means you want all powers invested in a Republican president, and all taken away from a Democratic one out loud in simple language we all understand, and believe me, your audience will still approve, and you will not have said a single thing different from what liberals understood from that.

I've called this attitude "nihilism" previously. I still consider it so. Does it rely on truth, or outcomes, consider the future, respect tradition, take in the full scope of the past, answer to the demands of the present? Nope. He's just giving reasons why he's going to render unto Trump as if he were Caesar, even though he demonstratively gives lip-service to God.  After all, for the theocrat, are they not, in some ways, one and the same? 

In the same rough respect that the founders would have given limited space to religion, separating it from matters of state, they also would not have removed a president (a mere human with faults) from accountability. Would the people who decried "taxation without representation" have been satisfied with a government they paid for, but could not audit? What sense does that make? Where the hell was the money of our gentlemen farmers and mercantile ministers going--they would have asked! And they were people of civilization as well, they considered how their actions and decision would reverberate through history. This impact mattered to them; Barr's POV is short-sighted. 

As I read about this speech, I also read that Trump, who boasted about permitting torture and more, pardoned soldiers accused of war crimes, over the objection of the Pentagon.  He doesn't care about human rights or military discipline or how our actions are perceived by ally or enemy alike, so this means nothing more than a macho gesture supposedly aimed at gaining military support by giving them "liberty" to do what they like to "others". I read about the way migrant families were being separated at our border, perhaps for good. I remembered when researching to write about the camps migrants were kept in under Trump,  reading that the administration wanted migrant families to be kept at Gitmo, like some kind of enemy combatants.  A camp for migrants, to mirror a top adviser's appreciation of the racist novel Camp of the Saints? 

The unitary executive issue takes me back, uncomfortably, to where we were during the George W. Bush years, when attorney John Yoo could not quite understand why a president might order a child's testicles crushed, but, like a badly-programmed robot, also knew there should somehow be a reason why he should be able to. (And he's back against impeachment, because we don't ever allow power-glorifying hacks to ever really go away, do we?) But here is why a president might request people do any appalling thing:

The president could be woefully ignorant.

The president could be medically impaired.

The president could be compromised in favor of a foreign government.

The president could be criminally corrupt. 

The president could be psychologically unfit.

To which I might add, the president could be Donald Trump, who might answer to any of the above reasons or all of them. 

This takes me back even further to my pre-2009 feelings when Barr brings up Boumediene as a bad decision. How comfortable would any person having been part of a rebellion against colonialist government be at disrupting rights without any due process? (Especially whilst kvetching that Trump wasn't getting some kind of due process himself, vis a vis impeachment, when he's got all kinds of opportunities to put his own case out to the public via the bully pulpit and sure is, honey). 

Fuck Barr and his Pat Buchanan-level KulturKampf speeches which once would have even been considered by many Republicans a bridge too far. Screw his pious mouthings about our founders and religion. His job is the law, not men, and he sacrifices the law, to serve the man, Trump, while other human beings are disregarded by his kind of law everywhere--he does not serve the people. Trump should pay him from his own pocket, not us.