Anyone Who Says They Know What Will Happen Tuesday Is Lying

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

12 December 17

The Roy Moore show rattles on.

icky Martin worked the high iron. He helped build nuclear plants all over the South, but especially in Alabama, where he was from. At the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Station in Hollywood, he worked almost 520 feet off the ground. Martin was a Democrat for most of his life, until 1980. “My union,” he said, “told me I had to vote for Jimmy Carter. I couldn’t do that.”

One day on the job at Bellefonte, however, Ricky fell 38 feet and wound up in the hospital for six months. Ricky's brother visited him there and often brought his girlfriend. The girlfriend often brought Toni, her best friend. Ricky and Toni hit it off, even though he was five years older than she. They began dating, and soon married. Meanwhile, Toni’s brother became a big noise in state politics. His name was Roy Moore, and that’s how Ricky Martin comes to know that nothing people are saying about his brother-in-law is true, especially not that part about the Gadsden Mall.

“They said he got banned from the mall, and even the security people there said that wasn’t the case,” Martin said. “The only reason Roy went there was because Toni wanted to meet up with her friends and her mother didn’t want her to go there alone, so she sent Roy along to make sure Toni was alright.”

Martin had come to the First Baptist Church of Gallant for Sunday services. Usually, Roy Moore is there, too, which is why the parking lot was full of camera crews and strangers with notepads on this particular Sunday. Above the media, black turkey vultures circled, which struck me as somewhat redundant. But Roy Moore was nowhere in sight. In fact, on this, the final weekend of Alabama’s special election for the seat in the United States Senate vacated by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Moore was preposterously hard to find.

His opponent, Democratic former prosecutor Doug Jones, has been all over the state. He has brought in surrogates; Senator Cory Booker and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick were with him over the weekend. He is substantially outspending Moore but, with all the energy he’s been putting into the effort, Jones has been campaigning against a ghost, and he currently trails the ghost by an eyelash. Moore has been running a virtual campaign, depending upon the great advantages held by any Republican candidate here and a network of conservative evangelicals, most definitely including the folks at his hometown church.

“I kind of resent all the national attention,” said Mary (“This is not an alias. This is my real name!”) Smith. “Alabama politics should be left up to Alabama people. National people shouldn’t have anything to do with it. They shouldn’t have any say in what we decide to do.”

Of course, the national attention has been drawn to this race because the Alabama people who voted in the primary election for this seat nominated a guy who twice was removed as chief justice of the state supreme court, essentially for behaving more like a public nullifier than anyone has since Governor George Corley Wallace stood in the doorway of the state university in Tuscaloosa. And, just this Sunday, CNN dug up a 2011 interview Moore did with a nutball radio program from Maine in which he expressed his Constitutional vision which, as it turns out, reaches all the way back to 1860.

Moore made his comments about constitutional amendments in a June 2011 appearance on the "Aroostook Watchmen" show, which is hosted by Maine residents Jack McCarthy and Steve Martin. The hosts have argued that the US government is illegitimate and who have said that the September 11, 2001, attacks, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, and other mass shootings and terrorist attacks are false flag attacks committed by the government. (False flag attacks refer to acts that are designed by perpetrators to be made to look like they were carried out by other individuals or groups.) The hosts have also spread conspiracy theories about the raid that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden and have pushed the false claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in the US.

The reception in their fillings must have been excellent that day.

In Moore's June appearance, one of the hosts says he would like to see an amendment that would void all the amendments after the Tenth. "That would eliminate many problems," Moore replied. "You know people don't understand how some of these amendments have completely tried to wreck the form of government that our forefathers intended." Moore cited the 17th Amendment, which calls for the direct election of senators by voters rather than state legislatures, as one he particularly found troublesome.

The host agreed with Moore, before turning his attention to the 14th Amendment, which was passed during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War and guaranteed citizenship and equal rights and protection to former slaves and has been used in landmark Supreme Court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges. "People also don't understand, and being from the South I bet you get it, the 14th Amendment was only approved at the point of the gun," the host said.

"Yeah, it had very serious problems with its approval by the states," Moore replied. "The danger in the 14th Amendment, which was to restrict, it has been a restriction on the states using the first Ten Amendments by and through the 14th Amendment. To restrict the states from doing something that the federal government was restricted from doing and allowing the federal government to do something which the first Ten Amendments prevented them from doing. If you understand the incorporation doctrine used by the courts and what it meant. You'd understand what I'm talking about.

And all of that happened before the Washington Post broke the story of Moore’s alleged sexual trysts with underage girls. Then, the #MeToo moment exploded around the country, especially in Washington, effectively nationalizing the charges against Moore. Never one merely to observe confusion when he can leap in and transform it into utter chaos, the president* belatedly came to Moore’s aid. And there is still the powerful engine of support that a network of conservative churches on which Moore can call. There are so many forces at play here, both openly and deeply beneath the surface, that anyone who says they know what will happen Tuesday is lying.

There is no doubt about Roy Moore here in the hills north of Birmingham. Not in Greasy Cove, or Rainbow City, or in Gallant, an unincorporated census designation named by the descendants of an Acadian who was expelled from eastern Canada by the British in 1755. In the hills and hollows, cows and horses graze uphill and down, at odd angles, in the fields of huge ranches. Everybody at church on Sunday knows everybody else, and they all know Roy Moore. On Tuesday, Pastor Tom Brown is going to drive a busload of them from the church to Moore’s election night soiree in Montgomery.

“I was asked by some of our members who are unable to drive if it could be done,” said Brown, a brisk fellow with a proud antebellum goatee. “They’re all paying for the gas and I’m driving.” Moore hasn’t been to church in nearly a month, but Brown doesn’t have a problem with that.

“Look at y’all,” Brown laughs. “Would you come to church and face this?

“Of course, I pray for him. I pray for everybody. I pray for all the politicians, and all the law enforcement people, too. I pray for his family and for the families of those women, too. I mean, it’s tough going through this, and it’s tough on his mother, who’s 90 years old. That’s something for y’all to think about—it’s not just him, but it’s his family, too.”

Ricky Martin’s faith in his brother-in-law is unshakable because he knows the real reason Roy Moore is running, and he knows it isn’t the reason the rest of the country thinks it is. "We asked him, 'Why do you want to go to Washington, D.C.?' And he said, 'I don’t want to. I was asked to do it. I was called to do it.'"

Theirs is a faith unshakable, both in the church and in their neighbor, both bulwarks against a strange, changing alien world beyond the rolling screen of the hills. There’s a power in that faith. It's unseen and it moves people, and it’s a fool who underestimates what it can move them to do.

The Mueller Investigation Is in Mortal Danger

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

12 December 17

 

f there was any single event that would cause the Republican elite to openly revolt against the ongoing Trumpification of their party, it would be the nomination of Roy Moore for U.S. Senate in Alabama. Even prior to the allegations of child molestation, Moore had discovered innovative new realms of extremism that had never occurred to even his most ideologically fervent colleagues. He proposed banning Muslims from serving in elected office, called for the criminalization of homosexuality, and defied court rulings and declared his own biblical jurisprudence the sole valid legal authority.

And if that revolt was going to begin anywhere, it would likely be in Utah. The state’s Mormon culture recoiled from Donald Trump’s libidinous boasting, erratic behavior, and displays of extravagant consumption. Between the 2012 and 2016 elections, Utah’s Republican presidential margin underwent an astonishing 28 percent collapse.

Orrin Hatch, who has represented Utah in the Senate since 1977, greeted Moore’s candidacy in this year’s election with skepticism. (“I have trouble with” Moore’s comments on gays and Muslims, he said in October.) Once evidence surfaced of Moore’s alleged predation of teenage girls, Hatch pulled the rip cord. “If the deeply disturbing allegations in the Washington Post are true, Senator Hatch believes that Judge Moore should step aside immediately,” his spokesman declared.

But even in Utah, there were forces at work to make Hatch reconsider. He was facing a potential primary challenge from a Trumpian candidate who had met with party insurrectionist Steve Bannon and Citizens United president David Bossie. In November, Hatch lavished praise on the president, calling him “one of the best I’ve served under.” Trump rewarded Hatch by endorsing him. Hatch then defended Trump’s endorsement of Moore, arguing that he “needs every Republican he can get so he can put his agenda through.”

Hatch’s response to Moore has followed that of his entire party, and the backtracking has usefully laid bare its power dynamics. As recently as a few weeks ago, Republicans were debating whether to shun Moore or, should he win, vote to expel him from the Senate. They have settled on a course of action that had initially been off the map altogether: endorsing their lecherous ayatollah and providing financial support from the Republican National Committee.

What mattered most was that Donald Trump has contempt for any standards of conduct. (Indeed, he reportedly has taken offense at the accusations against Moore, which remind him of his own treatment.) And no Republican who wishes to stay in office can afford to offend the president, who commands overwhelming support among the party base.

This was the dynamic last year, when a tape revealed Trump casually confessing to sexual assault, and it was briefly impossible to imagine that he could continue the campaign. Reince Priebus urged him to quit; Mike Pence reportedly offered his services to the RNC as a substitute. Then the incomprehensible became inevitable. The same thing happened in May when a Republican House candidate, Greg Gianforte, assaulted a reporter and then lied about it. Would Republicans denounce him? Expel him? It turned out they would do nothing. By the time Moore came along, the party’s moral sensibilities had been worn to a nub.

The next step in the sequence is almost insultingly obvious. Trump is preparing to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian intervention in the 2016 election.

The administration and its allied media organs, especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch, have spent months floating a series of rationales, of varying degrees of implausibility, for why a deeply respected Republican law-enforcement veteran is disqualified to lead the inquiry: He is friends with James Comey, who is biased because Trump fired him; Comey is biased because he pursued leads turned up in Christopher Steele’s investigation, which was financed by Democrats; Mueller has failed to investigate Hillary Clinton’s marginal-to-nonexistent role in a uranium sale.

The newest pseudo-scandal fixates on the role of Peter Strzok, an FBI official who helped tweak the language Comey employed in his statement condemning Clinton’s email carelessness and has also worked for Mueller. His alleged crime is a series of text messages criticizing Trump. Mueller removed Strzok from his team, but that is not enough for Trump’s supporters, who are seizing on Strzok’s role as a pretext to discredit and remove Mueller, too. The notion that a law-enforcement official should be disqualified for privately expressing partisan views is a novel one, and certainly did not trouble Republicans last year, when Rudy Giuliani was boasting on television about his network of friendly agents. Yet in the conservative media, Mueller and Comey have assumed fiendish personae of almost Clintonian proportions.

When Mueller was appointed, legal scholars debated whether Trump had the technical authority to fire him, but even the majority who believed he did assumed such a power existed only in theory. Republicans in Congress, everyone believed, would never sit still for such a blatant cover-up. Josh Blackman, a conservative lawyer, argued that Trump could remove the special counsel, but “make no mistake: Mueller’s firing would likely accelerate the end of the Trump administration.” Texas representative Mike McCaul declared in July, “If he fired Bob Mueller, I think you’d see a tremendous backlash, response from both Democrats but also House Republicans.” Such a rash move “could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency,” Senator Lindsey Graham proclaimed.

In August, members of both parties began drawing up legislation to prevent Trump from sacking Mueller. “The Mueller situation really gave rise to our thinking about how we can address the current situation,” explained Republican senator Thom Tillis, a sponsor of one of the bills. By early autumn, the momentum behind the effort had slowed; by Thanksgiving, Republican interest had melted away. “I don’t see any heightened kind of urgency, if you’re talking about some of the reports around Flynn and others,” Tillis said recently. “I don’t see any great risk.”

In fact, the risk has swelled. Trump has publicly declared any investigation into his finances would constitute a red line, and that he reserves the option to fire Mueller if he investigates them. Earlier this month, it was reported that Mueller has subpoenaed records at Deutsche Bank, an institution favored both by Trump and the Russian spy network.

John Dowd, a lawyer for Trump, recently floated the wildly expansive defense that a “president cannot obstruct justice, because he is the chief law-enforcement officer.” Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett called the investigation “illegitimate and corrupt” and declared that “the FBI has become America’s secret police.” Graham is now calling for a special counsel to investigate “Clinton email scandal, Uranium One, role of Fusion GPS, and FBI and DOJ bias during 2016 campaign” — i.e., every anti-Mueller conspiracy theory. And perhaps as ominously, Trump’s allies have been surfacing fallback defenses. Yes, “some conspiratorial quid pro quo between somebody in the Trump campaign and somebody representing Vladimir Putin” is “possible,” allowed Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, but “we would be stupid not to understand that other countries have a stake in the outcome of our elections and, by omission or commission, try to advance their interests. This is reality.” The notion of a criminal conspiracy by a hostile nation to intervene in the election in return for pliant foreign policy has gone from unthinkable to blasé, an offense only to naïve bourgeois morality.

It is almost a maxim of the Trump era that the bounds of the unthinkable continuously shrink. The capitulation to Moore was a dry run for the coming assault on the rule of law.