Today I’m going to talk about what isn’t in the news and hasn’t been since early 2021. Namely, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland.
After a period of deep corruption in the executive branch between 2016 to 2020, culminating in an attempted insurrection encouraged by the then-President, you would think an Attorney General coming into office who believed in the rule of law would be publicly and expressively committed to a broad series of investigations of the conduct of the past administration and its ongoing plans to subvert the next elections.
We’re finally getting around to having public hearings on the events of January 6th, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Attorney General is pursuing any kind of investigation on his own into any of the possible crimes of the former President or his Cabinet.
If he’s eager to rebuild public trust after five years of frequent threats to abuse the power of the Department of Justice for political ends and thus reluctant to undertake investigations or prosecutions of officials from the previous Administration (however blatant the illegality) then you’d think he’d at least see to trying to restate and intensify existing safeguards against misconduct within the executive branch, and to make evidence of misconduct available for public scrutiny. You’d think he’d be at least using the power of his office to talk about the importance of strict ethical standards. Or to explain why it is important to firewall the Department of Justice off from political influence.
You’d think he’d want to talk about national concerns over urban crime, both to put it in perspective, to talk about how to balance attention to police misconduct without ignoring crime. Anything at all here might be useful. Instead, nothing.
The Attorney General’s office has an odd status in modern American politics. It has sometimes been egregiously abused in political ways—John Mitchell, Edwin Meese, Jeff Sessions and William Barr come to mind in different ways. In both Republican and Democratic administrations, the AG’s office is also sometimes a political threat to the President, a lesson that the Republicans in particular learned during Watergate and have never forgotten, both because of a modern tradition of autonomy from direct executive hierarchy and because in the US, in theory, no one is above the law. In practice, as we’ve discovered, the law is only enforced against the powerful if there is a general will to use it—laws and procedures don’t do much otherwise.
But given that’s how many people feel, what a moment for an Attorney General to step forward and be a leader in spirit, at least—to say something about the laws, both their spirit and their reality. To talk forthrightly about what it means to have a judiciary that is increasingly just an extension of politics, to talk clearly about what it means that our laws and procedures and rules and safeguards failed so dramatically. Attorney Generals do get to meaningfully shape the national debate about law, crime, and justice if they choose. Most of the time, that’s what they do.
Instead, nothing.
The Attorney General could be out there talking about attempts to subvert the 2024 election process. He could be crafting attempts to use executive authority to protect that process. He could be talking forcefully about mass shootings and gun control. He could be talking about attempts by Republican-dominated states to outright reject federal authority or attempts to restrain their own citizens from pursuing the right to travel and seek services elsewhere, as in the case of the bill being contemplating in Missouri that would allow private citizens to sue other citizens who facilitate any travel out-of-state for an abortion.
There are so many things unravelling right now in this country, and we have an Attorney General who appears to think that he actually was appointed to the Supreme Court and needs to observe the customary reticience of the judiciary on all matters. He’s got the job wrong at the worst possible time to get it wrong.
So many of the steering currents heading towards our looming catastrophe are deep and structural that it’s not clear that any strategy can slow or redirect them. But I’d least like to feel, if and when we end up trapped in the worst outcomes, that somebody tried to do something about it. At the heart of one of the most potentially important institutions that could spearhead meaningful interventions, we have a person who seems frozen with fear, paralyzed by a pointless sense of excessive discretion. Someone who should be in the spotlight but has instead entirely vanished.
Image credit: "Invisible Man (Explore #478 13 Jan 13)" by shando. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Amen.