1 Trending: Dems’ Virginia Court-Packing Plan Is A Test Run Of What They’ll Do To SCOTUS After Retaking Power

2 Trending: Exclusive: ICE Nabs Drug Trafficker In Virginia As Spanberger Refuses To Turn Over Violent Illegal Aliens

3 Trending: Ted Turner Represented The Best And Worst Of America

4 Trending: How Our National Debt Jeopardizes Families’ Futures

Calls For Justice Department ‘Independence’ Are A Sign Of GOP Weakness

The ‘cycle of weaponization’ will not be broken by one side dropping its weapons while the other reloads.

Share Article on Facebook

Share Article on Twitter

Share Article on Truth Social

Share Article via Email

There is a kind of conservative who believes the republic will be preserved by procedural fastidiousness — that if only the right norms are observed, the right courtesies extended, the right institutional deference maintained, then justice will somehow emerge from the machinery of the state as though it were a thermodynamic inevitability. Writing in National Review last week, Paul McNulty and John G. Malcolm have offered the latest installment of this genre.

The authors are colleagues and friends of mine from the Bush 43 Justice Department era and Federalist Society circles, so I mean them no ill will. But their advice to President Trump is classic “weak sauce” that must be discarded because it’s gone sour.

Their thesis is familiar: “The attorney general is not the president’s fixer;” the Department of Justice must maintain institutional independence; President Trump should “break the cycle of weaponization” by declining to wield the weapons that were turned against him. The argument sounds principled. It even feels principled in the way all arguments feel principled when they demand restraint only from one side. But it is, at bottom, an argument for surrender dressed in the vocabulary of civic virtue.

Consider the authorities summoned to support this position, including Lord Hewart, who warned against the “new despotism” of administrative overreach. One hesitates to interrupt a good lecture, but it must be observed that Gordon Hewart, 1st Viscount Hewart, was lord chief justice of England, not of the United States nor any other American jurisdiction. He was a British jurist writing about British parliamentary delegation to British administrative agencies under British constitutional principles that recognize no separation of powers as Americans understand it.

To invoke Hewart as though he were an American Founding Father, or even a relevant interlocutor in the American constitutional tradition, is rather like citing the rules of cricket to settle a dispute about baseball. The man has nothing whatsoever to do with our........

© The Federalist