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NRaleighLiberal

(60,014 posts) Sat Dec 2, 2017, 03:37 PM Dec 2017

Slate "Is It Too Late for Robert Mueller to Save Us?"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/12/is_it_too_late_for_robert_mueller_to_save_us.html

It might not be enough for the special counsel to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment.

By Dahlia Lithwick

We talk a lot these days about how the United States has sorted itself into two distinct media bubbles, and all the ways in which those bubbles become self-reinforcing and reality-denying. But there is another way in which the perfect epistemic closure that characterizes this moment continues to play out. On Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. This moment will prove to be incredibly important, or not important at all. The importance or nonimportance of Flynn’s plea will depend on whether the law and legal conclusions continue to matter going forward, or whether they matter not at all. This is the question all of us are asking all day every day: Is the rule of law an escape hatch or a relic? It’s not yet clear what the answer to that question will be.

Like most people on the left, I have spent the past year putting great faith in the courts and legal institutions to act as a check on Donald Trump, maintaining this faith even as Trump fired career lawyers like James Comey and Sally Yates and replaced them with ideologues and thugs. And like most people on the left, I placed an enormous amount of confidence in Robert Mueller as the embodiment of the principle that Trump could not escape the oncoming steamroller of justice and legal liability. Even as we remained uncertain whether our political leaders were up to the task of sidelining the Trump train of destruction, we took solace in the fact that the last grown-ups in America were hard at work in the special counsel’s office. And no, they don’t spend their weekends on the golf course.

In recent weeks, and most especially in this past week, I’d begun to suspect that the forces of chaos and nihilism that stand against Mueller’s project might swallow whatever outcomes he produced. The shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press all contributed to a general sense that absolutely everything was broken and that Democrats had lost whatever momentum they had to halt this chaos.

In our ongoing national nightmare of creeping authoritarianism, we talk a good amount about normalization and the numbing effects of a barrage of shocking daily news. But I have also tried to be vigilant about all the ways in which magical thinking about law and lawyers—this is a nation of laws, not men, we’re told—can also numb us, and lead to a declining sense of agency or ownership.

snip - much more to read - pretty good article, worth reading, if depressing.