Two years ago, it would have been hard to find anyone the Left detested more than Senator Jeff Sessions. When Sessions was appointed Attorney General by President Trump, the Democrats outrageously smeared him by alleging, among other things, that he was a racist. That was a warm-up for their contemptible anti-Kavanaugh campaign. It is easy to see why liberals hated Sessions: in the Senate, he was a warrior for conservatism on the budget, immigration and other issues.
But now the worm has turned. President Trump is replacing Sessions as Attorney General, and liberals are up in arms. MoveOn.org and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC have encouraged liberals to take to the streets. Who could have anticipated this headline? “Soros-Funded MoveOn.Org Plans Mass Demonstrations Thursday to Protest Sessions’ Firing.”
What is going on here? Two things. First, the Democrats were delighted to have an Attorney General who recused himself from all matters relating to the Trump presidential campaign, including but not limited to Russia, broadly construed. That left career DOJ Democrats in the driver’s seat. Now Sessions will be succeeded by a Trump appointee, starting with interim AG Matthew Whitaker, who can supervise and perhaps–perish the thought!–terminate Bob Mueller’s Switch Project.
So Democrats like Chuck Schumer have claimed that the President’s firing of his Attorney General represents, or may soon represent, a constitutional crisis. This is absurd–cabinet officers serve at the pleasure of the president–but it isn’t pointless. Democrats have been propagating, for some time, the entirely non-constitutional idea that the Department of Justice is independent of the president.
That is a ridiculous claim. DOJ is part of the president’s Article II executive branch, and the Attorney General and his subordinates report to the president. The “independent DOJ” theme is intended to weaken President Trump and succeeding Republican presidents, and Mueller’s Switch Project represents an institutionalization of Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, in permanent opposition to the president whom the American people elected. The theory of an independent DOJ will not apply, naturally, to future Democratic presidents who, like Barack Obama, view their Attorney General as a “wing man.”
It is truly said that politics makes strange bedfellows, but I never imagined that conservative stalwart Jeff Sessions–whose resignation many Democrats demanded not long ago–would find himself a hero of the George Soros/Rachel Maddow crazy left. But that is where we are in today’s America.
PAUL ADDS: To answer John’s question, Jeff Sessions is not a liberal hero. That’s clear from articles like this one.
Some Democrats would have liked it if Sessions remained Attorney General, so that Rod Rosenstein remained the overseer of the Mueller investigation. However, Democrats still can’t stand Jeff Sessions.
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