Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Regiment on Little Round Top, July 2, 1863. Painting by Mort Künstler.

In a single day, House Democrats demanded President Donald Trump’s tax returns for six years, moved to get a decade’s worth of his financial records and prepared to issue a subpoena for the full Mueller report from the Justice Department.

Top House Democratic lawmakers and aides say the triple-headed attack was more by accident than design, but it’s also clear that April 3 marks a turning point for the new Democratic majority. In less than eight hours, House Democrats moved to an all-out investigative assault on Trump, one that the White House and Republican leaders blasted as unnecessary, openly partisan and a huge distraction from the country’s business. [Politico]

Am I enjoying this? You betcha. Anyway, since when did the current Republican Party give a hoo-haw about the “country’s business”?

The House also passed a resolution to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen. The Senate passed the resolution last month. Trump says he will veto it. But I wonder if Trump’s veto could be challenged in court.

The Yemen resolution invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (WPR), which gives Congress the power to direct a president to remove troops involved in “hostilities” abroad if there has been no formal “declaration of war or specific statutory authorization” from Congress.

Not only does it serve as a censure of Saudi’s conduct in the war, it’s also a clear check on executive power; if the US wants to be involved in a war in Yemen, Congress has to declare it. The Republican-led Senate passed the resolution in March, and it now heads to Trump’s desk. The White House says the president plans to veto it.

It seems to me that if Trump continues to use U.S. military resources in the war in Yemen without the support of Congress, he is in violation of the Constitution. Not that he gives a hoo-haw about the Constitution.

But speaking of courts — the enemy has not been idle. See Dana Milbank, “Mitch McConnell undid 213 years of Senate history in 33 minutes.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), in his latest move to seize power by dismantling the chamber’s centuries-old safeguards, was about to push through another vote to break another rule. But first he gave a speech blaming the other side.

“The Democratic leader started all of this,” McConnell proclaimed, his face blotchy red with anger.

Pointing at the Democratic leader, Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), McConnell added: “He started this whole thing.”

If that weren’t preschoolish enough, the once-distinguished gentleman from Kentucky said a third time: “He started it! That was a sad day. This is a glad day.”

Schumer just smiled and shook his head.

Actually, Vice President Aaron Burr started “it” — the Senate tradition of unlimited debate, that is. That tradition has prevailed, more or less, in the Senate since 1806. Over that time, senators had the right to delay votes on presidential nominees they found objectionable. But McConnell undid 213 years of history in 33 minutes on Wednesday afternoon, holding a party-line vote to rewrite the rules of debate.

The gloves are off. If Dems are ever again in control of both houses of Congress, watch them end the Senate filibuster, ban gerrymandering nationwide, and institute all kinds of judicial and election reforms.

Back to the tax returns — as I understand it, the IRS has no choice but to comply with the request from the Ways and Means Committee. The law is unambiguous. Paul Waldman:

Trump himself doesn’t have to hand over anything; the demand is made directly to the IRS, which, under the law, has no choice but to produce the returns. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will apparently instruct the IRS to refuse, under the legal doctrine known as “The law doesn’t apply to Donald Trump.”

The House of Representatives will then sue to compel the IRS to comply with the law, and the IRS will lose in court, until the case reaches the Supreme Court. In any sane world Trump would lose there on a 9-to-0 decision, but there’s no way to tell how the conservative justices will rule.

Even after the Ways and Means Committee gets the returns, it’s going to take a long time to sort through them and make sense of the tangle of LLCs and other business elements carefully put together to create maximum opaqueness. But at least, and at last, we’re seeing Democrats bringing guns to the gunfight.

By now you’ve heard there’s been grumbling from Mueller’s team that the Barr summary was, um, not the whole story. Trump’s toadies are even now redacting anything the least bit incriminating to Trump. I have to hope that somehow, some day, the entire thing will be leaked. And if there’s even a hint that Trump or his “associates” are helping out with the redacting, that’s an impeachable offense.

Speaking of impeachable offenses, let’s talk about White House security. It’s a mess. In a sane world, Trump’s playing fast and loose with security clearances would be a bigger scandal than Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails and Obama’s beige suit and Monica Lewinsky and possibly even Teapot Dome put together. I trust the House Intelligence Committee will investigate.

Last night Trump gave a speech to House Republicans that suggests he is going stark, raving mad. Examples:

1. He doubled down on the claim his father, born in the Bronx, was born in Germany. Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany, and perhaps he meant to say “grandfather.” But in his extended remarks, it is clear Trump was talking about his father and not his grandfather.
2. He doubled down on the claim that wind power doesn’t work — the wind doesn’t always blow, you know — and also said that wind turbines cause cancer.
3. He kept using the word “oranges” when he clearly meants “origins.” “I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges. The oranges of the, uh, uh, investigation.” Et cetera.
4. He told the assembled Republicans that they should be more paranoid about vote counting. And then he added,

“Someone’s gonna leak this whole damn speech to the media,” Trump worried aloud. It was a valid fear, given that reporters were in the room and C-SPAN cameras were covering the speech live.

And the most troubling part of this story is that audience members didn’t run from the room, screaming. R. Eric Thomas covered the speech for Elle,

And that said conspiracy could reach all the way to the White House. I’m inclined to agree. I don’t want to start an international incident but it seems clear that the President himself is trying to make Trump look like a fool. We have to investigate.

Jennifer Rubin says that Trump is increasingly incoherent:

The Post quotes him at a Republican event on Tuesday: “We’re going into the war with some socialist. It looks like the only non, sort of, heavy socialist is being taken care of pretty well by the socialists, they got to him, our former vice president. I was going to call him, I don’t know him well, I was going to say ‘Welcome to the world Joe, you having a good time?’” Even when attempting to defend himself, he emits spurts of disconnected thoughts. “Now you look at that [presidential announcement] speech and you see what’s happening and that speech was so tame compared to what is happening now, that trek up is one of the great treacherous treks anywhere, and Mexico has now, because they don’t want the border closed.”

But there’s more. It’s becoming clearer that Trump officials are moving ahead with their own agendas, separate from what Trump says he wants, because what Trump says he wants is nuts even to the genetically challenged crew who work for him. Greg Sargent writes,

There’s a deep disconnect, or even a pathology of sorts, festering at the core of the Trump administration’s response to the humanitarian crisis at the southern border.

On the one hand, Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, is appealing to congressional Democrats to engage in a constructive effort to find real solutions to the crisis. Nielsen has embarked on a new private and public campaign to get Democrats to consider legal changes that will supposedly ameliorate the situation.

Yet even as this is happening, Trump is rampaging around like a madman, threatening or putting in place all kinds of unhinged responses, through unilateral action, that are utterly disconnected from the realities of the actual crisis. These actions will only make the situation worse, and they render constructive engagement far less likely, or even impossible.

Right now, even as Nielsen wants Democrats to help solve the border crisis, White House aides are frantically scrambling to figure out how to dissuade Trump from closing down the border entirely, telling him that this would do immense economic damage to the country.

Here is something else Trump said yesterday, about his border crisis. This is an official White House transcript, mind you:

And what we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly and make a deal.  I could do it in 45 minutes.  We need to get rid of chain migration.  We need to get rid of catch and release and visa lottery.  And we have to do something about asylum.  And to be honest with you, you have to get rid of judges.

We have to get rid of judges?

Every time — and you won’t even believe this, Mr. Secretary General — you catch somebody that’s coming illegally into your country, and they bring them to a court.  But we can’t bring them to a court because you could never have that many judges.  So they take their name, they take their information, and they release them.  Now, we don’t release too many.  We keep them.  It’s called “catch and keep.”  But you don’t have facilities for that.  But you have to bring them through a court system.  If they touch your land — one foot on your land: “Welcome to being Perry Mason.  You now have a big trial.”

So what they’ve done over the years is they release them into the United States and they say, “Come back in four years for a trial.”  And nobody comes back.  I guess 1 percent — 1 to 2 percent, on average, come back.  And nobody can understand why they come back.  They’re the only ones that come back.

So no judges, no trials, no hearings. No asylum, I guess. And no coherent sentences.

Republicans in Congress were able to persuade Trump to back off promising a big new health care initiative soon. Now it’s been put off until after the 2020 election. But on many Trump’s erratic pronouncements have given his own officials and Republicans in Congress a bad case of whiplash.

“Given that the president’s proposals range from the imprudent to the impractical, at best, congressional Republicans seem largely to be ignoring them in favor of their own priorities: nominations in the Senate, and highlighting Democratic radicalism and disunity in the House,” said Michael Steel, who worked under former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

However, the degree to which Republicans meekly go along with whatever the madman wants remains disturbing. (See “Trump’s Takeover of the GOP Is Almost Complete” in the New York Times.) At the moment, one suspects that, like Caligula, Trump will become more and more outrageous and out of control. However, it will be up to our broken political processes, and not the Praetorian Guard, to take him out.

Elsewhere: The House Judiciary Committee has approved a subpoena for the complete Mueller report.

Caligula

If I were given to conspiracy theories, I might think this is a prelude to a putsch. Daily Beast reports,

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

The Daily Beast reporter, Betsy Woodruff, was part of a team that recently reported “fewer than a fifth of the FBI’s open terrorism investigations focus on people without connections to international extremist organizations.” This earlier report continued,

It’s a proxy figure that highlights what former counterterrorism officials consider an insufficient focus on far-right violence.

Out of about 5,000 open terrorism investigations, 900 probe domestic terrorism, according to FBI data reviewed by The Daily Beast. “Domestic terrorism” is an umbrella category that includes far more than just far-right terrorism, but functions as the most granular data available to indicate how federal law enforcement targets white supremacist violence.

Today’s report by Woodruff said that law enforcement officials had noticed a big drop in reports about domestic terrorism.

Sgt. Mike Abdeen with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told The Daily Beast that his office used to receive a significant amount of material from I&A, but that the communications have dried up in recent months. For the last six months, he said, I&A has been mostly silent. He added that this has been consistent with broader changes in how the department communicates with his office.

“It’s been very quiet lately,” Abdeen said. “It’s changed with the new administration. It doesn’t seem to be as robust, as active, as important—it is important, I’m sure, but it’s not a priority. It doesn’t seem like engagement, outreach, and prevention are seen as a priority as we used to see in the past. There were roundtable meetings in the past, there was more activity, more training, more seminars. Now it seems like it’s gone away.”

Alleen Brown at The Intercept reported last month that for a long time the DHS has taken “eco-terrorism” and animal rights groups more seriously than white nationalists. This is not necessarily about political bias.

Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terrorism analyst at DHS, says there’s a reason law enforcement took a less aggressive approach to right-wing white supremacists and anti-government attackers. In the case of the eco-extremists, the government had a powerful ally: industry. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying I wish you’d do something about these right-wing extremists,” said Johnson, who left his position in 2010, after his warnings about right-wing violence were dismissed. “If enough people lobbied congresspeople about white nationalists and how it’s affecting their business activity, then I’m sure you’ll get legislation.”

Or, maybe it is political.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P.?W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and a colleague met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

So the next time there’s a massacre in a church of synagogue perpetrated by a white nationalist thug, remember that some deaths by terrorism don’t count.

The Supreme Court recently ruled on two nearly identical cases involving prisoners and religion, and reached two different conclusions. In February, SCOTUS decided it was okay to execute a Muslim prisoner in Alabama without an imam present, as the prisoner had requested. In Alabama, only Christian ministers are allowed in the death chamber, and apparently that was okay with the SCOTUS. This week, SCOTUS stopped the execution of a Buddhist prisoner in Texas until the state provides a Buddhist clergyperson to be present during the procedure. Texas provides Christian and Muslim ministers for executions, but not Buddhist ones.

If this seems a tad inconsistent to you, you aren’t alone.

The Court failed to rule in favor of Domineque Ray, the Muslim prisoner in Alabama, saying that he had filed his request too late. I also point out that Domineque Ray was a black man, while the Texas Buddhist, Patrick Murphy, is, um, not. And the two men were of two different non-Christian religions. Other than that, I don’t see a substantive difference between the two cases.

Regarding prisoner Murphy,

The court did not give a reason for its decision. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have let the execution proceed.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing only for himself, said Texas’s policy was discriminatory.

“The relevant Texas policy allows a Christian or Muslim inmate to have a state-employed Christian or Muslim religious adviser present either in the execution room or in the adjacent viewing room,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But inmates of other religious denominations — for example, Buddhist inmates such as Murphy — who want their religious adviser to be present can have the religious adviser present only in the viewing room and not in the execution room itself for their executions.

“In my view, the Constitution prohibits such denominational discrimination.”

Why didn’t that same reasoning apply to Domineque Ray?

That is the same argument Justice Elena Kagan made last month when she and the court’s liberals objected to the execution of Alabama inmate Domineque Ray.

Under Alabama’s policy, “a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites,” Kagan wrote.

“But if an inmate practices a different religion — whether Islam, Judaism, or any other — he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality.”

Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented from the majority in the Ray case. Domineque Ray was executed February 7. Patrick Murphy may or may not be executed; his lawyer is appealing the sentence.

This reminded me of the case of Frankie Parker, whom I wrote about back in 2008 — see “A Tale of Two Prisoners.” The point of this post was that, as governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee was infamous for releasing prisoners who had found Jesus but who then went on to rape and kill after their release. But Frankie Parker was a condemned man who found Buddhism. He was on death row when Huckabee became governor in 1996. Huckabee’s very first proclamation as governor was to arrange to execute Frankie Parker six weeks sooner. See also “Onward Christian Convicts.”

Here is an account of Frankie Parker’s execution by the Rev. Kobutsu Malone, who was not allowed in the death chamber. The state-sanctioned minister at Parker’s side when he was executed was Christian.

My larger point here is that in the U.S. Christian clergy have been allowed a monopoly on prison mission work since there have been prisons. Although there is little about it online, I know from my personal contacts many Buddhist organizations have had to spend a lot of time in courts trying to be allowed to offer books, meditation lessons and spiritual counseling to prisoners. Some states eventually permitted this; some, I understand, still don’t.  Christian denominations, of course, have these privileges in all states.

The 2008 documentary Dhamma Brothers is about the struggle to offer Theravada Buddhist meditation instruction to prisoners in Alabama. As I recall, the meditation instructors were permitted to teach meditation only if they swore up and down they would not teach the prisoners anything about Buddhism. I’m sure Muslim, Hindu, and other minority religions face the same issues. I don’t know if Jewish rabbis have met the same degree of resistance from prison and state officials, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

On the other hand, in 2017 a Kansas prisoner sued to be spared Christian proselytizing.

Shari Webber-Dunn — who in 1994 was handed a 40-year-minimum prison sentence for her role in the murder of her estranged husband — claims in a federal lawsuit filed last week that inmates at Kansas’s only women’s prison are subjected to an endless profusion of Christian imagery and propaganda, from the material posted on bulletin boards to the movies played in the common room.

The net effect, Webber-Dunn claims, adds up to an institutional message “imposing Christian beliefs on inmates” in a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. The lawsuit argues the prison has created a “coercive atmosphere where inmates are pressured to spend their time in a high religious atmosphere and to participate in religious activities and prayers, thus violating the establishment clause.”

I couldn’t find updates on this, so I don’t know if the case went anywhere. I’d personally like to see independent studies as to whether all this religiosity makes any difference in prisoner behavior or recidivism rates, for better or worse.

Why did Trump decide to take up the banner of bashing Obamacare again? The New York Times says, to diss Barack Obama and to please his base.

The Trump administration’s surprise decision to press for a court-ordered demolition of the Affordable Care Act came after a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, where the president’s acting chief of staff and others convinced him that he could do through the courts what he could not do through Congress: repeal his predecessor’s signature achievement. …

…Mr. Trump has declared that he has kept his promises, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Grogan argued, and as a candidate he campaigned on repealing the health law. His base of voters would love it. Besides, they argued, Democrats have been campaigning successfully on health care, and Republicans should try to claim the issue for themselves. This could force the matter.

The base will really love it when they lose their health care, dontcha think? Paul Krugman provides this chart to show us how Trump kept his promises to just one red state, West Virginia.

By all accounts William Barr was opposed to filing the court challenge that his Justice Department filed on Monday, which tells us that he sees his role not at the nation’s chief legal representative but as Trump’s personal lapdog. Law professor Nicholas Bagley writes in the New York Times,

The irresponsibility of this new legal position is hard to overstate. It’s a shocking dereliction of the Justice Department’s duty, embraced by Republican and Democratic administrations alike, to defend acts of Congress if any plausible argument can be made in their defense.

It’s also the case, Professor Bagley continues, that the court ruling that found all of the ACA to be unconstitutional is widely considered to be “outrageous” and indefensible.

Indeed, even the Trump administration couldn’t bring itself to argue that the entire law should be scrapped. It agreed there was a constitutional problem, but said that the right remedy was to keep most of the law in place. Only those parts requiring private insurers to sell coverage at the same price to healthy and sick people alike — the protections for people with pre-existing conditions — would have to be struck.

Try to imagine what goes on in the mind of someone who thinks striking down protections for people with pre-existing conditions is a good idea.

That, too, was an outrageous position. It flouted the Justice Department’s duty to defend, a solemn duty, and one that goes to the heart of the rule of law. Without it, the sitting administration could pick which laws it wanted to defend in the courts and which it wanted to abandon. Laws could rise or fall based on nothing more than partisan disagreement. That’s inconsistent with a constitutional system that assigns to Congress — not the president — the power to legislate.

And so, at the confirmation hearing on his nomination to become attorney general, Mr. Barr said that he would review the Justice Department’s position in the Texas lawsuit. Apparently he did just that — but instead of mounting a vigorous defense, he doubled down on killing Obamacare. It’s as if Mr. Barr said to his predecessor, Jeff Sessions: “You thought your position was crazy? Hold my beer.”

Well, if there’s one thing the base likes, it’s crazy. The crazier the better.

GOP @RepMullin says that ACA coverage “sucks” and that bipartisan health care talks aren’t working.

[Democrat @repbenraylujan tries to cut in]

Mullin: “I said I wasn’t going to yield, you can shut up now.”

h/t @owermohle pic.twitter.com/xK4RZkH0vp

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) March 27, 2019

It’s fascinating that in what might be his moment of greatest triumph, the Creature managed to step in some slop. On Monday, Trump’s Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans to nullify the entire Affordable Care Act.

After the spanking they got in the midterms, Republicans in Congress had decided to drop their objections to Obamacare and move on to other issues, like blaming climate change on velociraptors, or whatever it was this moron was going on about.

But Trump’s Justice Department not only dragged the Republican Party back to the health care drawing board; but the so-called president is back to making promises his party can’t keep.

President Trump praised the move during a lunch with Senate Republicans, and suggested the GOP should embrace a new congressional battle over health-care policy ahead of the 2020 elections.

“Let me tell you exactly what my message is: The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care,” he told reporters before the lunch. “You watch.”

In other words, Trump is an effing moron. The Republicans have no workable plan to replace Obamacare and never will. If they could do it, they would have done it by now. Note that it has been estimated that 21 million Americans would lose health coverage if the ACA is struck down.

It’s widely reported that Republicans are furious with Trump for putting them back into the same position that got them roasted in the midterms. And this report from Axios makes it clear that the decision to make repealing Obamacare a major issue for 2020 came from the White House, not the Justice Department.

As Politico’s Eliana Johnson first reported — and Axios has confirmed — “The Trump administration’s surprising move to invalidate Obamacare on Monday came despite the opposition of two key Cabinet secretaries: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Attorney General William Barr.”

Republican officials are privately blaming Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, domestic policy chief Joe Grogan, and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought for engineering the new position. …

…Several Republican senators told Axios they were surprised Trump spent most of the Senate GOP lunch on Tuesday on health care. Trump led with health care and went back to it several times during the meeting. “He’s clearly very passionate about it,” Sen. John Kennedy said. “It was one of few times at these things the president spoke more than the senators.”

Trump wants to do this. But why? I get the impression that the failure to repeal the ACA in 2017 still gnaws at him. It’s reportedly the reason he can’t stop bashing six-months-dead John McCain. John McCain’s vote kept Trump from fulfilling a campaign promise, it’s said. But even that’s bogus, because Trump’s campaign promise was to replace the ACA with something better, not to deprive 20 million people of health coverage.

And, of course, that didn’t happen. And Trump has no clue how this health care thing works.

Karen Tumulty writes,

Trump may be going through this as a theoretical exercise merely to please his base. After all, the Supreme Court has already ruled twice that the key parts of the ACA are constitutional.

But it may also be that Trump believes that the hardball tactic will somehow bring Democrats to the negotiating table. If that is the case, he is making the same miscalculation he did when he shut down the government on the assumption that it would give him leverage to get the money he wanted to build his border wall.

The old dog has a pathological inability to learn new tricks. And he still refuses to listen to those trying to dissuade him from boneheaded plans. WaPo reports today:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged President Trump to hold off on pushing for a court-ordered destruction of the Affordable Care Act, advice the president ultimately ignored, according to a senior Republican official familiar with the conversation.

The unheeded counsel, which McCarthy recounted to fellow lawmakers in recent days, underscores the angst that has set in among Republicans now that Trump is pursuing the politically precarious strategy with no plan in hand to replace Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.

McCarthy has complained privately to donors that the GOP attempt to gut Obamacare — including its most popular provisions, such as protections for preexisting conditions — was the main reason the party lost at least House 40 seats in last year’s midterm elections.

See Greg Sargent, Republicans blast Trump for making it harder for them to lie about health care.

Oh, and as for Mike Lee and his velociraptors, I like what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said about him.

Like many other women + working people, I occasionally suffer from impostor syndrome: those small moments, especially on hard days, where you wonder if the haters are right.

But then they do things like this to clear it right up.

If this guy can be Senator, you can do anything. https://t.co/vU4ChbTnnr

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 26, 2019

It’s safe to say that William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report laid nothing to rest. It’s likely Barr will be invited to testify to both the House and Senate judiciary committees about what he wrote. People with better understanding of the law than I have say they are troubled about the summary and believe it leaves out too much. In short, the call to release the entire report is just getting started.

It’s my understanding that Mueller gave Barr his findings and left decisions on indictments to Barr and Rod Rosenstein. And Barr is declinging to issue indictments. But what was his reasoning?

Joe Conason:

Barr’s letter says that his decision on an obstruction charge was not based on his views about the presidency, but on Mueller’s finding that Trump did not commit the underlying crime of conspiring with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 election. The absence of sufficient evidence to charge on obstruction thus “bears on the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.” According to Barr, the Mueller report “identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent…”

But there are huge holes in that justification. Without interviewing the president, it seems impossible for either Mueller or Barr to determine his intent. And the president, despite his personal promise to submit to a Mueller interview, instead evaded it. And that leaves aside the glaring fact that the president himself declared he fired James Comey as FBI director to kill the Russia probe — a declaration of corrupt intent uttered in public more than once.

Even more telling is Barr’s attempt to brush aside Trump’s dangling of a pardon before Paul Manafort and other defendants. That hinted favor appears to have had an enormous impact on the Russia investigation, because the Office of Special Counsel indicated as much in its sentencing memorandum on Manafort.

So, the argument is that since Mueller was able to conduct an investigation, there was no obstruction? Not acceptable.

At the New Yorker, John Cassidy accused Mueller of punting.

The special counsel’s decision not to reach a conclusion, or render any opinion at all, about whether Trump obstructed justice will also have been a source of great relief at the White House. In the first place, it allowed Barr, a conservative lawyer whom Trump handpicked to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, to claim that the President is in the clear.

Robert Litt at Lawfare adds,

This conclusion must be read in coordination with Barr’s 2018 memo arguing that acts within the president’s constitutional authority over law enforcement, including firing the director of the FBI, cannot constitute obstruction of justice—at least if they do not “impair[] the integrity or availability of evidence.”

For that matter, the collusion charge wasn’t really laid to rest, either. Robert Litt continues:

The prevailing take on Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress on the Mueller report is summed up in the New York Times: “The investigation . . . found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference.” But a careful reading of Barr’s letter suggests that that may be wrong.

In fact, Barr’s letter quotes Special Counsel Robert Mueller as stating that the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Saying that the investigation did not establish that there was collusion is not the same thing as saying that the investigation established that there was no collusion.  …

…  as quoted by Barr, Mueller used the words “conspired” and “coordinated.” Unlike the colloquial term “colluded,” these terms have legal significance. “Coordination” with a foreign government would be a basis for a finding of criminal liability under the election laws, and “conspiracy” would be a criminal agreement to violate those laws. This language suggests that Mueller’s report viewed the conduct through the lens of a criminal investigative process—that is, whether the evidence met the Department of Justice standards for prosecution, including the ability to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was intent to violate the law.

In other words, there was collusion, but the evidence didn’t support criminal conspiricy or coordination.

Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, “Mueller’s inability to prove conspiracy does not mean, however, that he failed to uncover evidence that would be troubling to many Americans.” Release the full report.

What is of most concern to me is that there is no indication from the Barr summary whether Mueller delved into the question of whether Trump is compromised, in particular through old business ties to foreign entities like Vladimir Putin or the Saudis.

Martin Longman:

Going back to Rod Rosenstein’s 2017 “Scope of Investigation” memo, he declared that the original order had been “written categorically in order to permit its public release without confirming specific investigations involving specific individuals.” My interpretation of that is that he was envisioning a counterintelligence report where sources and methods have to be protected and prosecutorial decisions are not the focus. There is no mention from Barr of any counterintelligence assessment on whether the president is or has been the subject of blackmail or external control. That is the most important thing that Congress and the American people need to understand, and Barr is silent about it. In Rosenstein’s original authorizing memo from May 2017, he asked for “any linksand/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Where is the report on the links?

The links are important because they inform any counterintelligence assessment….

… the president is obviously compromised in some ways, as is evident from virtually everything he says and does with respect to Vladimir Putin and Russia. This situation didn’t suddenly become acceptable because Mueller did not find prosecutable evidence of a conspiracy. It didn’t go away because Barr unilaterally did what he auditioned to do and cleared the president of obstruction of justice charges.

In short, nothing is resolved, and this ain’t over.

Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, How to Understand the End of the Mueller Investigation (Hint: You Can’t Yet)

Barr is expected to send his summary of findings to Congress today, but I don’t know that means we’ll hear anything about what it says.

Andrew O’Hehir, Beto O’Rourke, Ilhan Omar and the Democratic future: Time to kill off the ghosts of the past. Why we can’t go back to “normal.” Depressing but honest.

Update: The New York Times reports that, according to Barr, the report did not find evidence of the Trump campaign working directly with the Russians. However, it left open the question of obstruction.

“The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him’,” the letter says, signaling that Mueller’s team apparently struggled with the issue.

“For each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction,” the letter says.

Some significant developments that are not part of the Mueller report:

On Thursday, Trump gave Bibi Netanyahu a big present:

On Thursday, President Trump tweeted his intention to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, territory that Israel annexed from Syria in the wake of the 1967 war. For decades the United States, along with the entire international community, has refused to recognize Israel’s annexation, instead treating the Golan Heights as temporarily occupied territory.

While commentary has largely focused on the effects Trump’s announcement will have in the Middle East, this shift in U.S. policy has global implications, as well. Trump’s position on the Golan Heights is inconsistent with what scholars call the territorial integrity norm, the principle that denounces territorial conquest as a legitimate instrument of international politics. Trump’s announcement is likely to weaken the norm of territorial integrity, and in the process, undercut the U.S. ability to deter and punish states that engage in territorial expansion.

Juan Cole puts it in starker terms. Please read his entire post; this is just a snip:

Trump’s call for recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, a part of Syria, is intended to help his and his donors’ ally Binyamin Netanyahu win the Israeli elections.

It is another example of his uncanny ability to sabotage his own policies.

Not to mention to sabotage any semblance of international legality. …

…Russian President Vladimir Putin is delighted at Trump’s move, since it cuts off at the knees US objections to the Russian annexation of Crimea from the Ukraine (and at least Russia had Crimea until 1954; Israel never had the Golan).

Moreover, it has implications for Russia’s return as a Middle East power.

The Syrian regime is already grateful to Putin’s Russia for its military intervention to defeat the rebels. Now, Damascus will view its close relationship with Moscow as the only hope of recovering lost territory. No state is willing to lose territory, and a weak Syria knows it cannot fight this development alone.

Juan Cole goes on to explain that the move has royally pissed off Turkey and is likely to drive other nations in the region to ally themselves with Iran. Way to go. See also Michael McGough, The Golan Heights switch is typical Trump, in the Los Angeles Times.

But thoroughly gumming up the Middle East was just a warmup. Then Trump announced a new appointment to the Federal Reserve Board — Stephen Moore.

Steven Pearlstein writes at WaPo:

Now our reality-TV president is set to nominate Stephen Moore, a right-wing crackpot who has been playing a TV economist for decades, for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board.

I use the phrase “right-wing crackpot” after careful consideration of possible alternatives, recognizing that it’s generally not a good idea to criticize the motives or intelligence of those with whom you disagree. Unfortunately, “famous idiot” was already taken by New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who for two decades has been chronicling Moore’s unbroken string of false statements and failed predictions. I also might have gone with “charlatan and crank,” but New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a real economist with a Nobel Prize, beat me to it.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Moore and I were in regular disagreement while appearing on a CNBC show hosted by another TV economist, Larry Kudlow, now President Trump’s top economic policy adviser. Back then, Moore was blaming the government rather than Wall Street for the market crash and warning that the heavy dose of fiscal and monetary stimulus then proposed by the Obama administration and the Fed would result in hyperinflation and a collapse of the dollar. …

…The central features of Moore’s economic way of thinking? A stubborn refusal to learn from historical experience, embrace economic consensus or accept the world as it is rather than as he would like it to be. He led the charge in predicting that the Clinton and Obama tax increases would fail to raise additional revenue and drive the economy into recession. He turned out to be wrong on both counts.

The only way Moore is able to continue peddling his supply-side nonsense is to simply make stuff up, hoping nobody will notice. A few years back, Miriam Pepper, the editorial-page editor of the Kansas City Star, caught him lying red-handed in an op-ed she had published. She banned him from ever appearing on her pages again. Indeed, outside the alternate-reality bubbles of Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Trump White House, Moore has no credibility, even as a TV economist.

Here’s a blog post by Paul Krugman from 2015 that’s just too deliciously snarky not to quote:

But there’s another aspect of the story, which is Moore himself: this is a guy who has a troubled relationship with facts. I don’t mean that he’s a slick dissembler; I mean that he seems more or less unable to publish an article without filling it with howlers — true, all erring in the direction he wants — in a way that ends up doing his cause a disservice. For example, his attempt to refute something I wrote about Kansas ended up being mainly a story about why Stephen can’t count, which presumably wasn’t his intention.

But here’s the mystery: evidently Moore has had a successful career. Why?

Think about Heritage: It’s immensely wealthy, and could surely afford to hire a technically competent right-wing hack. The Wall Street Journal, similarly, could have attracted someone much less likely to trip over his own intellectual shoelaces. Again, the problem isn’t even that Moore got the macroeconomics of recent years all wrong, although he did; it’s the inability to write without making embarrassing mistakes.

See also Krugman’s 2016 post on Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore, titled “Send in the Clowns.”

Yesterday Trump tweeted a cancellation of some new economic sanctions against North Korea:

It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2019

The tweet caused much confusion, because Treasury hasn’t announced any additional sanctions yesterday. It had announced some sanctions on Thursday, but what the Tweetster was talking about, it turns out, were some sanctions that hadn’t been announced yet.

Trump was referring to a future round of previously unknown sanctions scheduled for the coming days, said administration officials familiar with the matter. The officials declined to specify what those sanctions would entail.

The move to forestall future sanctions represents an attempt by the president to salvage his nuclear negotiations with North Korea in the face of efforts by national security adviser John Bolton and others to increase punitive economic measures against the regime of Kim Jong Un.

The confusion created by policy differences inside the administration was compounded by the president’s imprecise tweet.

When asked to explain the tweet, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders simply noted that “President Trump likes Chairman Kim, and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.”