Shan’t tell you
Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered an indignant defense on Tuesday against what he called “an appalling and detestable lie” that he may have colluded with the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election, showcasing his loyalty to President Trump in an often contentious Senate hearing but declining to answer central questions about his or the president’s conduct.
Sounding by turns defiant and wounded, Mr. Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, often infused his testimony with more emotion than specifics. He insisted repeatedly that it would be “inappropriate” to discuss his private conversations with the president, however relevant they might be, visibly frustrating senators who have been conducting their own inquiry into Russia’s election meddling.
This isn’t a cotillion, it’s a Senate hearing. It would not be “inappropriate” to tell the legislators and the people what the fuck these thieves and traitors have been getting up to.
Yet at times, Mr. Sessions seemed committed to revealing as little information as possible, particularly about his interactions with the president. Pressed on his rationale, Mr. Sessions allowed that Mr. Trump had not invoked executive privilege concerning the testimony of his attorney general.
“I am protecting the right of the president to assert it if he chooses,” Mr. Sessions said.
As many people have sharply pointed out, Sessions doesn’t get executive privilege. It applies only to the president. The worm from Alabama is just refusing to tell the government and citizens what he’s been doing, as if he were the dictator’s lieutenant-dictator.
This is basically a junta.
We’re down to one functioning branch of government right now. And that will only last as long as the health and stamina of the five justices who aren’t rubber stamps for the Republican Party.
I’ve now given up any hope that more than a trivial number of Republicans in Congress will ever do the right thing here — and by “the right thing” I just mean “provide meaningful oversight,” forget about impeachment. All I really hope for now is that Republican infighting and Trumpian incompetence will limit the damage that can be done before the next Congress is sworn in, with hopefully a Democratic House.
And even that prospect, of help in the midterms, depends on enough non-GOP voters actually bothering to show up for a midterm election.
Damn. I really need a drink.
Roberts is really only about half a rubber stamp… If only because he lives by rules of a sort.
Fair point. I even said in another thread that there’s a good chance that Roberts will vote to uphold the injunction against the Muslim ban, so I was contradicting myself by including him.
I also note that Sessions keeps denying that he met with the Russians to collude about the election. It’s a very lawyerly answer as it elides the fact that he did meet with Russians and not declare that. Shades of “I did not have sex with that women*”.
* where sex equals piv.
Attorney-client privilege. Doctor-patient privilege. Priest-parishioner privilege.
And now attorney general-president privilege? Why are so many okay with Sessions just inventing stuff?
Ben, because there are many people who are both wrongfully aggrieved and blinded by to (and by?) their relative state of privilege, who simply don’t want to see a problem. If they acknowledge a problem then they have to personally admit to being wrong. Maybe about a whole lot of things. humans being what they are that sometimes doesn’t happen until absolute catastrophic defeat occurs and even then maybe not.
Contrast the South after the civil war and Germany after WW2. One society came out of the experience as a great western democracy and the other as a bunch of whiny aggrieved racists.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1567319263286529/?type=3&theater
Rob: It’s even harder than just getting them to admit they were ‘wrong’. In order to fully confront Trump and the Trumpettes’ perfidy, they would have to admit they got conned. There’s a very human aversion against admitting you’re a sucker–even if that’s a necessary step towards restitution. Conmen and grifters rely on that impulse–it lets them get folks to double-down on a bad bet, rather than calling the cops.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1567881586563630/?type=3&theater