There is no justification for Matthew Whitaker‘s recess appointment to Attorney General. If this had happened under Obama, the Republicans would have lost their minds. How do I know Republicans would have lost their minds? Because Obama did almost precisely what Trump did, and the Republicans did, in fact, lose their minds.

Way back in 2012, Barack Obama made several recess appointments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Labor Relations Board, and later to other agencies. The pearl clutching from Republican senators was immediate and intense, sparking court battles and threats of yet more opposition to any of Obama’s appointments.

Fast forward a few years, and Donald Trump disregards US law and established tradition and appoints a sycophant to a position of political power over in the Department of Justice during an incredibly sensitive investigation into his administration and personal business dealings. And the Republican Party is sort of fine with it.

Oh, sure, they’ve made some noise, ruffling their feathers, and made a few statements, but at the end of the day, Matthew Whitaker is still sitting in the office of the Attorney General, placed there immediately after the “resignation” of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, fired because he refused to interfere in the ongoing Mueller investigation.

Further muddying the political waters is that Whitaker’s appointment was arguably illegal and unconstitutional, not that the Republicans care about the rule of law anymore. It’s simply a fact that as per 28 U.S. Code § 508, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should have become the interim Attorney General.

That didn’t happen, and everyone knows why. They are going to pretend they don’t know, because no one in the Republican Party leadership seriously cares about right or wrong anymore. Congress is filled with passive aggressive moral cowardice on all sides. Enough. I call shenanigans on this entire government.

This is what a constitutional crisis looks like. Executives openly disobeying the law and attacking the judiciary. A legislature doing absolutely nothing to censure an obviously out of control presidency. And a judiciary placidly tolerating all of this. This is only going to get worse as it goes along. Our government is officially defunct.

If we still lived in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we’d toss all of these it out and start anew. Sadly, it’s very likely Americans are going to ride this roller coaster to hell right off the rails.

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Liberty is For The Win!