Titting vs. Tatting

"Tit for tat" was the title of a Thomas the Tank Engine episode where Bert gets splashed by some visitors and their car, and decides to pay them back. You can watch it, but you really don't have to.

As the forces of justice close in around Trump, I've been noticing the concern trolls coming out with a warning, "Don't go too far," addressed to various people, like the Jack Goldsmith column Tom covered the other day ("The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences" no-paywall gift link):

The prosecution may well have terrible consequences beyond the [Justice] department for our politics and the rule of law. It will probably inspire ever more aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposing party, to the detriment of sound government.

Oh noes, not investigations of presidential actions by future Congresses! Anything but that! Spare us!

Or shall we say this has already started, at the beginning of this year, with Gym Jordan's tit for Jamie Raskin's tat, and it's not going anywhere? I submit that's not because it's not aggressive enough. Rather, it's because it has nothing going for it in the way of facts, as is shown in the gap between what Jordan and Comer claim on Fox News and what they've been able to show in their respective committees, which is basically nothing—it may have plunged to its nadir last week, when they claimed Hunter Biden's former partner Devon Archer would provide specific evidence of Joe Biden's corrupt participation in their dealings but publication of the transcript showed clearly that, though he certainly didn't have anything nice to say about Hunter, he'd firmly insisted Joe Biden was not involved. (What's the rule about not asking the witness any questions unless you know what the answers are going to be?)

The tits have been going on for a long time, starting with former Times reporter Jeff Gerth and special counsel Kenneth Starr (appointed by a three-judge panel of the D.C. circuit court) and the "Whitewater" investigation, which struggled along for years without results until the investigators (young Brett Kavanaugh, remember him?) finally landed on a feloniously underreported act of fellatio and gave Newt Gingrich's House an excuse for running an impeachment, leading to "the first time since 1822 that the non-presidential party had failed to gain House seats in the midterm election of a president's second term". 

Not so for the tats. Democrats were remarkably hesitant to strike back when they won back control of Congress in 2006 during the W. Bush administration, in spite of a wealth of things that ought to have been investigated, starting with the debacle of the Florida election, the mysterious failures of 9/11, the abuses of intelligence agencies in its wake, the serial fraud that led to the Iraq war, the lethal Katrina response, and the catastrophic failure of the economy in 2008. The tits came back in the 2010 shellacking, and started up the engines right away:

Philip Bump, Washington Post.

Turning the attention eventually from Obama to the presumptive 2016 candidate, Hillary Clinton. Though they never got any findings out of any of these issues (it was the FBI, and James Comey's nervous mismanagement, that managed to damage Clinton, with the idiotic issue of the secretary of state's private mail server).

Next time Democrats returned to a share of congressional power, in the 2018 midterms, Nancy Pelosi returned to the Speakership. Under Trump, there were many more things that needed investigation than there had been under W, but she was determined not to have the House investigate them if she could help it, not for entirely bad reasons—to me, stuck between an incompetent presidential administration and an immovably recalcitrant Senate, she was effectively the country's prime minister, with a national responsibility unlike that of any political figure in the country. It wasn't just her style. But whatever it was, she had her members ignore all the awful things of 2017 and 2018, and let the 2019 Mueller report and SSCI report on Trump's obstruction of justice and collusion with Russian intelligence sink into obscurity.

But when Trump's "perfect phone call" to extort the Ukrainian president into giving him campaign assistance came out in late 2019, she couldn't hold her members back any more, and the first impeachment became inevitable; and after the horrifying events of 2020, the pestilence and the economic collapse and the mushrooming of dangerous right-wing militant organizations and Trump's attempt to overturn the election (remember, that began the week after the election itself) culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, so did the second impeachment and the real investigation, of the (sort-of bipartisan) January 6 committee, which has contributed quite a lot to the work of special counsel Jack Smith.

I go through all this in such detail to make a particular point that's probably obvious to you, but that has consequences you may not have thought of: there's a big difference, as you see, between the Republican idea of congressional investigations and the Democratic idea of congressional investigations, as they've worked themselves out between 1992 and now. With Republicans, the purpose has been primarily political, that of harming their enemies, and with Democrats it hasn't. Not that Democrats mind harming their enemies, they're not complete fools, but they don't want to do it unless they're certain there's a legitimate purpose, that of righting a real wrong or exposing a real abuse; and preferably not unless they're certain it won't have some other kind of bad outcomes in some other kind of place. Democrats are uniquely sensitive to the kind of arguments Goldsmith is making here; Republicans really don't care about that shit. They only talk about it to Democrats, or journalists (the other denizens of the reality-based community), as part of the concern trolling.

So that, when you think about it, if you're really worried about the possibility of endless titting-for-tatting, it's the Republicans you need to talk to, and what you need to persuade them of is that it won't work if they don't have a real issue. Hunter Biden won't get them any farther than Solyndra did, or Benghazi. And the way to show them the difference is not by argument but demonstration of what a real issue looks like, as through the example of a thoroughly corrupt president and his gang of confederates and made men and thugs, as many of them as possible, getting their just deserts. So they know where the bar is, and stop playing. They should know once for all, as Republicans did for a while in 1974, what a crime is.

It may also exacerbate the criminalization of politics. The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. These practices will probably be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries.

That's not what the indictment alleges. It alleges that Trump practiced a politics that was illegal, not because Smith said was, but because it violated existing statute law. Smith isn't charging anything that isn't a crime. He isn't "criminalizing" anything (the indictment makes it clear that the lies and manipulations of the courts that Trump and Giuliani and Powell and Flynn conducted were entirely legal, before they moved on to fraud conspiracies and violence). Trump wasn't "trying to shape law and politics in his favor". He was trying to annul a regularly decided election by getting other people to break federal and state laws, through his lies and manipulations no doubt, but also through threats and intimidation.

Goldsmith seems to have an inkling of this later on in the column:

Regrettably, in February 2021, the Senate passed up a chance to convict Mr. Trump and bar him from future office, after the House of Representatives rightly impeached him for his election shenanigans. 

"Shenanigans" is a bit too Little Rascals for me, but yes, Trump was rightly impeached, because he commmitted high crimes and misdemeanors. Not high exaggeration and self-serving arguments, crimes. In which, in this particular case, the Constitution, the highest law of the land (for all its defects, that's not the issue) was attacked and could have been killed. 

I'm not that excited over punishment, but the whole thing needs to be recognized for what it was, and Republicans need to stop pretending that it's just a case one might bring to make your political opponent look bad. It's totally different.

I may have something to add later.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.