The president is NOT above the law

Ok. This is an example of the kind of thing that gives the Trumpistas ammunition, and I wish the media would knock it off.

9/11 hero turned Trump sycophant lawyer Rudy Giuliani did NOT say the other day that President Trump could have shot former FBI Director James Comey instead of firing him and still not have stood trial. That example was put to him by a reporter in a question. It was an inflammatory example and Giuliani has acknowledged that he should have demanded another example rather than answering it as asked.

But c'mon. And the universal uproar over an example which was posed by a reporter as if Giuliani had come up with it himself is bad journalism and frankly ethical sleaze. And it's the kind of thing the sensation-hunting and ideologically partisan media do all too often.

Say what you want, Democrats, but they never would have done that sort of thing to an attorney for President Obama.

The business about the president pardoning himself is regarded by most legal experts as hooey, but  Giuliani has said more than that on the subject. In his interview with George Stephanopolous Sunday, he said that the president probably could pardon himself:

He has no intention of pardoning himself.. .[It is a] really interesting constitutional argument: 'Can the president pardon himself?'

I think the political ramifications of that would be tough. Pardoning other people is one thing. Pardoning yourself is another. Other presidents have pardoned people in circumstances like this, both in their administration and sometimes the next president even of a different party will come along and pardon.

As he pointed out later, a sitting president probably cannot be indicted; the remedy for misconduct on the part of a sitting president would be impeachment. But prosecution could come afterward, which is why the matter of self-pardoning arises.

But anyway, the media are running with the implied lie that it was Giuliani who came up with the example. Based upon it, my senior senator, Chuck Grassley- who, though he is currently in my doghouse for his vote on the net neutrality issue, has pretty generally been a straight shooter- says that if he were POTUS, he would "get myself a new lawyer." Which is hardly fair to Giuliani.

Giuliani assures us that even though he maintains that the president could pardon himself, he won't. I wish I were as sure of that as he is. A large part of the trouble with Mr. Trump is that he's a loose cannon. He is liable to say or do almost anything, and frankly, I wouldn't put it past him to try to pardon himself. On June 4, he tweeted- citing no particular part of the Constitution and no legal precedent whatsoever- that "The appointment of the Special Councel [sic] is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL! Despite that, we play the game because I, unlike the Democrats, have done nothing wrong!"

Sadly, Mr. Trump's inability to recognize or at least acknowledge wrongdoing on his own part is yet another part of the reason he worries me.  As to the claim that Mueller's investigation is unconstitutional, it's hard to see how that can be the case; due to Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to recuse himself (for which he is currently enduring much abuse from Mr. Trump), Mueller was duly appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rothstein in May of last year.

Columnist Mark Levin's suggestion that Rothstein somehow "usurped the authority of the president of the United States to appoint whoever he wants as prosecutor" is errant nonsense that ignores the entire modern history of the appointment of special counsels. Following the Watergate scandal, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation to help guarantee the independence of special prosecutors from political interference. The Independent Counsel Reauthorization Act of 1994 which lapsed in 1999, gave the authority to determine actual identity of prosecutor to a panel of three Federal Court judges, and neither the initiation of an investigation nor the identity or even tenure of such a prosecutor has at least in the modern era been personally decided by the president. Levin forgets the Rube Goldberg mechanism by which Richard Nixon had to fire Archibald Cox. Nixon had to order his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. He fired Richardson when Richardson refused. It then fell to Rothstein's predecessor. Williams Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus resigned instead. It was left to Solicitor General Robert Bork to do the deed.

For the President of the United States to personally pick the prosecutor who was going to investigate him would create the mother of all conflicts of interest. And the eagerness of the president and his supporters to ignore that fact is, to say the least, worrisome.

Which brings us to the real issue here: accountability. The president is not a man who likes to be held accountable- which is all the more reason why he not only should be but must be.

Remember, this is the man who during his campaign was sufficiently ignorant (or defiant) of the First Amendment as to state his intention to see to it that the law was changed so that journalists who write "purposely false" stories could be sued. Anyone who gives the matter a moment's thought will realize that somebody would have to decide when a story is "purposely false-" and that whoever had such authority would be in a position to blackmail any and all journalists who would write anything even vaguely critical of the administration, or even calling its chosen narrative into question, into silence. What Mr. Trump advocated would amount to the repeal of freedom of the press and the imposition of the kind of state censorship which exists in authoritarian regimes all over the world.

This is the man who offered to pay the legal fees of those arrested for beating up peaceful protestors at his rallies. Mr. Trump is not a fan of free speech, either- at least when it's critical of him, or contradicts his narrative.

And this is the man who bragged during his campaign that if he committed murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York, he wouldn't lose any votes by doing so. And the frightening thing is that he was probably right.

And that's what makes the allusion to shooting James Comey so worrisome, no matter who came up with it. The president of the United States is not above the law. He cannot be above the law. In a free society, he must be accountable- and the man currently in the Oval Office is a man who before all else hates being accountable to anybody.