Our Democracy in Peril
Jeff Schweitzer, Ph.D.
What we are witnessing with the White House attempting to undermine the FBI investigation is an existential threat to our democracy. That is not an exaggeration of the imminent danger we face. We have an overt attempt to obstruct justice, with the Congress acting as a willing accomplice. Consider this: if Trump fires Mueller or the GOP establishment continues to actively undermine Mueller, we would no longer have any means of investigation the president; he will become for the first time in our history truly above the law. That is dictatorship.
Only one person is stopping this descent to authoritarianism. Rod Rosenstein, the second-highest ranking official at the Justice, confirmed that there’s no good cause for firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller and that he would not do so without good cause. Rosenstein is, by himself, holding his fingers in the dike against the flood of misinformation and fabrications coming from Trump and the GOP. The Nunes memo is a travesty, an assault on the foundations of our democracy.
If by chance a Trump appointee had been in this second-in-command position at the Justice Department, nobody would be investigating Russia’s interference in our election, and Trump would be beyond the reach of the law. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have already proven beyond doubt they would not seriously pursue the matter, and that they are complicit in smearing the FBI’s reputation for the purpose of obstructing its investigations. So the fate of our democracy, of our future, our entire history, now depends on just this one man. You should be frightened, perhaps more than you have ever been. Everything we care about hangs in the balance.
The institutions created to support our democracy are crumbling at the hands of hyper-partisan Republicans who put Party over country. Our future depends not on the strength of our institutions, or the momentum of our history, or the ability of partisans to put country over party; no, our future is now in the hands of just one bureaucrat trying to do the right thing when nobody else in power is willing to do so. At no time since the Civil War has the future of our country been in such peril. This is serious business.
