GOP Senate Gone Shamefully Silent on Trump – The American Spectator

On Jun 16, 2023

With former President Donald Trump the target of a Third World dictator–style indictment and arrest by his political opponent, the GOP’s Senate leadership suddenly has fallen silent.

In what is effectively a thumbs up for a wildly unconstitutional — not to mention anti-constitutional — move to silence Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate GOP Whip John Thune, and other GOP senators have simply turned their back on their responsibility as leaders. Leaders of their party, not to mention the country. (READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Biden’s Banana Republic)

The Associated Press reports:

The Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell steered clear of criticizing the former president or assuring the nation justice will be impartial, refusing to engage in questions about the unprecedented indictment.

And over at the Hill was this:

Senate GOP leaders break with House on Trump indictment

This gem reported as follows:

Senate Republican leaders, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), are staying quiet about former President Trump’s indictment on 37 criminal charges, letting him twist in the wind and breaking with House Republican leaders who have rushed to Trump’s defense….

The Senate GOP leader’s top deputies — Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) — have also indicated they don’t want Trump to win the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

They, along with McConnell, are letting Trump’s legal troubles unfold without coming to the former president’s defense, in contrast to Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who both issued statements Thursday criticizing the Justice Department before the indictment was unsealed to the public.

“They want him to go away, so they wouldn’t be very upset if this is the thing that finally takes him out,” a former Senate Republican aide said about the Senate Republican leaders’ silence on Trump’s indictment.

That is decidedly not leadership. This silence by Republican senators in the face of President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s serious and unprecedented attack on democracy itself, not to mention the Constitution, is inexcusable. It is a decided breech of their constitutional responsibilities as United States senators to simply fall silent as former President Trump is targeted by the Biden Department of Justice.

Not to mention that former Vice President Mike Pence made this mind-blowing statement last week:

Anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States. And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.

That, of course, is a perfect description of — Joe Biden. Not Donald Trump.

There is zero that is constitutional about a president using the Department of Justice to indict and arrest his political opponent. This is the stuff of banana republic dictatorships.

Here’s but a short list of world leaders who have reportedly had their political opponents arrested:

Vladimir Putin, president of Russia
Robert Mugabe, former president of Zimbabwe
Denis Sassou Nguesso, president of the Republic of the Congo
Hosni Mubarak, former president of Egypt
Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda
Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran
Edgar Lungu, former president of Zambia
Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela
Manuel Noriega, former Panamanian dictator
Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine
Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korean
Hun Sen, prime minister of Cambodia
Members of Myanmar’s military junta

The list goes on and on, and, yes, it includes three of history’s most infamous dictators — Russia’s Stalin, Germany’s Hitler, and China’s Mao.

There is no way on God’s green earth that any American president should be on this or any similar list.

Yet, quite willingly, President Joe Biden has now joined this disgraceful list. And in doing so, he has brought a deep and lasting historical shame to himself, to his presidency, and to the country.

And in the face of this monumental disgrace — the Republican leaders of the Senate have nothing to say? Nothing?

On the other hand, there is this AP headline:

‘Stand with Trump’ becomes rallying cry as Republicans amplify attacks on U.S. justice system

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has in fact stepped up to the plate, with the AP reporting:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Moments after Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he hoarded classified documents and then conspired to obstruct an investigation about it, the Republicans in Congress had his back.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy dashed off a fundraising email decrying the “witch hunt” against the former president and urging donors to sign up and “stand with Trump.”…

And at a public meeting in the Capitol basement, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene compared the case against Trump to the federal prosecution of people at the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, suggesting in both instances it was the Justice Department, not the defendants, under scrutiny.

The mounting legal jeopardy Trump finds himself in has quickly become a political rallying cry for the Republicans, many of whom acknowledged they had not fully read the 49-page federal indictment but are rushing to stand by the indicted former president, adopting his grievances against the federal justice system as their own.

Meanwhile, over there in the New York Times was this gem of reporting:

The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden

Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president.

Incredibly, the Times reports of a move to overturn “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.”

Say what? The idea that the Department of Justice is independent is utterly laughable. Recall this story from the Washington Post on Jan. 31, 2017, a mere 11 days after Trump was inaugurated. Here’s the headline:

Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump

The Post reported (emphasis my own):

The signs of popular dissent from President Trump’s opening volley of actions have been plain to see on the nation’s streets, at airports in the aftermath of his refugee and visa ban, and in the blizzard of outrage on social media. But there’s another level of resistance to the new president that is less visible and potentially more troublesome to the administration: a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing any new president’s agenda.

Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make….

At the Justice Department, an employee in the division that administers grants to nonprofits fighting domestic violence and researching sex crimes said the office has been planning to slow its work and to file complaints with the inspector general’s office if asked to shift grants away from their mission.

“You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Through leaks to news organizations and internal complaints, he said, “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable.”

The resistance is so early, so widespread and so deeply felt that it has officials worrying about paralysis and overt refusals by workers to do their jobs….

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a Trump adviser and longtime critic of the bureaucracy, said the pushback against the new administration reveals how firmly entrenched liberals are and how threatened they feel by the new regime. He cited an analysis by the Hill newspaper that showed that 95 percent of campaign donations from employees at 14 federal agencies went to Hillary Clinton last fall.

“This is essentially the opposition in waiting,” Gingrich said. “He may have to clean out the Justice Department because there are so many left-wingers there. State is even worse.”

Bingo.

In other words? In other words, the Department of Justice is filled with left-wing, Trump-hating career employees. There can be no surprise that they have weaponized the DOJ to target Trump.

Which is to say, when Trump says that if reelected, “I will totally obliterate the Deep State,” there is more than plenty of reason not only to say it but to do it. Starting with the Department of Justice.

The hard fact here is, as Gingrich notes, that the “career” bureaucrats who fill the…