Former Prosecutors: Were He Not President, Trump Would Have Been Indicted

Over the weekend, I saw a headline of a poll that said 57% of Americans think Trump is a criminal. That view ties in well with the opinion of four hundred and fifty (450) former federal prosecutors who state that but for his occupancy of the White House, Trump would have been indicted for obstruction of justice. Sadly, the view of the Justice Department policy - and it is only a policy - that a sitting president cannot be indicted places the holder of the office of president above the law.   The obvious conclusion is that William Barr is more concerned with protection Trump very wide ass and duping the American public that providing an honest analysis of Trump's wrong doings.  The Washington Post looks at the statement of the prosecutors.  Here are highlights:

More than 450 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he holds.

The statement — signed by myriad former career government employees as well as high-profile political appointees — offers a rebuttal to Attorney General William P. Barr’s determination that the evidence Mueller uncovered was “not sufficient” to establish that Trump committed a crime.

“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the former federal prosecutors wrote.

“We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,” they added. “Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here. . . . But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.”

The statement is notable for the number of people who signed it — 375 as of early Monday afternoon, growing to 459 in the hours after it published — and the positions and political affiliations of some on the list. Among the high-profile signers are Bill Weld, a former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination; Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration; John S. Martin, a former U.S. attorney and federal judge appointed to his posts by Republican presidents; Paul Rosenzweig, who served as senior counsel to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr; and Jeffrey Harris, who worked as the principal assistant to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration.

The list also includes more than 20 former U.S. attorneys and more than 100 people with at least 20 years of service at the Justice Department — most of them former career officials. The signers worked in every presidential administration since that of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former federal prosecutor, joined the letter after news of it broke, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted his support for its premise .

“We strongly believe that Americans deserve to hear from the men and women who spent their careers weighing evidence and making decisions about whether it was sufficient to justify prosecution, so we agreed to send out a call for signatories,” Vail said. “The response was overwhelming. This effort reflects the voices of former prosecutors who have served at DOJ and signed the statement.” Weld said by the time he reviewed the statement, it already had more than 100 signatures, and he affixed his name because he had concluded the evidence “goes well beyond what is required to support criminal charges of obstruction of justice.”

“I hope the letter will be persuasive evidence that Attorney General Barr’s apparent legal theory is incorrect,” he said.

Many legal analysts have wondered since Mueller’s report was released whether the special counsel believed he had sufficient evidence to charge Trump and was just unwilling to say it out loud. “All of this conduct — trying to control and impede the investigation against the President by leveraging his authority over others — is similar to conduct we have seen charged against other public officials and people in powerful positions,” the former federal prosecutors wrote in their letter. They wrote that prosecuting such cases was “critical because unchecked obstruction — which allows intentional interference with criminal investigations to go unpunished — puts our whole system of justice at risk.”

No one is above the law.  Trump needs to be indicted, tried, and hopefully convicted and removed from office. 

How Mitch McConnell Has Enabled Trump and Betrayed America

This blog - just like countless news articles and political commentary columns - has enumerated the many, many ways in which Donald Trump has harmed America's democracy and institutions. It Trump's not a Russian operative, he is nonetheless doing a great job of furthering Vladimir Putin's goals of destabilizing the west, causing disunity in the European Union (Putin's intelligence service interfered in the UK's Brexit vote), and dividing Americans into warring camps.   Often, however, focus is lost on the one man who has been key to aiding and abetting Trump in the infliction of harm on America and American interest: Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.  Should Mueller prove a conspiracy between Trump and Russia in flipping the 2016 presidential election, part of me cannot help but ponder whether McConnell was part of the conspiracy.  Let's not forget that McConnell cast doubt on CIA intelligence about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and threatened that if Barack Obama publicly challenged Russia, McConnell would disingenuously make it into a partisan issue.  A column in the New York Times lays out all of the harm McConnell has done to the nation. Here are highlights:

Among the casualties of President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build his border wall is the reputation of the majority leader Mitch McConnell as a Senate institutionalist. The evidence of the last few days has confirmed, if there were still any doubt, that he is no such thing.

First, he helped prolong the longest government shutdown in American history by insisting that the Senate would act only with explicit approval from the president. Now Mr. McConnell has fully acquiesced in President Trump’s power grab by supporting an emergency declaration, which he opposed just weeks before, aimed at addressing a crisis that Senate Republicans know does not exist.

This display of obedience from the leader of a supposedly coequal branch of government is shocking only if you ever believed Mr. McConnell was an institutionalist. But his defining characteristic has always been his willingness to do anything and sacrifice any principle to amass power for himself. What separates him from the garden-variety politicians — what makes him a radical — are the lengths he is willing to go. Seeing this with clarity should help us grasp the danger to which he is subjecting the Senate — and, more important, our democracy.

The signs of Mr. McConnell’s malign influence were always there. Before he became a Senate leader, he dedicated himself to opening the floodgates for corporate money to flow into our political system. Mr. McConnell chased the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law all the way to the Supreme Court; the 2003 challenge to the law bears his name. Mr. McConnell lost that one, but his cause prevailed six years later when the Supreme Court overturned restrictions on corporate contributions in Citizens United.
 In 2010, as minority leader, Mr. McConnell stated that his main goal was not to help our country recover from the Great Recession but to make President Obama a “one-term president.”
 The two forces that characterized Mr. McConnell’s career, obstruction and increasing the power of corporate money in our democracy, have worked hand in hand to diminish the Senate and paralyze American politics.
 Republicans actually took the Senate majority in 2014 in large part on claims to restore the Senate. Unsurprisingly, they broke their promises. Under President Trump, Mr. McConnell continued to run roughshod over Senate traditions, jamming the $1.5 trillion tax bill through without so much as a proper hearing. The one place the Senate has functioned efficiently is in judicial confirmations, but even here Mr. McConnell has cast aside bipartisan norms and reduced the Senate to a rubber stamp for some unqualified, extremist judges, including those rated “unqualified” by the American Bar Association.  Mr. McConnell is not playing three-dimensional chess. There is no grand strategy or long game — there is only what best serves his narrow interest.

Mr. McConnell has rigidly adhered to whatever the base wants, institutions be damned. When the base wanted Judge Merrick Garland blocked, he obeyed. When the base wanted Mr. Trump embraced, he obeyed.
 The crass self-interest at so many turns now poses a danger to our democracy. With Mr. Trump increasingly erratic and Robert Mueller’s investigation advancing, there is simply no reason to believe he will stand up for American institutions when it counts. He has already demonstrated a willingness to put his self-interest above America’s national security: In a classified briefing in 2016, Mr. McConnell reportedly cast doubt on C.I.A. intelligence about Russia’s interference in our election and threatened that if President Obama publicly challenged Russia, he’d twist it into a partisan issue. And when the four congressional leaders drafted a bipartisan letter to the states urging them to take action to protect our election infrastructure against Russian interference, Mr. McConnell categorically rejected all efforts to strengthen the letter.

Last week, Mr. McConnell had a choice. He didn’t have to acquiesce to the emergency declaration — he could have asserted the Senate’s independence at a critical time by passing the spending bill without validating Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration. If that prompted a veto, Mr. McConnell could have overridden it. That would be real leadership, and a clear assertion of the Senate’s independence. Instead, he meekly acquiesced in another presidential power grab.

Under a strong leader, the Senate could provide a critical counterweight to an out-of-control executive. Instead, we have a man who will put his self-interest first, every single time. We should enter this chapter with clarity and finally see Mr. McConnell for what he is. He’s not an institutionalist. He is the man who surrendered the Senate to Donald Trump.

Not only is he not an institutionalist, but if he aided the Trump/Russia effort in any way, he is also likely a traitor. 

Republicans Keep Dancing with Autocracy

With almost every passing day I cringe at what the Republican Party has become.  Between the constant misogyny of the sexual predator in chief in the White House, relentless attacks on the truth and the utterly foul Mitch McConnell, it's as if we are witnessing a reprise of some of the worse aspects of rise of the Nazis in Germany.  Most disturbing is that most Republicans continue to ignore the assaults on the rule of law and relentless lying.  Holding on to political power now means more than anything else, including office holders' pledge to uphold and defend the United States Constitution.  Some it would seem would sell their elderly mothers for pocket change in exchange for another term in office.  The recounts following the midterm elections have made Republican hideousness even worse and with the exception of George Conway's new group Republicans seem to be all in in supporting a would be autocrat (for Fox News viewers, that means a dictator).  A column in the Washington Post looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

When a national leader urges that votes be ignored, or that an election result he doesn’t like might best be set aside, we label him an autocrat or an authoritarian.

When it’s President Trump, we shrug. Worse, many in his party go right along with his baseless charges of fraud.

We are in for a difficult two years. Surviving them will require that Republican senators take seriously the pledge they made in their oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” What we have seen so far is not encouraging.

Florida brings out the worst in Republicans. They find it hard to break bad habits developed during the 2000 presidential election, during which they were willing to use any means necessary (including a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision rooted far more in partisanship than law) to prevent Democrat Al Gore from getting a recount. The contest was ultimately settled by 537 votes. . The GOP stopped the recounts, and George W. Bush became president.

To its credit, Florida now requires automatic recounts when races are decided by narrow margins. And this year, Republicans shouldn’t have much to worry about. In the U.S. Senate contest, as of Wednesday morning, Republican Gov. Rick Scott enjoyed a 12,562-vote lead over Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson. In the governor’s race, Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis led Democrat Andrew Gillum by 33,684 votes. Unless something is badly amiss — in which case a recount is imperative — such margins would typically survive close scrutiny. But Trump would have none of it.

For starters, as The Post’s Fact Checker noted, overseas and military ballots postmarked by Election Day are accepted as long as 10 days after the voting. So Trump, the day after Veterans Day, was suggesting that many of the ballots sent in by our service members not be counted at all.

Then there was Trump’s tweet last Friday suggesting that “a new Election” might be required in Arizona as Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema passed Republican Rep. Martha McSally in the vote count of their U.S. Senate race. With her golden retriever Boomer at her side, McSally ignored Trump and graciously conceded to Sinema in a video on Monday. McSally is clearly thinking beyond the Trumpian present.

All this is about more than Trump’s obvious meltdown since an election that was bad for him and his party — and gets worse as more votes are tallied. It is about whether Republicans are willing to contain and, when necessary, oppose a man who repeatedly demonstrates hostility to the rules, norms and constraints of constitutional democracy.

It was, thus, good news this week when 14 conservative and libertarian lawyers announced the formation of a new organization called Checks and Balances. Its ranks include George T. Conway III , who happens to be the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and former homeland security secretary and Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge.

Their organizing statement declared the group’s dedication to “the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights, and the necessity of civil discourse.”

Tellingly, they insisted that their commitment to these principles applied “regardless of the party or persons in power” and reflected their faith in “free speech, a free press, separation of powers and limited government.”

Up to now, conservatives opposed to Trump have had little impact on their party. Too many, especially among elected officials, have pulled their punches in the crunch and fallen silent under pressure.

The test will be whether four or five GOP senators prove willing to break with Trump’s apologists in their party’s leadership when it matters — and when it’s hard. Defending the Florida recount as legitimate and necessary would be a good start. So would supporting a bill protecting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and insisting that his findings be made public. Lovely words about the truth and the rule of law are powerless against a [would be tyrant] president who respects neither.

Right-Wing Extremist Calls For Global ‘Inquisition’ To Kill Gays:

Theodore Shoebat: kill all the gays

While the international community struggles to come up with a plan to irradiate the Islamic extremist organization known as ISIS (see the prior post), here at home in America we see far right Christofascists calling for the murder of gays much along the lines of the atrocities being conducted by ISIS in the area it currently controls.   What makes the anti-gay harangue more frightening is that it represents a mindset to which the Republican Party now prostitutes itself to on a daily basis.  The unfortunate truth is that fundamentalist religious belief and fundamentalist religions in and of themselves are an evil.  They thrive only by spreading hatred an seeking to impose their toxic beliefs on all.  Right Wing Watch has details on this latest sign that fundamentalist Christianity is dangerous and needs to be treated as such.  Here are excerpts:

Theodore Shoebat, who was among the dozens of anti-gay activists, Republican members of Congress and GOP presidential hopefuls to be featured in Janet Porter's recent anti-gay "Light Wins" documentary, posted a new video over the weekend calling for a global "Inquisition" to eradicate homosexuality once and for all.

Outraged over reports that a doctor had been let go by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for repeatedly spreading anti-gay material to colleagues, Shoebat posted a video declaring that "sodomite homo Sharia" was being imposed on America by "sodomite bastards" and "faggots" who do nothing but "go around spreading AIDS."

The only solution, he declared, is the imposition of a global law criminalizing homosexuality that will be enforced by a modern-day Inquisition with the power to put gays to death.

"I'm sick and tired of the homo tyranny," he said. "What the world needs is a collective law ... What we need is the laws of God, the virtues of Heaven to become the law of the world. That is the bottom line. Do I believe in Christian world domination? Absolutely. I would be a liar if I said I didn't. Do I believe in Christian supremacy? Absolutely. Do I believe in democracy? Hell no.  

Do I believe in some sort of a democratic socialist republic? Hell no. I believe in monarchy, I believe in Inquisitions, I believe we need to revive the system of the Middle Ages that we had; we had no fag problems, we didn't have a lot of serial killers back in those days, we didn't have frickin drug cartel problems, we had none of the crap. We didn't have no fags asking to be married. None of that garbage."

"It's homo tyranny and it needs to be destroyed," Shoebat continued, "Christian world domination needs to be established and homosexuality needs to be deemed as a crime. And the homos need to be told, hey, you gotta stop that and if they don't stop that then, I'm sorry, we have an Inquisition and that Inquisition will enact the death penalty, as Scripture tells us."

As I said, there really is not much difference between Shoebat and  his fellow "godly Christians" and the leaders of ISIS in terms of their ideology of imposing their beliefs on all and killing those who do not conform.  I guess the only question I find myself having is: how the f*ck did these folks get so crazy?  Are they really that fearful of thinking for themselves and/or what severe psychosis is behind their need to cling to far right extremist dogma.  Normal, sane people do not act this way.  Far right Christian belief in my view is synonymous with deep mental illness.

Be Afraid: Extremists Are Taking Control of the GOP

While in many ways the Republican Party has become and extremist sectarian party, things may be about to get much worse with the coming departure of feckless John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Now, swamp fever addled "movement conservatives" - read Christofascist religious fanatic extremists - backed members of the House are likely to push for even more extreme batshitery, including shutting down the government and force a debt default.  A piece in Salon looks at the frightening turn of events that may be in the near future if these lunatics get their way.  Here are excerpts:

Movement Conservatives just claimed the head of House Speaker John Boehner. His political death was the price of preventing a catastrophic government shutdown after Movement Conservatives in Congress tied the very survival of the United States government to their determination to defund Planned Parenthood. Movement Conservatives are gunning for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell next. We should be very afraid. Boehner and McConnell are not wild-eyed lefties. They are on the very far right of the American political spectrum: fervently pro-business, antiabortion, opposed to social welfare legislation. But they are old-school politicians who still have faith in the idea of American democracy.

Movement Conservatives do not. They want to blow up the government and remake America according to their own radical ideology.

Eisenhower worried deeply about the rise of authoritarian governments. He worried about fascism, communism and religious extremism overseas, but he was also deeply concerned at the rise of Movement Conservatism in America.

Mass movements ultimately need a disaffected population, Hoffer said, people who are either economically or culturally dispossessed. Those isolated individuals need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They need to believe they can regain their previous relevance. Properly primed, such followers will throw themselves behind a leader who promises to return them to power.

The easiest way to unify followers was with hate. Leaders of such a movement identified a villain. These villains were usually the weakest members of society, making them easy to attack. And each attack on these new “enemies” fed contempt for them. Followers of a movement made more and more outrageous claims about those they demonized. Eventually those villains became so dehumanized that movement members would kill them, believing such atrocities were vital to reclaiming a glorious future for their nation. At this stage, followers were immune to facts or logic. Indeed, arguing with them only entrenched them in their beliefs, because the sign of a true believer’s faith was that it stood firm in the face of overwhelming opposition.

In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower’s use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans. Black people threatened America by forcing the government to redistribute wealth, thus inserting communism into the very fabric of the country. In 1968, Nixon made this Movement Conservative argument part of the established Republican Party when he resorted to the Southern Strategy. 

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives controlled the Republican Party, and they abandoned reality in favor of their simple story line. A member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind that “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior adviser to the president told Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”

That is exactly what today’s Movement Conservatives are doing. After the last Republican debate, astonished observers noted that many of the candidates’ assertions were flat-out lies.

They tell followers that America has fallen apart because enemies— minorities, women and liberals– have poisoned the government. Only a Movement Conservative leader can purge the nation of that poison and return America to its former greatness. Donald Trump, who currently commands a significant lead, is the salesman who puts it most clearly. . . . He tells them a story in which Christianity is under siege, President Obama is a foreigner, and that immigrants—who actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans– are criminals.

But Trump is not an outlier. Jeb! says that black people vote for Democrats to get “free stuff.” Mike Huckabee insists that the United States is criminalizing Christianity. Bobby Jindal promises to “fire” Congress. Ted Cruz hints that President Obama is a Muslim and warns that no Muslim should be president. All of the candidates demonize undocumented immigrants.

The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism. Last week, 43 percent of Republicans polled said they could imagine a scenario in which they would back a military coup. This week, Movement Conservatives in Congress knocked off a conservative speaker because he refused to sacrifice the American government to their demands.

We should be very frightened indeed. If we are not careful, John Boehner’s will not be the only head on the block.

People need to wake up to the stark danger these fanatics pose.  For too long they have used racism, false patriotism, and hate to dupe people into supporting their toxic agenda.  They need to be unmasked and defeated.

The Lawlessness of Ted Cruz and the GOP

The Kim Davis spectacle is revealing another aspect of the far right: the unfitness of a number of elected officials to hold their office due to their violation of the oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution.”  Like Davis, they need to either obey the law of the land or resign.  Leading the pack of those unfit for office is Texas Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz who is advocating defiance of federal court orders.  Even id Cruz's motivation is to whore himself to the Christofascist base of the Republican Party, his behavior is inexcusable and someone needs to hold him accountable.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Cruz's lawlessness and violation of his oath of office.  Here are excerpts:

What Kim Davis did was troubling. What Ted Cruz did was downright alarming. . . . . Davis, at least, is facing the consequences of her actions. Not so Cruz, senator from Texas and Republican presidential candidate. 

“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny,” he said. “Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. . . . I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally.” 

Tyranny? Our system of government gives the Supreme Court final say over constitutional matters, and, though Cruz doesn’t like it, the court ordered states to recognize same-sex marriages. In fact, the high court specifically declined to give relief to Davis, and the federal judge who ordered her jailed for contempt of court is a George W. Bush appointee and son of a former Republican senator. 

Now Cruz, who took an oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution,” wants people to defy the Supreme Court’s authority? Who is the lawless one?

Cruz isn’t the only Republican candidate seeking the nation’s highest office while encouraging people to ignore its laws. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, declared: “I thank God for Kim Davis, and I hope more Americans will stand with her.” 

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, too, supported Davis, and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) called her jailing “absurd” and said stands such as Davis’s are “an important part of the American way.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said that “you have the freedom to practice religious beliefs out there. It’s a fundamental right.”

[N]obody is denying Davis freedom to believe what she wishes; she’s merely being ordered to do what she swore to do: “faithfully execute the duties of my office without favor.” Refusing to do so doesn’t make her Martin Luther King Jr. It makes her George Wallace. 

 “When they put their personal beliefs above their responsibilities as public servants, that’s not civil disobedience, it’s abuse of power,”

Huckabee and Rick Santorum, another GOP presidential candidate, signed a pledge not to “respect an unjust law that directly conflicts with higher law.” Huckabee is on record saying that “the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being, and they cannot overturn the laws of nature or of nature’s God.” Huckabee floated the notion of using federal troops to block people from getting abortions. He also said: “I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch.”

It’s fitting that, as Kim Davis undermines the rule of law, Joe Davis threatens violence. When you lose the former, all you are left with is the latter. 

When "Religious Freedom" Becomes Freedom From Laws

Republicans who seek to subvert the U.S. Constitution

I have consistently maintained that the Christofascist and GOP push for falsely named "religious freedom" laws is in reality an effort to gran special rights to far right Christians and basically exempt them from obeying laws that they claim are inconsistent with their warped, hate-filled beliefs.  These laws have nothing to do with protecting religious freedom as contemplated by the Founding Fathers and everything to do with granting religious extremist special exempt status under the laws that govern the rest of us.  First and foremost, far right Christians are self-centered and full of hatred towards others.  A piece in Salon looks at this reality and the ugly truth behind the effort to enact these laws.  Here are highlights:

When the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges came down and same-sex marriage was suddenly, finally legalized throughout the country, the response from social conservatives was loud and predictable: “What about our religious liberty?” We’ve seen versions of this fight play out time and again over the last few months and years as religious conservatives have sought to slow the rapid advance of gay rights by arguing that their constitutionally protected religious freedoms are threatened when the state makes it illegal to discriminate against gays. With the Obergefell ruling, the “religious liberty” crowd are facing their most challenging setback: If marriage equality for gays is now the law of the land, what can one do to protect one’s “religious freedom”?

Republicans like Ted Cruz and the Republican attorney general of Texas think they have the answer, and it gets to the ugly trajectory of the “religious freedom” push against gay rights: If the law won’t allow you your “religious freedom,” well, then, declare your freedom from the law.

Cruz said that government clerks should “absolutely” be able to refuse to issue marriage licenses if they have a religious objection. “Ours is a country that was built by men and women fleeing religious oppression.” Cruz’s opinion on the matter was joined by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton . . .

[T]wo high-ranking conservative public officials explicitly arguing that government employees may ignore the law if they can claim a religious objection. As the Atlantic’s David Graham writes, this is the very stuff of nullification theory: the idea that states are either not obligated to follow federal law or that states can pass laws that supersede federal law. Anyone who’s spent any time studying the Constitution – like Harvard Law graduate and former Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz, for example – knows that nullification is flagrantly unconstitutional and undermines the very foundations of our system of government.

There’s an easy pattern to observe here: Social progress leaps forward as a result of federal action, conservative opponents assert individual liberty and states’ rights to defy the feds in a last-ditch effort to thwart change, and they lose because they lack moral and legal justification.

The important thing to understand with the current gay rights battle is that the proponents of the “religious freedom” argument aren’t actually talking about “protecting” religious freedom — they’re talking about expanding the definition of what can be considered an expression of religious faith.

That argument “is not justified in either well-established constitutional law or in statutes that prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion,” Columbia Law’s Katherine Franke wrote in response to Paxton’s memo. “Religious freedom,” according to Cruz et al., allows the faithful to deny other people their legal rights, and allows for government employees to impose their religious beliefs on others. That’s an insane perversion of the First Amendment.

Ted Cruz has to know how insane that is. But he very much doesn’t care. Cruz is talking up nullification for the modern age not because he thinks it’s a legitimate legal strategy, but because it portrays him as a warrior for Christian rights. His whole 2016 campaign is based explicitly on mobilizing Christian conservatives, and positioning himself as a lone stalwart standing against the tyrannical judiciary in defense of “traditional values” is part of that strategy. In doing so he’s advocating lawlessness and discrimination in defiance of the established constitutional order.

The Christofascists and their GOP political whores constitute a clear and present danger to our system of constitutional government.  They must be defeated and ultimately driven into social and political oblivion.