In Texas, a picture of political extortion comes into view
To work, the crime requires the corruption of the law.
US Senator John Cornyn of Texas announced this morning that the FBI had granted his request to help Texas law enforcement agencies in “locating members of the Texas House of Representatives who have fled the state in a shameful attempt to thwart the legislative process.”
He was referring to scores of Democratic state lawmakers who denied a quorum in the bid by Republicans to redraw Texas’ congressional districts to give the president an extra five seats in the US Congress. Donald Trump evidently expects a wipeout in next year’s midterms and is trying to pad the margins to avoid losing the House. He faces the prospect of two years of Democratic investigations if he fails.
The Texas attorney general declared the move by the Texas Democrats illegal, and the Texas governor ordered state law enforcement to fetch them. Texas, however, doesn’t have jurisdiction in Illinois and New York, where some of the lawmakers went. That’s why Cornyn got involved. He wanted the federal government to do what Texas can’t.
The problem, however, is there’s no apparent basis for the FBI to be involved, as there are no federal statutes in doubt. Cornyn did not cite one, nor did he cite a Texas statute being violated. In his own words, the worst these Democrats have done is “avoid their constitutional responsibilities.” While that might be shameful, it’s hardly a crime deserving of the FBI’s attention, especially since plenty of lawmakers in Washington, including Republicans, don’t show up for scheduled votes.
The FBI’s lawless decision to help Texas is the latest of what I have been calling the Republicans’ attempt to change the rules of democracy – that’s what gerrymandering in the middle of a decade is – in order to avoid being held accountable for their support for an unpopular president and his even more unpopular agenda. But it is also the latest attempt to do something else: criminalize dissent.
Fleeing Texas to deny a quorum might indeed be shameful, depending on your view, but it’s nonetheless a form of constitutionally protected speech. We have such protections because there is always an incentive on the part of those in power to silence those who stand against them.
We must have such protections. Otherwise, those without power, which is most of us, would have no way of petitioning for the redress of grievances. This latest move by a lawless FBI illustrates the point that law enforcement in America is often less about enforcing the law than it is about enforcing the will of those with the greatest power.
But it is also a microcosm of a larger, more ominous pattern that I think is slowly coming into view – the corruption of the law by Trump and his party to protect a criminal conspiracy against the people. I know, I know. This sounds outlandish, but consider where it all began.
The president single-handedly implemented a massive sales tax on the entire country, in the form of insane and illegal tariffs, for reasons that have nothing to do with economics, or the national interest, and everything to do with Donald Trump’s demented mafia mentality.
The Republicans in Washington went along, for fear of their lives (literally) and their fortunes, and anyway it was a fair price to pay for all those sweet tax cuts, even though every single one of them would have voted against those tariffs if they had ever come up for a vote.
The Republicans, not just the ones in Washington, are now complicit in a criminal conspiracy to force the American people to pay and pay and pay for the essentials of life, even as our wages are decimated, our jobs are disappeared, and the safety net (food stamps, Medicaid) is taken out from beneath us, as a consequence of that criminal conspiracy. (Another component of the conspiracy is getting rid of immigrants who do needed work, while depriving native-born Americans of the education and opportunities they need to enter the middle class.)
But the Republicans can’t change course now, not without implicating themselves in a scheme to extort us. So they push ahead with Trump’s plan not only to prevent us from knowing that we’re being extorted – by faking government data on jobs and inflation – but also to prevent those who do know from saying what we know to those who don’t.
This is what’s happening in Texas. The Democrats there are trying to raise public awareness of the fact that the Republicans are trying to rig the rules of democracy so they win whether it’s heads or tails. In turn, the Republicans in Texas are corrupting the law, with the help of a lawless FBI director, to prevent the Democrats in Texas from alerting the American people to the GOP’s criminal conspiracy against them.
Think of it all in terms of Robin Hood, but instead of the story’s main character being an “outlaw” who robs from the rich in service to the poor, the main character is King John, a ruthless tyrant who created conditions in which the people must pay and pay and pay, in the form of insane and illegal taxation, but can’t do anything about the injustice, certainly not complain about it publicly. All they can do is secretly pine for a hero who will speak for them and offer some form of redress.
I don’t know who our Robin Hood (or Hoods) will be.
They might never come.
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