9/10/2015 -
Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
Do you remember Lewis "Scooter" Libby?
In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to
investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on
the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was
widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell's subordinate,
Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.
In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused
of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely
committed by someone else.
Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald convinced a
Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury
and making false statements to federal investigators -- not the supposed crimes
for which he was originally targeted by the media.
Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public
servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry -- by supposedly independent and
autonomous prosecutors. In the eight-plus since the Libby trial, the Obama administration
has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.
Barack Obama once warned Latino activists that he had no legal
authority to suspend enforcement of federal immigration law, stop deportations
and offer de facto amnesties. But that caution was only a campaigning talking point. After his
re-election in 2012 and the midterm elections in 2014, Obama made a mockery of
immigration law.
Hundreds of liberal sanctuary cities have announced that federal
immigration law does not apply to them. That scary, neo-Confederate idea of
legal nullification was sanctioned by the Obama administration -- in a way it
never would have been if a city had suspended the Endangered Species Act,
emissions standards or gun-control legislation. As a result, once-detained and later-released immigrants with
criminal records have murdered innocent American citizens.
Consider the proposed nuclear deal with Iran. By past custom and
practice, the nonproliferation agreement would be treated as what it is -- a
treaty.
But ratifying treaties constitutionally requires 67 yes votes from
the Senate. Obama could never obtain that margin. So he managed to downgrade
the treaty into a mere legal agreement. Then he claimed that the Senate
required 67 no votes to override his veto.
Obama also was worried about the political impact of his new
Obamacare legislation on the 2014 midterm elections. So he simply suspended by
executive fiat the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Had another
president done that to the laws of Obamacare, the left would have demanded
impeachment.
In Ferguson, Missouri, law enforcement eased off and allowed a
city to burn. But the cause of the rioting -- the supposed improper police
killing of criminal suspect Michael Brown -- was based on the lie that Brown
was shot in the back while fleeing. No matter. The ensuing public outrage
seemingly exempted arsonists and looters from arrest.
Just as scary is the application of the law on the basis of the
perceived politics of a suspect.
IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner was exposed as a rank partisan whose
office gave particular scrutiny to would-be tax-exempt groups deemed opponents
of Obama's re-election efforts. She invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to
testify before a congressional committee about her actions at the IRS. Lerner
has never been indicted.
Almost everything former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has
stated about her improper use of a private email account and server has been
proven false. A State Department staffer who worked on Clinton's private server
plans to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before a congressional
committee about his role in privatizing Clinton's email. But like Lerner, Clinton has escaped an indictment or jailing.
Not so Kim Davis. She is a conservative Christian court clerk in
Kentucky who apparently thought, given the lawless times, that she could ignore
without consequence a Supreme Court decision making gay marriage legal. Davis was jailed for not enforcing the law. That is a justifiable
punishment -- if it were applied equally to the progressive mayors of sanctuary
cities and all officials who likewise ignore federal law.
In the same manner, rank amateur video maker Nakoula Basseley
Nakoula was jailed for violating his probation. Why? Nakoula made a video insensitive to Muslims and thus was falsely
blamed for the riotous 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The most
likely culprit of the preplanned Benghazi attack was not scapegoat Nakoula, but
the inconvenient pre-election truth that al-Qaida was quite alive in Libya and
U.S. security quite lax.
America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary
Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically
protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.
So we are now seeing the logical descent into the abyss of chaos.
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