The Madness of Consigliere Barr
By 
The Attorney General of the United States is having a particularly normal one in a perpetual sequence of normal ones:
Attorney General William Barr suggested on Wednesday that the calls for a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus were the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in history “other than slavery.”The comments came minutes after he slammed the hundreds of Justice Department prosecutors working beneath him, equating them to preschoolers, in a defense of his own politically tuned decision making in the Trump administration.Addressing a Constitution Day celebration hosted by Hillsdale College, the event’s host asked Barr to explain the “constitutional hurdles for forbidding a church from meeting during Covid-19.”
The question lead Barr into a four-minute response where he said state governors were using their executive powers to stifle citizens and businesses from going back to work.
Checks out:
It’s basically:
1. Slavery
2. Restaurants were closed for a while
3. Jim Crow for a couple of generations
4. Internment camps during World War II
5. When they shut down Google Reader https://t.co/1TeozL595a— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 17, 2020
I regret to inform you that things can get much more crazy than this:
Separately, Mr. Barr asked officials in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to see whether they could bring criminal charges against Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for allowing residents to set up a police-free zone in that city this summer, a person familiar with the request said. The autonomous zone, the site of almost daily confrontations between officers and protesters, was the scene of several shootings.
The Aristocrats States’ Rights!
I’m so old I remember when the Attorney General briefly meeting with the spouse of a presidential candidate on a tarmac was a five-alarm political scandal.
Four years ago the press and the right erupted over the *appearance* of a possible conflict when Lynch met with Clinton, arguing improper political influence on prosecutions. Now the Barr/Trumpist position is: political influence on prosecutions is great and we need more of it.— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) September 17, 2020