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President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden at the White House on Wednesday in Washington.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In a fusillade of Twitter posts this week, President Donald Trump blasted his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for failing to pursue probes of Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey. It is unclear whether the presidents posts will spur his attorney general and the Justice Department to pursue investigations into either individual. It is increasingly clear, though, that Trump has no compunction about using the machinery of federal law enforcement as a weapon against his political opponents. What he probably doesnt realize is that he is committing a crime by doing so.

There are 120,000 full-time federal law enforcement officers in the United States, all of whom reportat least indirectlyto the president. Meanwhile, thefederal criminal code runs to 868 pages, with many crimes defined vaguely and many rarely enforced. If the president wants to use the vast investigative and prosecutorial infrastructure at his disposal to go after his rivals, its likely that federal law enforcement officers will be able to findsome provision that his opponents have violated. Even if not, the president could make his opponents lives miserable with ceaseless probes and baseless charges.

But the very breadth of federal law enforcement power has, at least since Richard Nixon abused it, given rise to a strong norm of independence from political control. While the president is the nominal head of the executive branch and can order the Justice Department to follow his priorities, he must not use his authority to criminalize political opposition or harass his opponents.

A now mostly forgotten political scandal from George W. Bushs second term shows what can happen when an administration tries to transform the Justice Department into a political weapon. To put that scandal in context: Each of the federal judicial districts has a U.S. attorney who serves as its chief federal prosecutor. The president can fire any one of them at any time. In 2006, Bush dismissed nine, includingmost controversiallythe U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias.

Iglesias says he was fired after a number of Republican officials in the state pressured him to bring corruption charges against a prominent Democratic politician in therun-up to the 2006 midterm election. That would potentially violate obstruction of justice laws, which make it a crime for anyone to corruptly influence a grand jury investigation oragency proceeding (among other matters). A subsequent Justice Departmentreport recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether Bush administration officials had broken the obstruction laws in the course of the Iglesias firing. The report stated: [W]e believe that pressuring a prosecutor to indict a case more quickly to affect the outcome of an upcoming election could be a corrupt attempt to influence the prosecution in violation of the obstruction of justice statute. The report added that the obstruction laws didnt just apply to the indictment of an opponent prior to an electionthey could apply to pressuring a prosecutor to take partisan considerations into account under other circumstances as well.

A special prosecutor was ultimately appointed to investigate the Iglesias firing and eventually concluded that there was insufficient evidence that any Bush administration official had pressured the New Mexico U.S. attorney. But all along, the Justice Department proceeded on the assumption that administration officials could be charged with obstruction if they had sought to influence Iglesias investigation for partisan purposes. In that case, there was no smoking gun: no tweets in which the president intimated that he would fire the prosecutor unless the prosecutor brought charges against the presidents political rival. (Twitter was only a fewmonths old then, and Bush wasnot a user.)

Is Trump pressuring Sessions to pursue cases on the basis of partisan considerations? Seems like it.

Today, by contrast, the gun smokes in 140-character plumes. In one of his posts, Trump asked why his beleaguered attorney general wasnt looking into Clintons crimes and Russia relations. In others, he complained of Comeys illegal leaks of memos to the New York Times and berates Sessions for taking a VERY WEAK position on leaks and on Clintons alleged mishandling of classified material. In yet another, he blasted Sessions for failing to replace the acting FBI director with someone who will go after Clinton with vigor. On Wednesday, theWashington Post published a piece sourced to four people familiar with the issue indicating that Trump may fire Sessionsa leak that may be aimed at Sessions himself.

Is Trump pressuring his attorney general and the acting FBI chief to pursue cases on the basis of partisan considerationsthe sort of conduct the Justice Department said could amount to criminal obstruction? Seems like it. If Trump follows up by replacing Sessions, the parallels to the Iglesias firing will be even stronger, except that this time there will be ample evidence of the presidents motive.

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To be sure, Trumpas presidenthas a constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and he might argue that this is what motivates his interest in the Clinton and Comey cases. But if a jury could be convinced that Trumps motives are political rather than in the public interest, then his advocacy for action against Clinton and Comey could be considered corrupt, thus amounting to criminal obstruction. That, at least, appears to be the implication of the Justice Department report regarding the Iglesias episode, and it is consistent with the way the obstruction laws have been interpreted in other contexts.

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Certainly Mueller is already collecting all the necessary documentation on this particular crime, right? At this pace, Mueller is going to have to leave some felonies out of his final report just for the sake of brevity. More...

Trumps power over the Justice Department might dissuade prosecutors from pursuing obstruction charges against him. But the Justice Department is staffed with career attorneys committed to the rule of lawand in many cases protected by civil service regulations. It is not so clear that they can be browbeaten by the president. Plus, whether or not Trump can be indicted while still president, he will find himself in legal jeopardy after he leaves office. And then there are his aides and associates; if any of them have assisted Trump in his campaign to pressure the Justice Department, they are complicit in a crime.

The vast reach of federal criminal law and law enforcement leaves us vulnerable to the risk that Trump will use these resources for political ends, as he already seems to have suggested. But Trump is vulnerable to the same forces that he seeks to unleash on his rivals. In an effort to ensnare his opponents, he may be laying his own trap.

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The Obstruction of Justice Case Against Donald Trump - Slate Magazine

Donald Trump and Melania Trump walk off the stage after his rally Tuesday in Youngstown, Ohio.

Justin Merriman/Getty Images

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took a reprieve from the chaos engulfing his administration, traveling to Youngstown, Ohio, to commune with his fans and supporters in a campaign-style Make America Great Again rally. The event was typical Trump fare: exuberant and improvisational, with the occasional feel of a tent revival. And Trump brought his greatest hits, blasting Democrats, the news media, and other opponents for the crowds enjoyment.

The president also addressed immigration, and there his rhetoric took a darker turn. Trump has always described unauthorized immigrants in harsh, disparaging terms. But here he went further, spinning a lurid and explicit tale of extreme violence against innocent people.

Youve seen the stories about some of these animals, said the president.

Its easy to file this under Trumps usual anti-immigrant demagoguery, specifically his preoccupation with crime committed by Hispanic immigrants. Recall his presidential announcement speech, where he assailed the Mexican government for sending criminals and rapists to the United States, as well as his (and Attorney General Jeff Sessions) recent fixation on MS-13, a gang with origins in Central America. In a June rally in Iowa, the president stated that they like to cut people, and on Thursday, he mentioned them in a tweet: Big progress being made in ridding our country of MS-13 gang members and gang members in general. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!

Despite the connection to those earlier statements, the Youngstown riff was different. It was especially detailed and graphic. And while the racial content of this kind of rhetoric has always been clearthe immigrants are always nonwhite, the victims are typically whitethis was unusually explicit. Trump wasnt just connecting immigrants with violent crime. He was using an outright racist trope: that of the violent, sadistic black or brown criminal, preying on innocent (usually white) women. Even considering his 1989 jeremiad against the Central Park Fivewhere he demanded the death penalty for the five black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a white womanthe Youngstown rhetoric was sensational and excessive.

What it wasnt, however, was unique. Rhetorically, Trumps Youngstown speech recalls the openly racist language found in the early 20th century among white reporters, pamphleteers, and politicians who expressed the prejudices of the era. In Southern newspapers, for example, writers described the alleged crimes of black offenders with gruesome and sensational detail, usually to justify lynchings and other forms of extrajudicial violence. A miserable negro beast attacked a telephone girl as she was going home at night, and choked her, reads a 1903 report from a newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi. The writer of a 1914 pamphlet titled The Black Shadow and the Red Death spun terrible tales of black crime, including one where cocaine and whiskey led a half-drunken negro beast to kill a little school girl with a pretty head.

Politically, what President Trump was doing in Ohio has a clear antecedent in the racial demagoguery common in the Jim Crow South. Rather than campaign on what they would do for voters, Southern politicians fanned flames of race hatred. This nigger baitinglabeled as such by observers at the timewas how they built emotional connections with their audiences and tarred their (often equally racist) opponents as unacceptable proponents of racial equality. You people who want social equality vote for Jones. You men who have nigger children vote for Jones, declared South Carolina Gov. Coleman Livingston Blease in his 1912 re-election campaign against state Supreme Court Justice Ira Jones, blasting his opponent as a supporter of rights for black Americans.

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Lawmakers like James Vardaman in Mississippi and Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina earned national notoriety for their vicious advocacy of white supremacy on the campaign trail. This style of politics did not end as the 20th century progressed; in 1958, Alabama Attorney General James Patterson ran for governor and wonbeating a fresh-faced George Wallaceas a staunch opponent of civil rights, backed by the states Ku Klux Klan. In two re-election races, one in 1984 and the other in 1990, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms ran race-baiting campaigns. Against thenGov. Jim Hunt, he distributed literature warning of black registration drives and black political figures such as Jesse Jackson. And against Harvey Gantt, the black mayor of Charlotte, Helms ran one of the most breathtakingly racist ads of the modern era.

Trump isnt yet running for re-election, but he is in dire political straits. According to FiveThirtyEights aggregate measure of his popularity, just 38.5 percent of Americans approve of his presidency, compared with 55 percent who disapprove. Hes caught in a feud with his attorney general, theres in-fighting among his senior staff, and hes facing backlash from within the armed services on account of a cynical attempt to stoke anti-transgender bias for political gain. Its possible, perhaps even likely, that the presidents riff in Youngstown was just another digression, a rant that emerged from the stew of resentments and prejudices that seem to form Trumps psyche.

But the additional timing of his statement on transgender service members suggests otherwise. On Friday Trump will visit Long Island, where 15 members of MS-13 were arresteda trip that would fit a political plan to demagogue Hispanic immigrants as imminent threats to white Americans, and white women in particular. Trump is aware that hes flailing, and to rebuild supportto re-establish that bond with his votershes turning to an old, crude, and dangerous rhetorical well.

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Make America Afraid Again - Slate Magazine

Something Josh Barro Text ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/SolidText ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/Solid$ID/NothingText ColorText Color$ID/NothingText ColorText Colorrecently wrote in a Business Insider essay struck a raw nerve with me: Except on abortion, where public opinion remains about evenly divided, conservatives have implicitly admitted that they have lost certain parts of the cultural war.

Hes probably right. Most conservatives can see that our culture is changing at what appears to be breakneck speed.

As I observe the changes, the question for me as a conservative is no longer How do I/we stop this? Were well past that stage.

Once in a while in conversations with friends, I allude to the old slippery slope, which instantly makes me the target for their loving scorn. This isnt the slippery slope, Phil. Its progress. The conversation usually ends there, with me stubbornly clinging to my thoughts of humanity at the highest point of the roller coaster, poised to take the plunge straight down into the abyss.

The signs of change are becoming more and more pronounced. A case like Charlie Gard, where the State apparatus has supplanted parental rights, has become legally acceptable. At what point will society decide this arrangement is also morally acceptable? Will it become normative?

It wasnt too long ago that euthanasia was almost impossible to imagine. Now, its becoming increasingly tolerable, even to the point where involuntary euthanasia is being practiced (NCBI/NIH abstract The Illusion of Safeguards 6/2012). Polite discussions about what to do with unwanted or unhealthy children are now taking place, thanks to the work of ethicists like Princetons Peter Singer and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, both of whom advance the grisly idea that killing a child is a morally sound decision. Coyne recently put it this way in a blog posting dated July 13th: This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide is the result of the tide of increasing morality in the world.

Not to be outdone, Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State University, wrote about the painful death of his newborn son. After reflecting on his agonizing experience, he decided that the repugnant has become reasonable. The unthinkable has become the right, the good. Painlessly. Quickly. With the assistance of a trained physician You should have killed your baby.

How far into the abyss have we plunged? Just this morning I read a piece in the Palm Beach Post about some teenage boys in Florida who mocked and filmed Jamel Dunn, a 32-year-old disabled man, as he drowned. The more Dunn pleaded for help, the more they mocked. Get out the water, you gonna die one teen can be heard shouting. Another yelled to the man aint nobody fixing to help you, you dumb (expletive).

According to Florida law, the teens hadnt done anything wrong. There may be a statute they violated by not reporting a death, but mocking a dying man and making a video of his ordeal isnt illegal. Is it immoral? It probably is now, but will we get to the point where even things like this will become morally acceptable?

I just finished reading Rod Drehers The Benedict Option A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. The book is in part a tome and in part an indictment of the modern Christian church. Dreher bores in right away, arguing that the church, which should be a counterforce to secularism, has become content to be the chaplaincy to a consumerist culture that was fast losing a sense of what it meant to be Christian.

Dreher argues that Christians have some very important decisions to make. As a baseline, he cites the work of Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who saw that the time was coming when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue.

Dreher then argues, quite persuasively, that Christians need to pull away from the rest of society? He calls it the Benedict Option.

I think he may be right.

We conservative Christians need to understand we have lost the culture wars. The question for us is no longer how to stop the wheels of the machine, but rather it is now a question of how those who choose to can live a meaningful, Christian life in such an environment.

The signs of the times all point to one thing. The Christian pilgrimage for many right now is difficult. Our input is neither valued nor wanted. The path is narrow; the light seems dim. Yet, in spite of the difficulties, we need to press on, in our own way. As W.H. Auden put it in his short poem Atlantis, we must:

Stagger onward rejoicing

And even then if, perhaps

Having actually got

To the last col, you collapse

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The culture war - Emporia Gazette

Boy Scouts listen as President Donald Trump speaks during the National Boy Scout Jamboree in Glen Jean, West Virginia, on Monday.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

As is often true of Trumps speeches, his address on Monday in front of the Boy Scouts of America would have been reasonably appropriate if he had simply given the speech as written. The scripted version was not great but passable. Trumps asides, as always, sent the speech off the rails, full of references to his win, fake news, fake polls, Hillarys sins, another swipe at Obama, and so on.

Backlash in the world of the Scouts was instantaneous. Those of us raised in ScoutingI say as an Eagle Scout myself, and author of a book on Scoutingknow that a fundamental rule of the BSA is that it is nonpartisan. We were taught never to wear our uniforms at a political event or to act in any way while in uniform that would suggest the BSA would endorse the activity. Indeed, the national office issued a statement Tuesday affirming that the organization is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy and that the tradition of inviting the president of the U.S., as honorary president of the BSA, to speak to the National Jamboree is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific politics.

When I read Kenneth Kenistons fine book from 1968, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, years ago, it seemed clear to me that the young men (mainly) who organized the antiwar activities of the Vietnam Summer of 1967 and whom Keniston interviewed for the book could easily have been Eagle Scouts. It seemed equally likely to me that a Green Beret fighting the war in Vietnam could have been an Eagle Scout. Participation in the war or against the war could easily be justified based on the values learned as Scouts. The point is, of course, that the values and leadership skills learned in Scouting do not lead to any single partisan position.

The BSA managed to avoid political controversy for the first 75 years or so of its existence, but the rise of the culture wars in the Reagan years dragged the BSA into battles it would rather have avoided. The BSA policies barring gay boys and men, and atheists, from membership signaled on which side of the culture wars the BSA had landed. Those policies were rooted in religion, and although the BSA was not intended by the founders to be a religious organization but rather an organization open to all, the large number of Boy Scout troops sponsored by churches sustained a membership policy that really was at odds with the tolerance promoted by the BSA. Eventually it did change its membership policies, first, in 2014, admitting boys regardless of their sexual orientation, then in 2015 admitting adult leaders regardless of their sexual orientation. Most recently the BSA announced a policy of accepting members based on the gender identity they stated on their membership application, rather than the gender indicated on their birth certificates, opening the way for the first transgender boys to be Scouts. Though the culture wars have clearly not disappeared in 2017, evolving millennial attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity have been transformative for the Boy Scouts organization.

Yet its incumbent upon the BSAs current leadership to ensure that the Boy Scouts are a force for good going forward. The event at the Jamboree reminded me of the moment back in September of 2016 when the Rev. Faith Green Timmons, pastor at Bethel United Methodist Church in Flint, Michigan, had to ask candidate Trump to stop turning his visit therewhich was intended to be a recognition of the role of the church in the Flint water crisisinto a Hillary-bashing campaign speech. Trump complied but then publicly excoriated Timmons the next day. So I could imagine the BSA senior leadership standing in the wings of the stage at the Jamboreeperhaps they had seen the written version of the speechcringing as Trumps asides increasingly turned what should have been a nonpartisan speech into a deeply partisan one. And none of those leaders had the courage to do what Timmons had done.

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Then there were the audible cheers from some members of the BSA crowd listening to Trumps speech, which drove some critics to denounce the Boy Scouts writ large. I know that that Scouts for Equality had a presence at the Jamboree and their Facebook page chronicles their negative reaction to the Trump speech. Many boys were complaining that their troop leaders required them to attend the speech, against the boys own wishes. No, that crowd was not unanimous in its approval of President Trump, no matter the volume of the supporters.

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So the BSA has to issue an apology because the President of the United States is incapable of giving an appropriate speech to a bunch of kids. It's hard to believe this is really where America is. More...

But regardless, Id argue that these cheers should actually serve as a scary reminder of exactly why the Boy Scouts organization is important. The BSA, which was founded in 1910, early on aimed to take the natural instincts of adolescent boys and channel them toward positive, socially beneficial goals. Juvenile delinquency was causing a moral panic among American adults, and the founders of the BSA explicitlyif dubiously talked about the Scouts as the new, socially positive form of the boys gang, offering the boy what he craved as a teenager: a sense of belonging, comradeship, a distinct identity marked by uniforms and insignia, a sense of serving a larger good, and the satisfaction of helping others. These are needs that can be served by organizations espousing a politics of the left or right (hence the Hitler Youth analogy). The BSA tries to sustain a nonpartisan stance precisely because it wants to avoid the excesses adolescent boys are capable of.

The shouts of approval in the audience at Trumps speech confirm for me that adolescence is exactly what the founders thought it was in 1910a malleable time of life when teens and preteens are uniquely susceptible to both peer leaders and adult authority figures. One can hope that there will be a new president for the next National Jamboree in four years and that this new president will return to the tradition of delivering to the assembled Scouts a speech that brings out the best instincts in young people, instead of the worst.

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In Defense of the Boy Scouts - Slate Magazine

Jeff Sessions. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump may be bashing his attorney general left and right, but that hasnt deterred Jeff Sessions from deploying his bosss legal agenda. His latest rollback, on what now looks like a banner day for the Trump administration and LGBT rights, was the Department of Justices new position in court that federal civil-rights law doesnt protect employees targeted by anti-gay bias in the workplace.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the crowning achievements of the civil-rights movement, and by its very terms forbids employers from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Since the laws enactment, courts have understood the word sex to mean gender and not sexual orientation, and thus it became standard practice for judges to routinely dismiss cases whenever a worker alleged, say, that his employer denied him a promotion simply because the employer didnt like that the worker hung a picture of his bearded spouse in his cubicle.

In recent years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which oversees enforcement of Title VII, began to see things differently. And relying on Supreme Court precedent that read existing law as forbidding things such as same-sex harassment and gender stereotyping, the agency started to push the argument that Title VII, indeed, may be read to also forbid taking adverse employment actions against gays and lesbians.

Advocates ran with this position, arguing for themselves and their aggrieved clients that federal employment law, if read the way EEOC and Justice Antonin Scalia read the law that is, textually makes it illegal to fire the gay worker with the framed picture of his bearded spouse. After all, a woman with the same picture frame and bearded husband wouldnt be fired. Thats classic discrimination on the basis of sex: The sex of the workers spouse is the bosss guiding light. And isnt the expectation that a man should only marry a woman de facto sex stereotyping?

In a landmark April ruling, an appeals court bucked precedent and ruled for the first time that the EEOCs position is the correct one. And other courts, including the Manhattan-based federal appeals court, are starting to give a fresh look at an issue they once thought was open and shut. Its in that New York case that Trumps Justice Department filed a brief opposing the view that Title VII protects gay workers. Its view is a familiar one: It should be up to Congress to fix the law if it wants to prohibit anti-gay discrimination. As written, the law just doesnt do that.

But for Sessions and his lawyers to prevail in this particular battle, they will be forced to contend with something their hero Scalia recognized for a unanimous Supreme Court in 1998: that what matters in the end is the laws text, not what Congress may have in mind at a specific moment in history. In his view, statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.

In other words, Sessions could well take a beating here as well. And the Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter of many of our culture wars, is already on deck to deal the painful blow sooner rather than later.

It does away with the individual mandate and defunds Planned Parenthood.

A bad bill designed to avoid scrutiny.

Their shared dark vision of the world unites them.

But the funding probably wont make it through the Senate.

The Dept. of Justices new position is that federal civil-rights law doesnt cover employees targeted by anti-gay bias

John McCain calls for bipartisanship, votes to prevent it from happening.

Reince is a f*cking paranoid schizophrenic. And so much more.

Anthony Scaramucci credited Trump with nailing 3-foot putts, but the White House transcript says they were 30-footers.

All the tactical brilliance that has kept unpopular and divisive GOP health care legislation alive disguises a fatal strategic blindness.

The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the GOP cant roll back Obamacares regulations without 60 votes. That makes skinny repeal more dangerous.

As Trumps religious-freedom envoy, Brownback has a chance to leave the state he wrecked and to take his religious views worldwide.

General Joseph Dunford wrote in a memo that there have been no modifications to the current policy.

Thinking it through before you vote for a huge change to the health-care system is for big-government liberal weenies.

It explains his otherwise inexplicable attacks on staunch ally Jeff Sessions.

Any effort to go after Muellercould be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, the senator said.

The R train may have been held in the station after a press conference.

The point of skinny repeal of Obamacare is to enact a bare-bones bill to shape in committee. Bulking up could be fatal.

Trump insists that his harassment of Sessions cant be obstruction because he has nothing to hide, is just doing all this out of pointless spite.

It will collide head-on with the doctrine of animus the legal principle guarding against singling out a group for harm.

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Jeff Sessions Takes a Stand Against Protecting Gay Workers - New York Magazine