The Always Almost Inevitable Constitutional Crisis Is Arriving...

I remember saying well over a year ago that one of the things making intelligent people feel quite insane is trying to hold in your head at the same time the sense that it is at once impossible to imagine a President being and doing what Trump is and does not getting impeached for it as well as impossible to imagine President Trump actually getting impeached for any of it. This is more or less just a version of what the whole election campaign running up to this horror show always already felt like. The rolling approach to a Constitutional crisis over Trump's lawlessness (I'm not even referring to the moral and legal crises represented by Trump's ongoing war against queer folks and brown folks, or his international catastrophes in North Korea, Iran, the Paris Agreement, among so many others) has always had the fraught drumbeat of inevitability about it... Each day after day we brace for the worst as the drip drip drip of firings and indictments tit for tat between the Administration and Mueller and the rest. Josh Marshall warns -- there are of course lots of comparable warnings coming from various quarters these days, this one is at once nicely concise and representative -- that the peril is pitching upward, that various dangerous end-games are being jockeyed for, that it is clear that Trump will gladly take down the country to preserve his skin (as if anyone ever doubted it) and that the hollowed out remains of the GOP, with almost nothing left now but stupid grifters and cynical opportunists and ugly bigots and scarcely-stealthed fascists, are gladly enabling his demolitions:

... We’re heading toward a genuine constitutional crisis with the President. “Constitutional crisis” is sort of a meaningless word. But let me try to give it more specific meaning: a threat to the rule of law and adherence to the constitution which the constitution itself does not provide a ready to solution to, not under present political circumstances. The President is getting rid of staunch right-wing ideologues because they will not allow him – whatever their other faults -– to prevent the rule of law to applying to him and his family. To use a analogy, they’ll help him with his misdemeanors but so far at least not with his felonies. That’s what the laying the groundwork to fire Jeff Sessions is about. That’s what the firing of Don McGahn is about. When your boss announces you are leaving and you didn’t know you were leaving, that’s called being fired. Even the inability to state this obvious fact is a symptom of a larger problem: since there’s no apparent solution to the President’s push to make himself invulnerable to the law, we prefer not to say what is happening. We don’t know the precise order of events. But the President is apparently intent on pardoning Paul Manafort –- something that even by Trumpian standards has no real justification other than obstructing justice –- and either ending Robert Mueller’s investigation or putting it under the control of a loyalist who will defang it. This is happening before our eyes. There’s as yet no apparent path by which any of this will be prevented. The one partial path, which is political in nature as it should be, is if the House of Representatives moves to Democratic control in January... Trump appears to know he cannot let the Special Counsel’s investigation continue, not in its present form, not without risking his presidency, his wealth and perhaps his freedom. For now, there’s no reason to think anyone will stop him. Republicans are becoming more accommodating rather than less in helping him to do so. The check will be a Democratic congress which can not only investigate but conduct a largely public investigation.