After a sitting United States president was accused in filings on Friday of being involved in a criminal conspiracy, one might imagine that the next round of Sunday shows would be well stocked with Republicans looking to distance themselves from an overt and flagrant act of corruption.
Or so we would say, if we had been all locked in an underground cave for two years only to finally peep out this morning. The real world consisted primarily of two of the usual Republican suspects, and their concern over the lawbreaking part was, ahem, muted at best.
Noted corruption-fighter Sen. Rand Paul was unimpressed. According to Rand Paul, campaign finance crimes can hardly be counted as crimes at all, and as for pursuing financial deals with the heads of hostile foreign states while winking about your soon-maybe-status as Oval Office resident, why, you'd practically be stupid not to do it.
And I think we have to decide in our society if -- there are thousands and thousands of rules. It's incredibly complicated, campaign finance. We have to decide whether or not really criminal penalties are the way we should approach criminal finance.
Who among us can keep straight whether it is legal or illegal to, after having paid hush money to a porn actress to keep her quiet about an affair on the eve of your presidential election, elaborately structure reimbursement payments to your lawyer-fixer from your private for-profit company so as to conceal the existence of that payment. It is Too Hard. It makes our wee brains hurt to think about; perhaps it would be better to use this opportunity to retroactively legalize whatever Donald Trump has done and Move On With Our Republican Lives.
So it seems we will not be able to count on Rand Paul to get outraged over, apparently, literally any crime that comes his way. Which is curious, for a man who insisted that Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server should result in prison time, but Rand Paul is a corrupt, lying, crooked hack who has long believed that the rule of law should consist of whatever helps Rand Paul's cash-raising efforts or whatever hurts Rand Paul's momentary political enemy. (Also, he may well be among the dumbest senators ever elected to the post, and we are fully aware of the existence of Jim Inhofe. Sweet mercy, never has a man been so indebted to his father's hard-built mailing list of the most gullible rubes in America.)
As for Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Marco Rubio was on the Sunday shows to play the role of Being Marco Rubio. In abstract theory, says Senator Windsock, no one should be above the law. That said, he has no immediate plans to give a damn about any of the things his party is now neck-deep in, but mind you he theoretically might give a damn at some future point, maybe, possibly, and only if everyone around him is giving a damn and he can hitch a ride there on their coattails.
Faced with the possibility of Trump pardoning a potential accomplice [Manafort]—an act which even former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer says would be impeachable—Rubio said “I would not be supportive of it, I would be critical of it.”
[...] Rubio also warned that Trump’s pardon of Manafort “could trigger a debate about whether the pardon powers should be amended given these circumstances.”
No, stop. Allow us a moment to recover from this display of boldness; you cannot spring such raw bravery on us all at once. A president pardoning a criminal conspirator in order to sabotage an investigation into his own crimes could trigger a debate among Republicans? Surely, this will require a full chapter in the upcoming Big Book of Courage, Illustrated Edition. Rubio will likely go to bed tonight dreaming of the parades held to honor him after he boldly steps forward, on some future day, to suggest a debate on the whole thing after-the-fact.
And that is about it. If you were looking for Republican lawmakers to distance themselves from a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office, there was no such thing present on the Sunday shows today. They are all in, unless Trump does something so obviously, transparently crooked that it threatens to instill authoritarian thuggery over constitutional rule, in which case Marco Rubio may, he assures us all, have some critical words about that and Rand Paul will titter at the fuss he is making.