Max Boot/NY Times:
When Will Republicans Stand Up to Trump?
If this Republican stonewall holds, Mr. Trump may get away with the most egregious abuse of presidential power since Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre in 1973. In those days, too, most Republicans reflexively rushed to the president’s defense. But not all.
Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than fire the independent counsel, Archibald Cox. Six Republicans joined all 21 Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee to move articles of impeachment. Republican senators like Howard Baker were relentless in demanding, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” And when the end came in 1974, three Republicans — Senator Barry Goldwater, the Senate minority leader Hugh Scott and the House minority leader John Rhodes — went to the White House to tell Mr. Nixon he had lost the support of his party.
Are there even three principled Republicans left who will put their devotion to the Republic above their fealty to the Republican Party?
I fear the answer to that question.
NBC News:
A majority of Americans — 54 percent — think that President Donald Trump's abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James Comey was not appropriate, while 46 percent think that Comey was fired due to the Russia investigation, according to results from a new NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.
James Hohmann/WaPo;
THE BIG IDEA: The biggest news out of Donald Trump’s Thursday interview with NBC was his confession that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he fired FBI Director James Comey. Undercutting 48 hours of denials by his aides, the president said: “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”
But what may ultimately get Trump into bigger trouble is his story about Comey assuring him he was not under investigation during a one-on-one dinner at the White House. Lester Holt asked the president to elaborate on his claim, made in the letter firing Comey, that he’d been told three times he was not under federal investigation. “He wanted to stay at the FBI, and I said I’ll, you know, consider and see what happens,” Trump said. “But we had a very nice dinner, and at that time he told me, ‘You are not under investigation.’”
David A. Hopkins/Honest Graft:
Why Congressional Republicans Won't Abandon Trump Over Comey
To McConnell, Republican support for any Democratic calls to investigate Trump would only signal to voters that Trump had indeed done something wrong, further reducing the president's public support and thus giving the Democrats even more of an advantage. Converting every Trump-related controversy into a partisan food fight instead allows Republicans to summon their base to rally behind them in yet another polarizing battle against the left. Since Democratic supporters are already likely to be highly motivated to turn out against Trump in the next two elections, Republicans are concerned about whether their own side will match their opponents' level of engagement.
Of course, this approach carries certain risks. The most obvious danger is that congressional Republicans could wind up chaining themselves more tightly to Trump just as he plummets off a political cliff. The lack of a meaningful difference between Trump and the rest of the Republican Party gives anti-Trump voters good reason to replace even personally popular Republican incumbents with Democratic challengers. Unless Trump finds a way to bolster his national popularity in the future, even a relatively energized Republican base may not be enough to protect the party against a wider popular backlash among Democrats and independents.
It's also quite possible that Ryan and McConnell would be better served in the long run by buzzing a warning pitch or two under Trump's chin at this stage of his presidency. Automatic party support for his various antics in office may only reinforce bad behavior on Trump's part, making future Comey-scale debacles all the more likely and dragging the entire party into an inescapable political morass. Occasional demonstrations of independence by congressional Republicans might have a constraining effect on a president with flawed knowledge, instincts, and judgment, encouraging him to consult with a wider array of interlocutors and steering him away from the most disastrous courses of action. Normally, party leaders' interests are not well-served by greater intra-party tension. But we are, at the moment, a fair ways off from normalcy.
Vann Newkirk II/Atlantic:
How Unprecedented Is James Comey's Firing?
A Q&A with historian Beverly Gage about the history of conflicts between FBI directors and the executive branch
Vann R. Newkirk II: I’ll start with the big question. Is James Comey’s firing by Donald Trump an unprecedented clash between president and FBI?
Beverly Gage: The answer is yes and no. It is unprecedented in its extremeness—no president before this moment has fired an FBI director who was engaged in conducting an ongoing and politically sensitive investigation of his own campaign. On the other hand, this sort of conflict between the FBI and the executive branch is not itself totally anomalous. It's something that we've seen over the course of American history. During J. Edgar Hoover's day, he had repeated conflicts with presidents, and he had a kind of autonomous power that allowed to withstand and sometimes win those conflicts, for better or worse. Since then, most presidents have been cautious about this kind of direct confrontation.
Amanda Taub/NY Times:
Comey’s Firing Tests Strength of the ‘Guardrails of Democracy’
Norms are the ‘guardrails of democracy’
Norms about political behavior and power serve as “soft guardrails for democracy,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard who studies authoritarianism.
In a healthy democratic system, when politicians violate important norms, other institutions push back, ensuring that the violators pay a hefty price and the guardrails are preserved for another day.
But in collapsing democracies, the opposite happens. Instead of banding together to protect democratic norms, warring parties take violations by their opponents as justification for breaking other norms in response. “It’s a process of escalation that often begins with minor stuff and ends with coups,” Mr. Levitsky said.
Dave Weigel/WaPo:
Republicans misstate, again and again on TV and at town halls, what’s in their health-care bill
That means these lawmakers face two potential backlashes: one if opponents of Obamacare perceive the bill does not go far enough, and another from Americans worried that the bill would eliminate their coverage.
The result has been a confused sales effort — and a series of flat misstatements and contradictions about what’s actually in the bill.
It’s a risky strategy — especially in front of the skeptical crowds and interviewers Republicans have been speaking to in recent days. On Wednesday, Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) spent nearly five hours answering questions from a disgruntled audience of constituents, some of whom spoke at length about what Medicaid meant in their communities. MacArthur was blown back by laughter when he argued, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has, that caps on per capita Medicaid funding would leave the system stronger.
“I am trying to save a system so it continues to help you,” he said. “I am trying to make sure Medicaid is strong enough to continue.”
Later, MacArthur argued that the tax cuts in the bill were “for everybody” — but when a constituent calculated that MacArthur’s own savings would amount to $37,000 if the bill was passed, the congressman agreed that the bill’s large investment tax cut was not going to benefit everyone equally.
Paul Krugman/NY Times:
So it’s naïve to expect Republicans to join forces with Democrats to get to the bottom of the Russia scandal — even if that scandal may strike at the very roots of our national security. Today’s Republicans just don’t cooperate with Democrats, period. They’d rather work with Vladimir Putin.
In fact, some of them probably did.
Now, maybe I’m being too pessimistic. Maybe there are enough Republicans with a conscience — or, failing that, sufficiently frightened of an electoral backlash — that the attempt to kill the Russia probe will fail. One can only hope so.
But it’s time to face up to the scary reality here. Most people now realize, I think, that Donald Trump holds basic American political values in contempt. What we need to realize is that much of his party shares that contempt.
Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter and Norman Eisen/USA Today:
Whether the president’s clumsy and seemingly ill-thought-out steps will backfire is impossible to predict. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had promised to recuse himself from all Justice Department matters involving Russian interference with our election, but waded right into the middle of the decision to discharge Comey. Perhaps Sessions will step aside while Rosenstein attempts to redeem himself for his role in the pretense that Comey was fired over missteps in the Clinton email probe. The deputy attorney general could do it by appointing an independent special counsel.
But the constraints under which such a special counsel would have to operate under current law, and the constitutional subservience of any such counsel to the president as head of the executive branch, are a prescription for a replay of an ugly drama: President Nixon fired two attorneys general before finding someone (Robert Bork) willing to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox — only to be pressured into appointing another special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who ended up being as determined and unshakable as Cox.
Peter Beinart/Atlantic:
L'Etat, C'est Trump
The president and his advisors believe loyalty to the country and loyalty to him are the same thing.
It’s not just that Trump has never worked in government. He’s never worked in a job devoted to a cause larger than self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement. He’s spent virtually his entire professional life in a family business where he sets the rules and where people answer to him. Note how promiscuously Trump’s uses the first person possessive: “my generals,” “my African-American.” Last spring, when journalists asked him who his Israeli advisors were, he wheeled out his Jewish lawyers. He sends his children on diplomatic missions, where they also hawk his products. He doesn’t really distinguish between public and private interest, between obeying the law and obeying him.