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Avani Dias produced a television segment about accusations that India was responsible for the death of a Sikh separatist in Canada last year.
TAC Contributing Editor Carmel Richardson wrote: “[Richard] Dawkins is right to recognize that it is better to belong to a Christian nation than to any other sort of nation. Indeed, much of his own worldview, whether or not he knows it, is borrowed from Christendom. It is not just cultural edifices like hymns and parishes, but the very systems of science Dawkins employs that were built by Christians, not to mention our legal and judicial heritage.”
She’s far too kind. Dawkins isn’t so reflective to understand his follies, nor are his New Atheist buddies that profound. The damage they have done to civilization is incalculable and we will suffer for centuries for that. Dawkins’s rants are risible, a horrified realization of a failed old man who suddenly realized that he has been sawing off the tree limb where he was thus far safely perched, someone who destroyed the roots of the old society and is now horrified with the aftereffects as he realizes what is coming.
The idea that you can have “cultural Christianity” with either secular or neopagan society is so absurd that only a “scientist” can think of that. There’s a reason in every Victorian sci-fi novel, the villain is a mad scientist with no religious morals. “When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality,” as Nietzsche once wrote. Morals do not exist in a vacuum. You cannot have Michelangelo’s Pieta without the faith behind it.
The peak reactionary, romantic 19th century gave us Flaubert and Shelley, Aivazovsky and Chopin, Dostoyevsky, and Millais. Peak secularism and New Atheism gave us euthanasia, Pinker’s ahistoricism about Enlightenment, Sam Harris, the Iraq War, and failed social engineering in the Middle East. May they live to suffer the world they wrought, before a new generation of young reactionaries can find meaning again in natural beauty, authority, divine glory, and repressed stoicism.
The post ‘New Atheism,’ Twenty Years On appeared first on The American Conservative.
There is no such thing as cultural Christianity without Christians.
The famed atheist Richard Dawkins is now calling himself a “cultural Christian.” That he would like to claim the culture of Christianity for himself while rejecting its theological tenets is not surprising. What is surprising is his honesty.
In an interview with the British network LBC on Easter Sunday, the New Atheist and author of The God Delusion announced, “I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, even though I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.” Calling himself a cultural Christian means he can appreciate Christmas carols and cathedrals without worshiping Christ, the evolutionary biologist said. While Dawkins is still “happy” to see the number of Christians in the West declining, he spoke concernedly about losing Christian parishes to the thousands of new Islamic mosques being built across Great Britain. He reasoned that this is because Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion,” unlike that alternative; indeed, Dawkins called the substitution of any alternative religion for Christianity “truly dreadful.”
What Dawkins is describing is what American liberalism has been attempting to actualize for decades: beautiful churches and traditions, absent the beatific vision of Christ made known to man. Standing apart from all this striving is the very important question whether such a thing—religion without religious adherents, church without God—can even exist, or would make any sense if it did. The mosques taking over Europe indicate the answer: When Christ is marched out of the church, the cathedrals may remain standing, but other religions will march in.
The idea of a neutered Christianity is tantalizing to an ideology that makes equality its cornerstone. The liberal worldview cannot allow for Christianity as it is, claiming superiority over all other religions and worldly regimes, but if perhaps that troublesome part could be cut out, and the consequences of sin forgotten, the remains could be something beautiful and harmless, or so the thought experiment goes. This is more than mere idea: The mainline Protestant denominations in America have gone to great lengths to liberalize the American church, and quite successfully so. In most major cities, the grand historic parishes belonging to the Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian (PCUSA), and Unitarian denominations fly the rainbow flag to signal that “all are welcome,” even people their churches once excommunicated for living in unrepentant sin.
The doctrines of Christianity have been purged to fit the new sexual mores of our day. The PCUSA has been ordaining female pastors for nearly 70 years, in direct contradiction of the holy scriptures it claims to represent, for the sake of obedience to the god of gender equality. But it is the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Episcopalian in denomination, that demonstrates the greatest zeal. The church lists among its core values a commitment to “God’s gift of self-determination and democratic ideals.”
Strange: Neutered Christianity does not look much like Christianity at all. In fact, its shape is much more like some new religion, with acolytes stumbling over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to the solemn new doctrines ranging from sexual libertinism to that wonderful catch-all, “democratic ideals.” The high holy days of the old church have been smothered over by those of the new church: If Eastertide and Transgender Day of Visibility fall on the same day, the Christian holiday must submit to the sexual. The only possible consequence of taking Christ out of the church is that new gods will come to fill the void. Humans are by their nature religious.
Dawkins is right to recognize that it is better to belong to a Christian nation than to any other sort of nation. Indeed, much of his own worldview, whether or not he knows it, is borrowed from Christendom. It is not just cultural edifices like hymns and parishes, but the very systems of science Dawkins employs that were built by Christians, not to mention our legal and judicial heritage. These are not doctrines of the church, but they are the fruits of a people that once sought to live in accordance with nature and nature’s God. Where Dawkins goes wrong is in imagining he can remove Christ and still have the effects of Christianity. The faithful have left the mainline denominations already, and their buildings have been blasphemously desecrated; as they continue to be chased from the public square (Christianity is now apparently synonymous with white ethno-nationalism, the worst of all bogeymen), so too will Christian virtue. More violent crime, theft, drug use, suicide, broken families, and other social ills are downstream of this change, as Dawkins himself seems to be subconsciously aware.
The UK, like America, was once a Christian nation, but it will not remain so without Christians. Beauty, it turns out, cannot be found apart from holiness. The dampness in our eyes at “Ah, Holy Jesus” is not caused by meditating on suffering in the abstract, but on the very particular suffering of a very particular man. Absent that man, the whole thing is meaningless.
Dawkins himself has long rejected any claims to religious neutrality, frequently mocking Christians. In The God Delusion, he argued against all forms of religion as dangerous, divisive, and just plain illogical. At a 2012 rally of some 20,000 atheists and agnostics in Washington, DC, Dawkins derided Christians who believe in Christ’s real presence at the communion table. “Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated, and need to be challenged—and if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt,” he told a cheering crowd on the National Mall. Moments later he added, “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!”
Having actively persecuted the church, Dawkins finds he is sad to see it go. We cannot pretend this is anyone’s fault but his own, and that of his compatriots who have crusaded against religion as the root of all social ills. Nevertheless, some of the church’s greatest apologists have come from its worst former persecutors. May the same be true of Dawkins.
The post Richard Dawkins’s ‘Cultural Christianity’ Is Thin Gruel appeared first on The American Conservative.
Pre-eminent atheist Richard Dawkins said on Easter Sunday that he identifies as a “cultural Christian” and that he prefers to live in a country based on Christian principles and would not want the UK to become an Islamic nation. Emeritus
The post Atheist Richard Dawkins Says He Would Choose Christianity over Islam ‘Every Single Time’, Calls Himself a ‘Cultural Christian’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The populist Reform UK party has surpassed the governing Conservatives among men and Red Wall voters for the first time, a survey from YouGov found
The post Populist Reform UK Party Overtakes Tories in Support Among Men and Red Wall Voters appeared first on Breitbart.
Jared Kushner, former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, set up an investment company after leaving his White House job.
The Ferrari stolen from Gerhard Berger, now recovered.
Police officers and investigators on Sunday in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin, where raids were carried out.
Members of the Sikh community protesting against Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India in Washington in 2020.
Mourners carrying the coffin of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist who was murdered in June in British Columbia.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada discussed allegations against the Indian government in September.
Henry A. Kissinger in 1979. He sought to strike and maintain balances of power in a dangerously precarious world.
Palestinians receive flour distributed by the United Nations on Wednesday in Khan Younis, Gaza, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Biden in Washington in June. News outlets reported on Wednesday that the Biden administration had told the Indian government it had information possibly linking New Delhi to an assassination plot.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rallied in Washington on Saturday.
As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war.
To inaugurate proceedings at the Nixon National Security Summit on Thursday in Washington, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich shared striking writing from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.
In a recently declassified letter, the 37th president counseled the 42nd: “I have reluctantly concluded that his situation has rapidly deteriorated since the elections in December, and that the days of his unquestioned leadership of Russia are numbered,” remarking on the then-President of Russia Boris Yeltsin. “[Yeltsin’s] drinking bouts are longer and his periods of depression are more frequent. Most troublesome, he can no longer deliver on his commitments to you and other Western leaders in an increasingly anti-American environment in the Duma and in the country.”
Comments on the doomed Yeltsin era can almost seem inane, close to thirty years on, at least amid the largest land war in Europe and in the shadow of Putin, the most fearsome Russian ruler since Stalin. A fait accompli makes for poor copy. Of course, Yeltsin was a shambolic wreck fated to failure (never mind the talent that enabled his ascent), and obviously the vulgarian Russian bear would only ever respect and understand animal force (disregard perhaps the most talented diplomatic force on the globe, and arguably the world’s finest literature).
But one man who understood the truth, that fate is fluid, was Richard Nixon. He spent his sunset years rebuilding a reputation in tatters, crafting himself as a member of the “our son-of-a-bitch” school of foreign policy with the understanding his truest jury would be people he never met. As the last president to enjoy a drink to something like a fault, and whose own darkness seemingly never permitted him to fully trust his fellow man (even as they kept electing him), Nixon’s warning to Clinton about Yeltsin’s personal descent and the limits of democracy’s appeal came during the greatest bear market in history for such a view, the alleged end of history.
Nixon is gone, but much less alone now.
Indeed, something about the man, our Shakespearean president, is fitting for this moment, as the country careens toward its most chaotic presidential election since 1860 and ponders “a world which now seems terrifyingly near to a spiral into a world war,” as TAC’s founding editor Scott McConnell put it last week.
As the 2024 campaign and the national security scene heat up, the ongoing rehabilitation of the 37th president comes into play in the GOP civil war as well. Teasing his new film, the preeminent conservative activist Christopher Rufo said, “I tell a new story about a man, reviled in his time, who left behind a blueprint for counter-revolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic.”
At the very least, something’s in the water.
Seeking to capitalize is none other than the Richard Nixon Foundation itself. Based out of Yorba Linda, California, but marinating this week in Washington, it is led by Jim Byron, who, in his early thirties, has really only ever worked for the organization. It is chaired by Robert C. O’Brien, the last Republican president’s national security advisor. O’Brien passed on a Utah Senate run earlier this autumn, but, with Americans held sword-on-neck in Gaza, he is back in the news as the former president’s chief hostage negotiator. That O’Brien could reprise his former position in a second Trump Administration or even be on the ticket—a Mormon national security-oriented upgrade to Mike Pence who could help in Arizona and Nevada—are facts also never far from the discussion around him.
Notably, the Nixon Foundation is more Trump-curious than its friendly, Californian rival: the Reagan Foundation. Like its namesake, the Nixon Foundation has one foot in the establishment, and one foot in the populist id. It’s a difficult, perhaps even impossible balance. And yet.
For instance, generally a hawk’s hawk, Florida’s Congressman Mike Waltz said at the event that the current American line on Ukraine is “not sustainable” and that hard conversations need to recommence with the Europeans. This is the legislator who once endorsed years and years more in Afghanistan to a dyspeptic CPAC audience response. Waltz is a former Special Forces officer, and whatever else, one with probably a large future. If he’s saying this, Ukraine skepticism is no longer ghettoized to the conservative avant-garde.
Congressman Ro Khanna, a Golden State Democrat and former student of John Mearsheimer, and former Trump Defense official Elbridge Colby, also scouted for a big future role in a successor Administration, led a panel skeptical of the war in Eurasia. Colby is also a member of O’Brien’s American Global Strategies group, where he represents the realist edge of O’Brien’s big tent that at times has been more overtly committed to the Ukraine hardline.
In many ways, it was striking who the defense of the Kiev’s government’s preferences fell to: the Democratic establishment. Jane Harman, the former L.A. Congresswoman and former president of the Wilson Center, remarked “Do I support more support for Ukraine? Yes.” More for Israel? Yes. More U.S. border funding? She opined that it is not a “zero sum game” while hailing the rosier times of budget surplus. She urged the gathered to “contemplate that.”
Without missing a beat, former Congresswoman Harman said: “What did we miss in the nineties? Just about everything. We missed the rise of China. We missed the rise of terrorism. And we missed” Russian anxieties about the expansion of NATO.
“They were totally offended,” she added.
Harman closed by positively mentioning uber-internationalist Wendell Willkie, the 1940 GOP presidential nominee who failed to stop Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented third term and the solidification of the New Deal. Democratic reverence for Republicans who scantily disagree with them would seem to be an old tradition.
To round it out for the hardliners, former NSA head and United States Cyber Command Michael S. Rogers blasted “incrementalism” on Ukraine, implying he believes true support for Ukraine has never been tried. The merger of America’s brass with the Democratic establishment (and its distance from the Republican rank-and-file) is, of course, perhaps the most important story in politics as America contemplates not just one war, but three.
Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, attended the dinner the night before but passed on the main event itself. Pompeo was the surprise guest-of-honor at Governor Glenn Youngkin’s “Red Vest Retreat” in Virginia Beach, where the gathered discussed how the Commonwealth’s governor is absolutely not running for president. Notably, the state of Pompeo’s relationship with Donald Trump is a bonafide unknown. Would Pompeo be snubbed entirely from a second Trump team? Why did Pompeo pass on a 2024 race? (That now looks smart—ask Ron DeSantis.) Is Pompeo angling to be Youngkin’s VP or Defense Secretary?
It should be said: O’Brien has not quite endorsed Trump. O’Brien jokes, given his service on Scott Walker’s Hindenburg-style effort, that if he endorsed him, that would actually cause Trump to lose. More seriously, O’Brien spoke of a side of Trump not flashed for the cameras. The 45th president is an “incredibly cordial man,” O’Brien claims, who exhibited tremendous “sympathy” for his fellow world leaders during the Covid crisis, frequently phoning to check on their health.
Most relevant: O’Brien closed his remarks by discussing a “GOP approach” to foreign policy and national security, one that he said is quite different from the Democrats, but one (he implied) in which a thread can be weaved from Nixon, to Reagan, to Trump.
For skeptics, there’s the rub. O’Brien also served in an administration not mentioned (to this writer’s knowledge) at the event: that of George W. Bush. And some that would see a far more restrained foreign policy of the United States do fear wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Or as Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, commented to me after the event: “Can the regime change doctrine be rehabbed or is it just California dreamin’?”
The post The New Nixonians appeared first on The American Conservative.
What actually happened in one of the most disruptive episodes of the supposed Watergate scandal?
This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a heroic but doomed attempt by President Richard M. Nixon to halt the runaway tyranny of the deep state, the judiciary, and the corporate media before it could usurp fully the government of the people of the United States of America. The episode, like the Watergate scandal as a whole, has been entirely distorted in American memory, with Nixon miscast in the very role of his opponents: a man gone mad with power, an aspiring despot with no regard for the Constitution. It was, in most tellings, the moment that doomed the Nixon presidency—after sixteen months of Americans not caring that five men had been caught snooping at the DNC headquarters, and just eleven months since the American people sent Nixon back to the White House in the most resounding electoral victory in the country’s history.
The saga began in June 1971, when the New York Times published the “Pentagon Papers,” a trove of classified documents detailing American policy and actions in the ongoing Vietnam War. The documents had been leaked by a radical activist named Daniel Ellsberg, who as a senior staffer at both the Department of Defense and the RAND Corporation had been admitted to the inner circles of trust of the American military establishment, in an effort to undermine U.S. interests abroad and political stability at home.
The Pentagon Papers, covering 1945–1968, had virtually nothing to do with the Nixon administration, and, in fact, they reflected the grave misdeeds of the president’s opponents. But Nixon had cut his teeth in Washington two decades earlier on the House Un-American Activities Committee, exposing Alger Hiss and other dangerous enemies of America embedded deep within the government and the highest levels of media. This was exactly the kind of subversion from within that he and his colleagues had feared then and hoped to stop. America could not function in the 20th century with Ellsbergs stalking the shadowy halls of a military-industrial complex at war with itself any more than it could survive the construction of a globe-spanning super-state with Alger Hiss as its architect.
A week after the publication, aides within the White House stood up a Special Investigations Unit meant to get a handle on such leaks from the executive branch. John Ehrlichman tapped Egil “Bud” Krogh to lead the project, a family friend who had worked for him prior to joining the administration. Krogh was wet behind the ears, a 31-year-old lawyer from Chicago with a reputation for decency. Political journalist Theodore White later joked that “to put Egil Krogh in charge of a secret police operation was equivalent to making Frank Merriwell chief executive of a KGB squad.” Krogh hired G. Gordon Liddy, a decorated veteran of the FBI, to help run the unit’s operations. E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer and prolific pulp novelist, had been hired elsewhere in the White House but was quickly moved to the “Plumbers” (a not especially clever self-reference that has stuck for half a century). The ranks were largely filled out from Hunt’s circles at the CIA, especially those who had worked on his notoriously unsuccessful operations in Cuba.
The first major effort the Plumbers undertook was a burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, during which they hoped to turn up damaging information about the leaker’s mental health. When that failed to produce a smoking gun, they planned, but were not allowed, to execute a second burglary at the psychiatrist’s home. The scheme was worse than fruitless: These men’s missteps allowed Ellsberg to escape justice for his crimes, as the burglary and other misconduct became public during trial. He did not receive a single conviction, nor did he serve a single day of the 115-year prison sentence the charges warranted.
Their incompetence became clear early on, so the Plumbers were largely shunted off to tinker with campaign schemes, rather than ostensibly more sensitive White House business, as the president entered reelection season. In May 1972, they planted two listening devices at the headquarters of the Democratic National Convention at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. What value they thought they would obtain from these bugs has never been clear, but they were apparently worth enough that a second break-in was warranted a month later to fix one of the devices.
It is this last Plumbers break-in, on June 17, 1972, that has gone down in history. Five men with varying degrees of connection to the CIA and the Nixon campaign were arrested with lockpicks, huge amounts of cash, and other cartoon burglary equipment. Hunt’s name was found in two of the men’s address books, along with the White House phone number. The scene was so colossally moronic that it almost seemed as if the burglars were trying to get caught.
In the following days, senior White House staff began to learn of the involvement of both campaign and administration personnel. Top aides, along with the president himself, discussed how to handle these revelations with minimal damage to the conduct of government and the position of the administration.
The crisis presented an opportunity for certain entrenched powers in Washington who had wanted Nixon out of office since the day the American people put him there. Perhaps the most important of these was Katharine Meyer Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. Graham had inherited the paper from her father, the first president of the World Bank whose family had long held sway in finance on multiple continents. Graham had no problem with Republicans per se, but she had always resented Nixon as an unpolished novus homo in the salons of Georgetown society—a resentment the president repaid in force. Envoys between the White House and the Post reported that Graham herself was going to use her control of the Post to turn the break-in embarrassment into a scandal that could derail Nixon’s presidency. In a particularly candid moment, Graham told columnist Stewart Alsop, “I hate him and I’m going to do everything I can to beat him.”
The press vendetta—embodied most forcefully in Graham and her Post, but extending well beyond them—was compounded by those of factions in government. Mark Felt, the number 2 at the FBI, fed information to Graham’s reporter Bob Woodward (until recently a naval intelligence officer) in hopes that he could unseat the bureau’s director and take the position for himself. Democrats and hostile Republicans in Congress began investigations in hopes of overturning the ’72 landslide indirectly by impeachment. Judges and bureaucrats seized on the opportunity to claim an advantage over the people’s elected president. John Dean, the slippery White House Counsel, turned in exchange for a slap on the wrist over his own involvement in the scandal.
Those last two developments converged on the fateful night of Saturday, October 20, 1973. In April, Nixon had been forced to fire Dean and to accept the resignations of Ehrlichman, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst over their proximity to the Watergate debacle. To succeed Kleindienst, Nixon appointed Elliott Richardson, a sort of utility player in the administration. Richardson was a liberal Republican who nonetheless had proven himself exceptionally valuable, serving as undersecretary of State; as secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare; and as secretary of Defense before the move to the Justice Department.
Among Richardson’s first major responsibilities at Justice was to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate affair. The new attorney general likely thought he was transcending political concerns when he tapped Archibald Cox, a former Kennedy lackey whose father and grandfather both had been powerful Manhattan lawyers. But it very quickly became clear that Cox’s animosity toward the Nixon administration rivaled Katharine Graham’s. As part of his effort to turn the aftermath of the Watergate break-in into a political crisis for the president, Cox convinced Judge John J. Sirica to subpoena the White House for eight tapes of Oval Office conversations to which John Dean had testified.
The White House argued that the president’s conversations in the Oval Office were protected by executive privilege, and that they could not be pried into by a meddling prosecutor. To virtually anyone whose common sense had not been supplanted by a Harvard Law degree, this might have seemed obvious. Yet Cox would not relent.
The administration conceived a compromise. White House staff would produce transcripts of the eight tapes in question. The tapes themselves would then be turned over in full to Senator John Stennis, a widely respected Mississippi Democrat who had been elected to the upper chamber in 1947, the same year Nixon arrived in the House of Representatives. Stennis would then confirm the accuracy and completeness of the summaries to Cox and other investigators, while softening turns of phrase that might embarrass the administration. The terms of the proposal suggest that Nixon’s principal concern was not the content of the tapes so much as the fallout of his foul language in private becoming a matter of public record. Attorney General Richardson agreed that the White House proposal was a sound one.
Archibald Cox was not so magnanimous. He knew that the Stennis compromise would deny him Nixon’s scalp. Within hours, he had rejected the president’s proposal. This left Nixon with no choice but to remove the special prosecutor. He had encouraged the creation of the office, but he knew from the moment Richardson made his pick that it might end this way. Years later, he would recall in his memoirs, “If Richardson searched specifically for the man whom I least trusted, he could hardly have done better.”
Richardson had agreed at the outset not to fire Cox except in case of actual misconduct. The refusal for political reasons of a sensible compromise offered by the president of the United States plainly crossed that threshold; but, asked to carry out his duty, the attorney general balked. He resigned rather than remove the rogue prosecutor, as did his second-in-command, William Ruckelshaus. This left Solicitor General Robert Bork as acting attorney general, with the unenviable task of terminating Cox.
It is easy in these latter days to dismiss America’s domestic enemies as weak or evil men (or both). But Elliott Richardson was no Merrick Garland. At Utah Beach on D-Day, Richardson—then a 23-year-old lieutenant—ran alone across an active minefield to save the life of an injured officer; he returned home in 1945 with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He was, however, a scion of old Puritan stock whose worst inherited tendencies were aroused by the horror of the war in Europe. He was a liberal who believed sincerely, even naively, in procedure and form. He also operated on a moral code that could not survive contact with depraved enemies. Upon his death on the last day of the millennium, he was eulogized by the Associated Press as “a prince of the Eastern Establishment.”
Depraved enemies abounded in Washington by 1973, and Elliott Richardson’s naive stand gave them an opportunity. Kay Graham’s Washington Post recognized that this episode could turn public opinion decisively against the president, if the right spin was applied. (That the bowtied Cox counted St. Paul’s and Harvard in his background no doubt contributed to the revulsion that drove her coverage.) Other left-wing journalists like Walter Cronkite, who held an unearned place of honor as “the most trusted man in America,” added the exodus from Justice to their arsenal of anti-Nixon propaganda, and they pursued this line with particular vigor. Within days, resolutions for impeachment had been introduced in the House of Representatives. Within months, Nixon had left office in disgrace.
But the consequences of the Saturday Night Massacre extended beyond even the destruction of one of the most beloved presidents in American history. A decade later, when Bork was presented as the obvious candidate for a seat on the Supreme Court, he was pilloried for carrying out his duty until the nomination died in the Senate. Gerhard Gessell, a partisan lawyer appointed to the bench by Lyndon Johnson, ruled that it had been illegal for the president—to whom the Constitution grants sole authority over the executive branch—to fire his subordinates when they refused to obey orders. This was a legal invention that began to invade American practice long before October 1973, but the Saturday Night Massacre and its aftermath carved the message in stone: the president in practice cannot and will not be allowed to exercise the powers granted to him by the Constitution.
Of course, this is only true when the president happens to be a conservative populist. It runs directly counter to the prevailing narrative of an “imperial presidency” popularized by the left wing in the years before Nixon’s election, but it is a fact plain enough for those with eyes to see. The crimes of the governing powers these last few years dwarf anything encountered by Nixon half a century ago; so too do the abuses of the media and the jealousy of the courts—not to mention the lawyers. Will the circle be unbroken?
The post The Saturday Night Massacre at 50 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, right, sitting next to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said that India’s plan to revoke diplomatic immunity was “unreasonable and escalatory.”
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