"If standards were in visible decline on his own person and in his own house, they were in full route in the world at large," wrote the unparalleled humorist Peter De Vries of his protagonist, Charles Swallow, in The Tents of Wickedness.
On rereading that line yesterday, it struck me as perfectly apropos of the Republican Party's visible decline. Its "house," like De Vries's world, is in full route.
In a fatuous perversity led by Rep. Jim Jordan, the lower chamber is demanding to see all the documented evidence in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's criminal case against Donald Trump. Such an unprecedented molestation of a local affair's grand jury secrecy laws tells you all you need to know about "small-government" Republicans.
For his part, Trump has called the black district attorney's probe a "WITCH HUNT" carried out by "ANIMALS." A cross-burning Ku Kluxer could not be more obvious in his choice of words.
Did we hear any thundering objections to Trump's heinous rhetoric by House Republicans? Not even a peep. Nor has the self-righteous GOP condemned Trump's characterization of the FBI and Justice Department as "vicious monsters."
Here, I'm compelled to remind you that Donald Trump is a former president of the United States. And Jim Jordan is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. When Newt Gingrich, in the 1990s, encouraged his colleagues to assault Democrats as unpatriotic and the like, did even he imagine that the very highest strata of Republicanism would become so vile?
The GOP attack on the "weaponized" Justice Department is especially worrisome. It's aimed at delegitimizing justice itself, much as Trump's similarly authoritarian friend, Bibi Netanyahu, is doing to the rule of law in Israel. Both men are willing to permanently dismantle the enforcement of laws to save their own butts from prosecution.
For criminals, this is understandable. What's astonishing is that their parties are willing, full-scale co-conspirators.
Purely for temporary political benefit. "All of these steps are about planting the seeds for a potential impeachment of [Attorney General Merrick] Garland in 2024 during the campaign, which would be their ultimate demonstration that the investigation, and indictment of Trump, were all about partisanship," says Charles Tiefer, a law professor and former congressional counselor.
Adds presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky: "The [Justice] department is being given a role that it was never really designed to have — defending American democracy," which is undergirded by the rule of law. And it's being undermined by Trump, Jordan and virtually the entire, authentically monstrous Republican Party.
Who at any time could have ever guessed that the Party of Lincoln would come to this?