Washington Wednesday: Law, order, and the loss of civility

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 8th of October. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Political scientist and WORLD Opinions contributor Hunter Baker joins us now. Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, Attorney General Pam Bondi was back on Capitol Hill yesterday for a tense oversight hearing, and I understate the tension even as I say that. The hearing was before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Lawmakers on both sides pressed her over a string of controversies, from dropped investigations to the Justice Department handling of internal discipline and data collection. The session often turned combative, with Bondi declining to answer several questions and trading sharp words with senators, and I must say, giving as good as she got.

But Hunter, these hearings are supposed to be about accountability. This one sounded more like a knock-down, drag-out political brawl. What did we learn, if anything, from Bondi’s testimony?

BAKER: There are a few things. I mean, one is, we're entering into a new mode in American politics, where we have these hearings and there is less interest in developing useful information, either for the Congress or for the listening public, than there is making sure that you come out of the encounter unscathed, or that you look as though you have won. And so this was very pugilistic, I think that the Democrats wanted to push this idea that the Department of Justice has previously been non political and sort of meritocratic, and they wanted to kind of indicate that Pam Bondi has just been a political instrument of Donald Trump. And of course, that's a little bit ironic, because Donald Trump views himself as the victim of tremendous politically oriented justice. So now we have essentially both sides accusing each other of this thing. The story that comes out of this most strongly for me is the push on Tom Homan, who is in charge of this massive deportation effort, and you have Democrats asking over and over again about this $50,000 that he is said to have received before the election, and Bondi just kind of pushed back over and over again, sort of refusing to engage that inquiry.

EICHER: Hunter, I was listening to the hearing yesterday with a colleague, and I think it was when California Sen. Adam Schiff was sparring with the attorney general. I made the observation that this is precisely why the AG has the president’s confidence: unlike other administrations, you see the cabinet secretaries kind of rope-a-doping and being saved by the bell. Not Trump people: they turn tough hearings into opportunities to go on offense. I imagine you noticed the same thing.

BAKER: Yeah, I think that this is what he wants. He was tremendously frustrated with his original Attorney General, who was Jeff Sessions, when the sort of the Russian probe opened up. Sessions immediately recused himself, and Trump was furious. Trump, you know, his, his AG, is not there to kind of help him, to protect him from that seat in the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi gives no indication of being the same sort who would recuse herself in some sort of a controversy. She's got the gloves in and she is fighting.

MAST: Hunter, Republicans used their time to raise concerns about politicization of law enforcement during the Biden administration—especially the collection of lawmakers’ phone records by the special counsel’s office. How significant is that issue?

BAKER: I'm interested in seeing what else we find out here. I mean, on the one hand, to imagine a government lawyer actually sort of tapping the phones or tracking calls to major senators. I mean, there are some big names on this list. Ron Johnson being one, Bill Haggerty being another, Lindsey Graham being another. The idea that one of them, or all of them, are somehow involved in some sort. A criminal conspiracy to capture the election, wrongly, something like that. So we'll see what happens. The question is, did Jack Smith have any kind of a valid basis for doing this, or was this more of just a political form of targeting? We'll find out more, I think.

MAST: Well, before we leave the hearing room, I do want to listen to one exchange in particular, because it does lead in to what we want to talk about next. It was when Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois spoke, and this was really a moment. Have a listen.

DURBIN (D-IL): The American people don't know the rationale behind the deployment of National Guard troops in my state. The word is, and I think it's been confirmed by the White House, they are going to transfer Texas National Guard units to the state of Illinois. What's the rationale for that?

BONDI: Yeah, Chairman, as you shut down the government, you voted to shut down the government, and you're sitting here. Our law enforcement officers aren't being paid. They're out there working to protect you. I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. And currently the National Guard are on the way to Chicago. If you're not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.

MAST: That’s the kind of thing I think that prompted Senator Schiff to say something about Pam Bondi’s “canned criticisms.” Obviously one person’s preparation is another person’s canned statement, but clearly she was ready for that one.

BAKER: Yeah, this goes back to what we've talked about before, on the law and order message Trump calculates, as did Richard Nixon in the past, that law and order is a winning issue with the American people, and I think it is. I just want to remind everybody that when Richard Nixon ran for his second term on that law and order message, he won massively, one of the biggest election wins in American history. And so Trump is on kind of firm ground pushing this law and order message. That's the politics of it. Now the legal issues are kind of a separate matter.

EICHER: Well, and let's get to that hunter. I think it's important. And we'll kind of ask you to put on your lawyer hat—and I guess they give those out in law school— But Hunter, help us to understand the relationship between a federal deployment and, for example, the power of the state to call out the National Guard. I'd like to get a sense of what's at stake here, what the President's powers are what the local officials powers are. So when the National Guard is sent into a city who's in charge, the president, the governor, the local authorities?

BAKER: We need to keep in mind that what we're looking at with places like Chicago or Portland or Los Angeles or Memphis, this is different than a Washington, DC issue. When the President is stepping in to help out in Washington, DC, he is on awfully firm ground, because Washington, DC is largely a sort of something associated with the federal government, where the seat of government is located, but with regard to the states. Typically, crime is something that belongs to the States and to the local governments. However, if we are talking about federal law, then the President can absolutely make sure that the federal law is enforced. So what kinds of things does that entail? Well, immigration is the big one right now, but we could be thinking about things like drug laws or bank robberies, that's a matter of federal law, or kidnapping. You know, there are a number of different things that have a federal basis, and the federal government is free to operate when that happens. Now, we've had this controversy in Chicago, where you had ICE agents actually being put in danger for their lives, with local people surrounding them, attacking them, and we'll find out more about what exactly has happened. I think Chicago is playing for time, but it seems as though for a while, those ICE agents were left without any help, and that maybe they had been ordered not to be helped, that you know that the police had been held back for a time. But whatever happens, police officers are not free from their obligation to protect those ICE agents are doing their job sent there by the federal government, and if they are put in physical danger, the police have the obligation to protect them, just like they would anybody else.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, I wonder if that's where the Insurrection Act comes in. Is that what would govern something like this, or is this a routine deployment that's more political than it is legal. How do you analyze that?

BAKER: Well, the Insurrection Act is designed to allow the federal government to come in to an area during times of great civil unrest. Now, typically, I think that a governor would be requesting that that help come in. But. But again, this gets down to that federal and state sort of a breakdown, and I think that probably the last time I can think of the insurrection act being used is probably with regard to some of those civil rights sort of cases where maybe you have students who are supposed to be allowed into a school or a university, and the local officials are resisting that the insurrection Act would allow a president to send in the National Guard or someone like that to break that log jam and enforce the federal law.

MAST: Since we talked last, the Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General, Jay Jones, took lots of heat, and I think you would say justifiably. He sent a string of text messages a few years back to a former colleague in the state legislature.

His rationale: “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Since then, Jones has apologized–here’s audio from WRIC-TV:

JONES: I want the people of Virginia to know that I am so deeply, deeply embarrassed and that I understand the gravity of what I said, and I am so apologetic for it from the bottom of my heart.

MAST: We’ve been talking for weeks about language and its impact … and I’m especially struck by that line “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” That’s really something: Are we pedalling backwards on the road to civil civic discourse? Where are we?

BAKER: We're in a really bad place. We have Charlie Kirk murdered by a person who disagreed with him significantly about politics and saw that as a way to exterminate the hate that he saw within Charlie Kirk. And now we have this former Virginia Assemblyman and now candidate for attorney general in the state, openly fantasizing about killing a Virginia Republican, saying that if he had two bullets, and standing next to him were Paul Pott and Adolf Hitler. He would reserve both bullets for that Virginia Republican, and adding to that that he thought it would be fitting if that Virginia Republicans children died in their mother's arms. So no, this is not good. We have reached some extremes of irrationality and hatred, and we just need to learn how to disagree about politics in a manner befitting of citizens. We are citizens. We are not children. We are not ruled the way subjects are ruled, and that means that we're responsible, and that means that we inform ourselves, and then we talk it out, and then we vote, and then we abide by the results of those elections. Right now, it feels like we're pretty far away from that.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and provost at North Greenville University. Hunter, thanks so much.

BAKER: Thank you.

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