Pun Salad

John McCain, the last great active American political figure of the 20th century, has lost his battle with cancer at age 81.

For both good and ill, McCain helped shape the purpose and application of Washington's considerable power for nearly half a century. Partly because of that mixed track record, his passing leaves as an open question what kind of future that McCain-style politics—with its robust, moralistic interventionism both at home but especially abroad—has in a political party and country that elected his rhetorical tormentor, Donald Trump.

Perhaps one day a court will find that Donald Trump had conspired with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to pay non-disclosure agreements meant to silence his mistresses. Perhaps one day the House will impeach Trump for breaking those campaign finance laws, and then, maybe the Senate will also remove him from office.

Those are the mechanisms that have been provided by the Constitution to thwart a president from nominating justices to the Supreme Court. I’m afraid there’s no clause in the document that empowers angst-y liberal pundits and politicians to question the legitimacy of duly confirmed justices.

But my point here isn’t really to demonstrate the weaknesses of Giuliani’s legal and political arguments. Nor is it to point out that he zigzags between making legal arguments for political purposes and political arguments disguised as legal ones. Rather, it’s to illuminate the fact that while Giuliani is right to keep Trump from testifying, he’s not making an argument on behalf of the public interest. Like Tom Hagen in The Godfather, Giuliani has a special practice with only one client.

Giuliani is doing whatever he can to protect that client. Where he draws moral or ethical lines to that end is between him and his conscience. But the rest of us are not obliged to argue like we’re Trump’s legal water-carriers. Refusing to testify might make total sense as a matter of Trump’s personal self-interest — which is Giuliani’s concern — but it is not obvious that such a refusal would be in the public interest. We deserve to know all of the relevant facts. If that makes the president’s job harder, so be it. The Constitution makes every president’s job harder in myriad ways, but we don’t say that we should therefore get rid of the Constitution.

The word and thought police have reached brand new levels of crazy. Professional race car driver Conor Daly has lost a sponsorship because his father reportedly uttered a racial slur in the 1980’s. To put this in some perspective, Conor wasn’t born until 1991, yet he is paying for the sins of his father.