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The Day After the Law Disappeared
I had an order to pick up at the grocery store this morning, and as I drove through the early bright of one of those splendid Texas days with pale cerulean skies turning deeper blue as the sun rose and bluebonnets answered the hue from ground level, my car radio was tuned to my favorite station, KUT, public radio from the University of Texas at Austin. KUT was airing a national report about the dropping of Robert Mueller’s work product from over two years of labor within the law.
At least the part of it President Trump is OK with the public seeing dropped. On the third try, it appears Mr. Trump has finally gotten his Roy Cohn, his fixer with a law license, his human heat shield. Mr. Trump is entitled to employ a purported lawyer who does not love the law, if that’s his idea of wisdom, but since William Barr decloaked I’ve had an emotional reaction to the continuing death spiral in the Department of Justice that surprised even me.
I took to the law early, a jurisprudential duckling, and so it had given me a heavy load of sadness when JFK appointed his brother Attorney General. I thought no good could come from flagrant nepotism at Justice. I was happy to be proven wrong.
In those days, southern governors contested with each other to stand for white supremacy by keeping white students from the dire peril of having to compete with black…