President Trump has placed the Democrats in a no-win situation over who will be the Attorney General after he nominates William Barr for the position.
Their major problem is that Matt Whitaker has been cleared to take over the Mueller witch hunt. Neither one will suit the Democrats, but then again, they will fight anyone that Trump would try to fill the position with. They do have the ability to block the nomination into January, but at that time, there will be 53 GOP Senators and Barr will fly through.
Both Barr and Whitaker believe in a strong presidency.
President Donald Trump’s selection of William Barr for attorney general has caught Democrats in the horns of a dilemma.
Without a Senate majority, Democrats have little chance of stopping Barr’s confirmation, but with ordinary obstruction mechanisms, a month-long delay is conceivable — the question is whether Democrats ought to do so, and there’s no easy answer from their perspective.
To hear many Democrats tell it, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is an existential threat to special counsel Robert Mueller, a Trump loyalist who would happily do the bloody work of ending the Russia probe. Since Democrats are committed to protecting the investigation’s integrity, ushering Whitaker out would seem an urgent priority.
“In a nutshell, Barr has, like Sessions, supported aggressive anti-immigrant policies, opposed criminal justice reform, lauded intrusive surveillance of Americans, said Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and supported denying civil rights protections to transgender individuals,” David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote after Barr’s nomination on Dec. 7.
Even a decade after leaving office, Barr was strident in his criticism of Walsh’s investigation.
“He was certainly a headhunter and had completely lost perspective, and was out there flailing about on Iran-Contra with a lot of headhunters working for him,” Barr said at the University of Virginia in 2001. “The whole tenor of the administration was affected by that.”
“I don’t know what to say in polite company,” he said of Walsh elsewhere in his remarks.
All told, Whitaker is a relative newcomer to Justice Department leadership, and his ambitions for the special counsel’s office are unknown. Barr is a seasoned operator who dealt aggressively with investigators he feels are crossing lines they should not. Since neither man is optimal for Democrats, Trump has forced Democrats into a no-win scenario.