When the Atlantic published a piece on Sunday under the headline “Bill Barr Must Resign,” the editors must have believed there was truly something powerful about the article.
They were, of course, mistaken. William Barr has not resigned as attorney general, and there doesn’t appear to be anything forcing him to do so, even though the author of the piece, a former deputy attorney general, has declared that he “must.”
The article itself amounts to a cliche of the Trump era. If you were to exclude from the media all denunciations of administration officials and the exhausted phrase “no person is above the law,” there would be nothing left.
The Atlantic article checked both boxes. “The fundamental problem,” wrote Donald Ayer, “is that [Barr] does not believe in the central tenet of our system of government — that no person is above the law.”
Saying that magical line can get you everywhere with the media, even though it’s always stupid.
President Trump might just be the most legally constrained president in history, and yet the banal “above the law” is given out by the media like back rubs at a Joe Biden meet-and-greet.
Someone should tell journalists that “above the law” is not the same thing as “I don’t like that.”
For example, the impeachment articles drafted by House Democrats never accused Trump of breaking any law in his interactions of Ukraine, which led to his impeachment. But Jon Meacham, a historian who for some reason gets booked on MSNBC to say “um” a lot, gravely warned last month that we now have “a president who is above the law.”
But what exactly does it mean for a person to be “above the law” when he hasn’t even been accused of a crime?
District judges keep hamstringing the administration’s ability to get our immigration system under control, only to find their rulings overturned by the Supreme Court. Does that mean those judges are operating “above the law”? Of course not.
The attorney general hasn’t done anything illegal. Neither has Trump. And there’s no reason that either of them “must” do anything.
