berg80
Diamond Member
- Oct 28, 2017
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Attorney General Merrick Garland fires back at House GOP contempt threat: ‘I will not be intimidated’
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday hit back at House Republicans threatening to hold him in contempt, calling their efforts part of a wave of “unprecedented and unfounded” attacks against the Department of Justice.
“I will not be intimidated,” Garland said in his testimony at the start of a hearing before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee.
“The Justice Department will not be intimidated,” he said. “We will continue to do our jobs free from political influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”
He also pushed back on the swell of conspiracy theories surrounding Thursday’s historic criminal conviction of former President Donald Trump, including the false claim that the guilty verdict by a New York state jury “was somehow controlled by the Justice Department.”
“That conspiracy theory is an attack on the judicial process itself,” Garland said.
The "this" I'm referring to in the thread title is exemplified by the contentious hearing Casper Milktoast, otherwise known as Merrick, testified at. By that I do not mean having contentious hearings is not sustainable. Rather, I refer to the polar opposite perceptions of reality each side brings to the table. House Repubs like Gym Jordan and Dems like Garland metaphorically represent the divergent perceptions of reality that exists more broadly among Trump Repubs and Dems.
Effective governance requires building a consensus between two philosophically opposed parties. A difficult task that is proving to be more and more difficult in this era of political polarization. But consensus is virtually impossible when the two parties can not agree on what is real and what is not.
Many of you reading this already know where I stand on divergent perceptions of reality like the integrity of the 2020 election result. The affect man is having on the climate. The credibility of the grand jury's decision to indict Trump in the NY election fraud case and the jury's decision to convict him. I do not wish for this thread to devolve in to a back and forth on those matters. The point of the thread is to make clear my opinion that the country simply can not survive, can not effectively govern itself, if when gazing upon an image one side sees a tree and the other a balloon.
We all have opinions as to what lead us to this point. How we got here does matter because as with governance we need to agree on what the problem is before we can solve it. The answers are vexing, nuanced, complex, and not easily reconciled. If we fail to agree on what they are, and then act to fix them, the republic will fall.
