November 8, 2018

Susan Glasser: “Shortly after 7 P.M. on Election Night, I spoke with Doug Sosnik, a political strategist who served as President Bill Clinton’s White House adviser in 1994, when Republicans won the House of Representatives in a fifty-two-seat pickup. A few days earlier, Sosnik had written a column in the Post predicting just the kind of response that Trump delivered on Wednesday, and warning that Democrats will invariably oblige the President by engaging in a spiral of partisan escalation.”

“This will look like a period of relative calm and tranquility,” Sosnik wrote, observing that today’s politics leaves little choice but “for both Trump and the Democrats to heighten their differences. The result will be that an already toxic political environment will become even more poisonous.”

“Not a single close race had yet been called, but Sosnik was already quite sure by the time we talked that the outcome of the night would be exactly the sort of heightened toxicity he had predicted. The working-with-the-opposition that Sosnik proposed to Clinton after the elections in 1994 is not really an option for Trump. The President knows only one strategy, and that is to escalate.”

“President Trump, acting under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, has appointed Matthew Whitaker, formerly the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to serve as acting attorney general. There has been widespread coverage of the potential ramifications of this appointment for the special counsel’s investigation,” Lawfare reports.

“But there are three lingering questions about this appointment that have not yet been answered in public: First, is the appointment constitutional? Second, does the president have authority to make an appointment under the FVRA when there is a confirmed deputy attorney general who can act under a specific statute governing Department of Justice succession (28 U.S.C. § 508)? And third, does the acting attorney general have any recusal obligations in relation to the special counsel’s investigation in light of his past statements and relationships?”