Writers, bloggers, commenters, and pundits nearly exhausted the dictionary in the runup to the president’s July 4th Trumpapalooza™. With his tanks, parades, flyovers, and personal address, Donald Trump’s appropriation of America’s Independence Day rightly earned descriptions ranging from inappropriate, disgusting, and self-serving to grotesque, Orwellian, and masturbatory. But word that the Republican National Committee was distributing special reserved-seat tickets to GOP megadonors and VIPs to a taxpayer-funded event produced a qualitatively different reaction. As conservative columnist and Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin put it, “This is the mother of all Hatch Act violations.”
Writing in Slate, legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick offered a primer on what types of July Fourth hijinks could indeed constitute violations of the Hatch Act, the 1939 law “that bars virtually all federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities.” But whatever Hatch Act transgressions may have emerged from Donald Trump’s autodeification in D.C. last Thursday, one thing is certain: Trump’s right-wing media enablers and Republican allies on Capitol Hill will defiantly brush them under the rug. As the record-setting Hatch Act lawlessness of Trump counselor Kellyanne Conwayshows, today’s Republicans have no problem with politicizing the operations of the federal government and politicizing crime itself. Continue reading “Republicans shriek about ‘the criminalization of politics’ as Trump advisors brazenly break this 1929 law”