Thursday
I report today on two literary sightings in the testimony of law professor Jonathan Turley, the expert witness on Constitutional law chosen by the GOP for yesterday’s impeachment hearings. At one point Turley echoed Alice in Wonderland, at another he quoted Robert Bolt’s Man for All Seasons.
Although Turley was arguing against impeachment, his Bolt allusion had the effect of casting Donald Trump as “the Devil himself.” And while disputing the evidence assembled against the president, Turley conceded that, if Trump were in fact guilty of the what he is charged with, impeachment would be appropriate.
Turley echoed Carroll’s Cheshire cat in a riff about the heightened emotions surrounding the proceedings:
I get it: You are mad. The president is mad. My Democratic friends are mad. My Republican friends are mad. My wife is mad. My kids are mad. Even my dog seems mad — and Luna is a goldendoodle and they don’t get mad. So we’re all mad.
I think his point was that, if we’re all mad, then we’re incapable of behaving sensibly and should therefore drop this crazy impeachment business. It’s a self-serving argument but it does allude to the mayhem that Republicans want to create, not having the facts on their side. Here’s the passage:
‘In that direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: and in that direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports on Turley’s Bolt allusion:
He testified that Trump’s call “was anything but perfect” and his targeting of the Bidens “highly inappropriate.” He acknowledged that the quid pro quo, “if proven, can be an impeachable offense.” Quoting from A Man for All Seasons, he spoke of the need to “give the devil the benefit of the law.”
The relevant passage involves a man who, while a spy in Sir Thomas More’s household, is not a proven spy:
ALICE MORE: Arrest him!
SIR THOMAS MORE: For what?
ALICE: He’s dangerous!
WILLIAM ROPER: For libel, he’s a spy!
MARGARET MORE: Father, that man’s bad.
MORE: There is no law against that.
ROPER: There is! God’s law!
MORE: Then God can arrest him.
ALICE: While you talk, he’s gone!
MORE: And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the
law!
ROPER: So! Now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Milbanks wryly asks,
Do Republicans realize who the devil is in Turley’s scenario?
Actually, More comes across as a bit naïve here, thinking that the law will save him. It doesn’t, as his beheading at play’s end indicates. And I think of Attorney General William Barr’s response to perceived spies in our midst. While it looks as though an Inspector General’s report is about to disprove Barr’s theory that the FBI was “spying” on the Trump campaign, Barr appears ready to once again take the law into his own hands (as he did with the Mueller Report) and declare that his opinion should prevail.
But yes, More is right that, if we don’t have the law, we don’t have any checks on autocratic behavior. We have to believe that our institutions will work, that the Truth will out, and that the Devil will be revealed for who he really is. And that the madness will end.
