Donald Trump’s former White House attorney, Ty Cobb, painted his one-time boss as a crook and all but pleaded with Congress to impeach him. Or to at least to pass strong, anti-corruption legislation to stop his rampage through our democracy.
Cobb speared on MS Now Tuesday in the wake of the Supreme Court’s depressing decision overturning the campaign finance law that limited how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.
“I don’t think this is as much a surprise as it is a disappointment,” Cobb said. He characterized the decision as a green light to “the most corrupt administration in the history of our government because any invitation for corruption now is one that we know will be answered.” He went on to cite such examples as Trump’s corrupt deals with foreign governments and his bogus lawsuit against the IRS that he “settled” for $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to be used as a slush fund for Jan. 6 rioters.
“The timing of this is sad because we know that the avarice of the person that benefits the most from this is overwhelming,” Cobb added.
Host Katy Tur read from Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent. She said that the court “ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.” She predicted the result will be what Justice Stephen Breyer had once warned of: “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”
Cobb said he “couldn’t agree more” with Kagan. But he went on to say that “the difficulty is, to the extent that corruption can be restrained in the political process, it’s really up to Congress.”
“Congress, of course, as we know, is missing in action, with little Mikey Johnson willing to hold Congress out for two months just to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. There is no principle at play on Capitol Hill, with the leadership, certainly in the House,” Cobb continued.
“You know we’re not going to have the protections that that we need and that Justice Kagan laments the absence of,” Cobb said. But he called it more a warning to the country and Congress than to the Supreme Court. “And Congress has failed to pick up the ball.”
Yes, SCOTUS is awful, but we, the people, can do something about Congress.
