One fact becomes clear in special counsel Robert Hur's finding that Joe Biden should not be criminally prosecuted for his transgressions with classified documents.
It's that Attorney General Merrick Garland, or someone like him, ought to be on the U.S. Supreme Court.
That man is seriously fair and circumspect, maybe to a fault. But I'm loath to complain of any fault. Somebody ought to stand up these days for fairness and circumspection, with so little of them evident in our politics.
Some president or another should have nominated Garland for the Supreme Court along the way. Then some Senate majority leader or another should have granted Garland a timely hearing and overseen his confirmation.
It's strange that never happened.
You see what I've done there, right?
It did happen in part. Barack Obama nominated Garland. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stonewalled the nomination for nearly a year in case Donald Trump got elected president. Then Joe Biden made Garland attorney general, and fairness and circumspection have been applied in that office since -- to the consternation of all, it seems.
That ours is a dysfunctional and hyperpartisan government was never clearer than last Tuesday. A House committee couldn't cope with a straight-arrow attorney general's appointment of a straight-arrow special prosecutor who produced a (nearly) straight-arrow report.
The report said that Biden indeed had classified documents in his home and shouldn't have, but that making the essential case for prosecution that Biden acted knowingly and willfully would be futile, in part because a jury would see Biden for what the special prosecutor had determined him in an interview to be. That's a well-meaning older gentleman who didn't remember things well, even the date of his beloved son's death, which was 2015, although Biden stumbled around during the interview between 2013 and 2017 before settling on 2015 when his lawyer helped him.
Here is how that came to be:
Trump was found to have classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. He held some back when ordered to turn everything over. He flashed a document around among guests. He got indicted, less for having the documents in the first place than for resisting the law-enforcement investigation and confiscation.
Then it turned out that Biden's home also held classified documents. Biden instantly directed that everything be turned over. He sat for an interview. Already, his situation was different from--less than--Trump's.
Garland, being fair and circumspect, felt he had to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden's document stash. He felt he had to go out of his way not to appear partisan. He picked, in Hur, a well-respected registered Republican who had worked in the Trump Justice Department.
Hur produced the meanderingly balanced report summarized above, declining to pursue prosecution of Biden but mentioning as a reason that the president's memory problems would soften a jury and weaken any case requiring a finding of willfulness.
Garland, who officially received the report, could have--and perhaps should have--told Hur that he'd done good work, but that, in the part about Biden's memory problem, he was venturing further than necessary under his job description, and beyond proper discretion.
Garland could have explained to Hur that, while it was right to cite Biden's poor memory about where the documents came from, Hur needn't presume to make a personal finding of Biden's general failing memory, even about his son's death, since that lacked direct relevance to the issue at hand and would surely emerge as a volatile political issue.
But being fair and circumspect, Garland knew it would be a bigger issue--and further damaging to the noble idea of nonpartisan justice in his department--if the public found out that he had ordered or even asked Hur to take out any critical observation about the president's memory. That would have been an open invitation for an accusation of covering up.
So, it stayed in and, last Tuesday, Democrats were aghast about that, and Republicans were aghast that Hur hadn't brought charges.
When both sets of modern-day hyperpartisans in Washington are aghast about the same report but different specific elements, then somebody has written a pretty good report.
U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a leader of the progressive wing of the Democrats, insisted time and again that Hur had "exonerated" Biden. Hur countered each time that the report didn't contain that word and that he had not ventured to that conclusion.
Hyperpartisan Democrats wanted that headline word, "exonerate," aware that hyperpartisan Republicans had their headline word, "demented."
But, as usual, neither was quite correct. Hur's conclusion was something less than exoneration. And what he reported of Biden's mental acuity was something less than mental unfitness.
It is possible as one grows older that the mind runs all those fast-compiling past years together, but that doesn't necessarily amount to general incompetence. I hope to heck that's the case. My standard response anymore to when something happened is 10 to 15 years ago. It might be five. It might be 30.
At any rate, the current congressional crop doesn't do well with increments. Or fairness. Or circumspection.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.