Comparisons Not Far-Fetched
President Donald Trump’s firing of the Acting Attorney General and the Acting Director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is causing some, including to congressional Democrats, to compare him to the late, disgraced President Richard Nixon, and some to call his Nixonian actions the “Monday Night Massacre.”
The comparisons are not far-fetched. In October of 1973, Nixon fired the special prosecutor he hired to investigate the Watergate break in, who had issued him a subpoena. In response to Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox, the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigned.
“President Trump has commenced a course of conduct that is Nixonian in its design and execution and threatens the long-vaunted independence of the Justice Department,” Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, said in a statement titled “Conyers Condemns Monday Night Massacre.”Â
“If dedicated government officials deem his directives to be unlawful and unconstitutional, he will simply fire them as if government is a reality show,” Conyers, who is the Ranking Member on the House Judicial Committee, added. “I call on my colleagues, regardless of party, to condemn this executive order and the reckless firing of our chief law enforcement officer.”
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York delivered a speech on the Senate floor Monday night.
“We’ve had a number, a large number of eloquent speeches about the president’s executive order,” Sen. Schumer said. “And while they were going on, of course, we had a ‘Monday Night Massacre.’ Sally Yates, a person of great integrity, who follows the law, was fired by the president. She was fired because she would not enact, pursue the executive order on the belief that it was illegal, perhaps unconstitutional. It was a profile in courage. It was a brave act. And a right act. And I hope the president and his people who are in the White House learn something from this.”
Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, while not making the Nixon comparison, called Yates “an American with the courage to say that the law and the Constitution come first.”
Noting that Trump’s executive order “really challenges who we are as Americans and violates important parts of the constitution,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow the firing of Yates is “historic. It certainly reminded me immediately of the Saturday night massacre. There are many differences but one is how quickly this has happened in the Trump presidency.”
“It’s as if history is being collapsed into a black hole and everything is happening faster than the speed of light,†Tribe added, saying this is “an important turning point in our history.”
He later tweeted:
Other responses via Twitter:
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