I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about something that had been eating at me since Tuesday. Many of our assumptions about the course of the Mueller investigation are based on the premise or the backstop that Supreme Court will enforce the Nixon-era precedents about the rule of law and presidency. This seemed less clear to me after Tuesday’s decisions, though I didn’t return to that issue after yesterday’s news. I did last night at 3 a.m. The Mueller probe is the most immediate issue but it’s really just a proxy for our democratic institutions. I’ve said before that Trump is an autocrat without an autocracy. But he’s working on it and the question is whether there will be any check.

Looking through my email I found this from a former federal public corruption prosecutor …

I am deeply concerned that the Kennedy retirement will put the rule of law and our democratic institutions at graver risk than ever before. The President of the United States is the subject of a serious federal criminal investigation into (1) whether he conspired with a foreign adversary to help him win a narrow electoral college victory; and (2) whether he has obstructed that very investigation by, among things, firing the FBI director in charge of the investigation. The President will now be able to choose the person who, in a very real sense, may be the ultimate arbiter of whether or not he and others are ever held accountable.