Some days these days, it's just hard to get started in the morning. This was one of those days. The news prompted a severe case of the slows because, outside of the massive storm in the southeastern United States, all the news seems the same, and none of it seems good.

The president*'s little Riefenstahl Tour of the Americas has become so utterly banal, even in its dangerous flirtations with outright fascism, that even Fox didn't cover the one Wednesday night. Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court and doing exactly what we thought he'd be doing, which is exactly what he was chosen to do—take the hardline administration position on immigration, and managing to get to the right of Neil Gorsuch on the issue, as well as being reassuringly vague on the issue of whether or not he's in the bag for the president* in Muellerized cases that might come up down the line. There is absolutely no question that conventional ethics would require Kavanaugh to recuse himself from hearing cases involving this president*'s use of executive power. But conventional ethics never had 'skis with Squi, so what does conventional ethics know, anyway?

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Voter suppression is reaching preposterous levels, especially in Georgia, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp is in the position (as the incumbent secretary of state) of determining who will vote in the upcoming election in which he's running against Stacey Abrams. Again, conventional ethics would insist that Kemp should've stepped down from his position as secretary of state for the balance of the campaign, win or lose. But conventional ethics never worked as hard as Kemp has to tamp down minority voters, so what does conventional ethics know?

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But, sooner or later, you run up against a story that has stepped far out of the ordinary. The mystery of Jamal Khashoggi is one of those stories. An American resident walks into a foreign embassy and he never walks out again. Reports say that he might have been murdered and dismembered, and his parts carried out of the place in briefcases. There is a lot to be said here about the threat to journalists all over the world, and that's important, and it's worthy of study. But the simple fact is that this was a resident of this country who likely was murdered, and, by all indications, murdered by agents of an allied government.

And the president*, who never misses a chance to flog his opponents with the corpse of poor Otto Warmbier, and who never misses a chance to brag about the remains he's brought home from North Korea, says nothing about this except that he'd rather not lay sanctions on the murderous Saudi regime. Meanwhile, Congress goes out of its gourd—and in a very bipartisan manner, I might add. From The New York Times:

“The Saudis will keep killing civilians and journalists as long as we keep arming and assisting them,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said on Twitter on Thursday. “The President should immediately halt arms sales and military support to Saudi Arabia.”

“What good does that do us?” Mr. Trump asked, speaking to reporters midday in the Oval Office. “I would not be in favor of stopping a country from spending $110 billion—which is an all-time record—and letting Russia have that money and letting China have that money,” Mr. Trump said, referring to an arms deal with the Saudis, brokered last year, that the president has said will lead to new American jobs...

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On Wednesday, the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a bipartisan letter to Mr. Trump demanding an investigation of whether “the highest ranking officials in the Government of Saudi Arabia” were responsible for human rights abuses in Mr. Khashoggi’s case. The letter invoked a statute that Congress enacted in December 2016 which says the executive branch, upon receipt of such a letter, has 120 days to decide whether to sanction foreign officials.

It is not clear, however, whether the Trump administration will consider itself bound to comply if the president does not want to tangle with the Saudis. When former President Barack Obama signed the legislation creating that law, he issued a signing statement challenging it as an unconstitutional intrusion on executive power, and saying presidents would maintain “discretion to decline to act on such requests when appropriate.”

By the way, the "statute that Congress enacted" that the Times refers to above is the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which was a worldwide expansion of the principles espoused in our old friend, the Magnitsky Act, which passed in reaction to the reported murder in prison of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax accountant. When the Obama administration dropped the Magnitsky act on Russia, the Putin government screamed and hollered to anyone who would listen, and it found a presidential campaign that was very willing to listen. In June of 2016, a meeting was held in Trump Tower and, so, round and round we go.

The Congress wants the president* to apply to his pals, the Saudis, sanctions based in a law originally directed at some of the president*'s other pals among the Volga Bagmen. One of the president*'s shady deals with a foreign despot now has run headlong into a previous shady deal with a foreign despot. Hey, that doesn't happen every day.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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