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(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The current crop of Republicans resembles lemmings rushing toward the cliffs of ignominy. Their fear of trump, if they could only see it for what it is, should instead be aimed toward fear of becoming irrelevant.

By forsaking their duty to act to counter the actions of a rogue president, Senate Republicans continue to align themselves with trump and his unhinged directives. Senators’ sanctioning of the ongoing corruption currently underway in major governmental institutions such as the Justice Department—growing closer each day to becoming the Department of Injustice— have made them co-conspirators in a conspiracy the dimensions of which are frightening to behold.

Attorney General William Barr—the man who looks disarmingly like a teddy bear but whose actions more resemble those of a tick in the manner in which he has burrowed into the Justice Department and infested it with his poisonous policy pronouncements, the man with the likeness of an Ewok from the forest moon of Endor, the man who resembles a puffer fish when provoked or excited, appears hell-bent on derailing the wheels of justice. Looking more like the president’s counsel that the People’s’ attorney, Barr’s actions scream ‘conflict of interest.’

After his intervention to lower the sentencing recommendations in the Roger Stone trial—a clearly inappropriate act to anyone not enveloped in the fog of wrongheadedness of those in trump’s orbit—the day after the president attacked prosecutors’ recommendations as “horrible and very unfair,” Barr sought to distance himself from the president’s actions via the fiction that the two events were not related.

The implications of these actions for the concept of equal justice under the rule of law were hard to ignore.

The perception that the two events in fact were connected was reinforced after trump subsequently congratulated the attorney general for, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have ever been brought up.” In expressing his gratitude, the president was obviously experiencing some degree of confusion concerning who it was who was out of control.

The connections thus revealed may explain Barr’s telling ABC News yesterday that he wasn’t going to be “bullied or influenced by anybody,” be it “Congress, newspaper editorial board(s) or the president.” Time will tell if he means it, or if his statements amount to just more disingenuous Republican blather.

Tim Konrad