Quote of the day:

“It is by now simply taken for granted that this president holds himself above legal accountability and that his party will support him to the hilt.” — Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

Context: the House Ways and Means Committee makes a written request for Donald Trump’s tax forms; the law clearly authorizes this request. Senator Chuck Grassley, Chair of the Finance Committee criticizes Congressional Democrats because they “dislike” Trump.

As Chait summarizes, this is an entrenched pattern (which the media more or less shrugs off as the new normal):

“Grassley is fixating on the motivation of Congress to obtain Trump’s taxes, while ignoring Trump’s own motivation to hide them, so that he can steer the conversation away from the obvious solution — from the standpoint of both the public good and the letter of the law. This is the method Republicans have used to justify every debasement of norms and the law Trump has undertaken: Drain the question of any neutral principle and reduce it to a simple struggle of us versus them. And the more gross and unjustifiable Trump’s behavior, the more Democrats resent him, which gives Republicans all the more reason to defend him.”