Hamilton, Madison and Jay Spin Loudly in Their Graves

Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" once declared, "Politics," "ain’t bean-bag."

Precisely what this meant might be a bit obscure, but at this point in our history politics is just about as poisonous as it has ever been. Most of the media, most of the academy, and virtually all of the Democratic party thinks President Trump is a Russian agent, a racist, and an unscrupulous liar.

It is true the president can be colorful and embellish facts to a certain extent.

Still, he is not the monster his enemies would like to make him out to be.

As president, even though questionable judicial rulings by Democratically-appointed District Court judges have frustrated several of his policy initiatives (wrongly in my view) — he has carefully obeyed them.

Even though the Mueller investigation has wrongly created the impression Mr. Trump colluded with a foreign power, Trump has done nothing to stop that investigation. The President’s Attorney General nominee, Bill Barr, has testified that Mr. Trump "sought no assurances, promises or commitments" from Barr "of any kind, either express or implied."

Barr also made clear that he had not given the president any promises on any cases or investigations, including the Mueller probe, other than to run the Justice Department "with professionalism and integrity."

Given the recent behavior by so many senior officials of that department, this would, of course, be a welcome change.

Phelim McAleer, writing in Townhall, observed, "We hear a lot about how President Trump has apparently damaged institutions and democracy. The media claim he is 'ethically challenged.' But perhaps the real story to emerge from this presidency is how the media is ethically challenged and have thrown all standards aside in their desire to bring the president down." Journalists used at least to aspire to objectivity, and to refrain from taking sides in our political battles.

No longer.

Democrats have been gloating about a purported victory of Nancy Pelosi over the President because he has agreed to reopen the shuttered part of the federal government without a commitment to border security funding. Howard Schultz recently observed on CBS that, "both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics."

This may be unfair to Republicans. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, reflecting on Trump’s efforts noted, "the numbers [of illegal immigrants entering the country] have skyrocketed and that’s what the Border Patrol has said. So, we’ve got to do something."

Democrats have claimed there is no border "crisis," but this is clearly not the view of homeland security officials. A fact rarely reported in the mainstream media.

There has been a great deal of speculation whether the president, in apparently capitulating to the Democrats by reopening the government, is playing a brilliant long game, as pressure has now shifted to Democrats to make the next move.

Oddly, some of Mr. Trump’s formerly enthusiastic supporters, like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh have seemed critical of the president’s good faith efforts to secure a compromise on immigration and border security. However, now that Democrats control one-half of the federal legislature, some sort of accommodation cannot be avoided.

Unfortunately, not only do Democrats seem disinclined to cooperate, but U.S. House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seems to be far more inclined to stretch the truth than Mr. Trump. Thus she proclaimed that, "The indictment [by Mueller] of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people."

Speaker Pelosi’s implication is that it's somehow wrong to seek to influence an election or shape the will of the American people when, in fact, that is precisely what anyone campaigning for office has always and will always seek to do.

Pelosi appears to believe that the president has continually sought to "undermine the special counsel investigation," and she asks, in a manner that would be slander were our laws not permissive of political hyperbole, "What does Putin have on the president, politically, personally, or financially?"

Ms. Pelosi must know she is perniciously spreading rumor and falsehood.

As Andrew McCarthy recently wrote in National Review, "Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false. In truth, there was no evidence of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage — nothing but the Clinton-campaign generated, unverified Steele dossier."

Our framers naively hoped that this country could avoid political parties, because they inevitably divide us, and operate to favor factions rather than promoting the national interest. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay would be appalled.

Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, the Legal Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, and a contributor to The University Bookman. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Virginia, and University College, London. He has often testified on constitutional issues before committees of the United States Congress, and is the author of "Recapturing the Constitution: Race, Religion, and Abortion Reconsidered" (Regnery, 1994) and "Law Professsors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law" (West Academic, 2017). Presser was recently appointed as a Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado's Boulder Campus for 2018-2019. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.