"The Constitution itself places no limit on the President's authority to act on matters which concern him or his own conduct. On the contrary, the Constitution's grant of law enforcement power to the President is plenary. Constitutionally, it is wrong to conceive of the President as simply the highest officer within the Executive branch hierarchy. He alone is the Executive branch. As such, he is the sole repository of all Executive powers conferred by the Constitution." [emphasis in original]
Widely regarded as a job application in disguise, the memo earned Barr his second nomination as attorney general in December 2018. He was confirmed by the Senate the following February. Since then, as Intercept columnist James Risen has charged, Barr has "turned the Justice Department into a law firm with one client: Donald Trump."
Barr's views on the role of religion in public life, while less publicized than his cheerleading for the unitary executive, are equally virulent.
In a speech delivered at the University of Notre Dame Law School in October 2019, Barr revealed himself as a Christian nationalist, blaming, as commentators Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson later noted in a New York Times op-ed, "secularists" for the "moral chaos" plaguing the country.
"From the Founding Era onward," Barr told his audience at Notre Dame, "there was strong consensus about the centrality of religious liberty in the United States. The imperative of protecting religious freedom was not just a nod in the direction of piety. It reflects the Framers' belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government."
Invoking the framers of the Constitution time and again, he continued:
"The Founding generation were Christians. They believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man... Modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as other-worldly superstition imposed by a kill-joy clergy. In fact, Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct. They reflect the rules that are best for man, not in the by and by, but in the here and now. They are like God's instruction manual for the best running of man and human society."
Today's secularists, he lamented, were destroying the framers' vision by using the law "as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values and to establish moral relativism as a new orthodoxy." He pledged as the attorney general to "keep an eye out for cases or events around the country where states are misapplying the Establishment Clause in a way that discriminates against people of faith, or cases where states adopt laws that impinge upon the free exercise of religion."
In February, Barr doubled down on his demonization of secularism in an address to the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, Tennessee, in which he declared:
"We live at a time when religion -- long an essential pillar of our society -- is being driven from the public square. ... Experience teaches that, to be strong enough to control willful human beings, moral values must be based on authority independent of man's will. In other words, they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being."
Secularists, and "progressives," he charged, aim to impose a new form of totalitarianism, "which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda" in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective."
The slide into secularism can be reversed, he said, "but only if we can alter our course." Exhorting Christian journalists and broadcasters to join with him to restore the centrality of religion, he concluded, "It is not too late to stem the tide, but we need to get to work."
Far from faithfully adhering to the wisdom of the framers, Barr's unhinged views on religion comprise a clear and present danger to the bedrock First Amendment principle of the separation of church and state, and to modernity itself. Combined with his extremist position on executive power, Barr's religious fundamentalism makes him the most treacherous man in America, second only to Trump himself.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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