Here’s what else is on my radar this week: the president and the Constitution-- AGAIN.
In nearly 3 years in office, president Donald Trump has spend federal dollars not authorized
by Congress, Separated families and incarcerated children
at the Texas-Mexico border in defiance of a federal court order, pulled 1,000 troops
out of Syria, ignoring a commitment to allies and facilitated war against civilians there,
and send 2,000 American troops to Saudi Arabia without a congressional authorization or declaration
of war.
He has also criminally obstructed a Department of Justice investigation into him but escaped
prosecution because of the intercession of an attorney general more loyal to him than
to the Constitution—the CONSTITUTION.
At the outset of his presidency, Trump took the presidential oath of office
promising that he would faithfully execute his obligation to preserve, protect and defend
the Constitution.
James Madison, the scrivener of the Constitution, insisted that the word “faithfully” be
in the presidential oath and that the oath itself be in the Constitution to remind presidents
to enforce laws and comply with constitutional provisions whether they agree with them or
not and to immunize the oath from Congressional alteration.
Can the president of the United States lawfully enforce only the clauses of the Constitution
with which he agrees and ignores those with which he disagrees?
In a word: no.
The doctrine of the separation of powers, which is the backbone of the Constitution,
states that Congress writes the law, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them.
It also offers that the government roles of the three branches cannot be intermingled
or traded without undermining the protections for personal liberty that the separation of
powers was intended to secure.
If the president could pick and choose which laws to enforce and which parts of the Constitution
to ignore, he effectively would be deciding what the laws mean-- that’s a judicial function
– and which laws have vitality and which do not – that’s a congressional function.
President Trump has become known for forceful and often tasteless banter.
He publicly calls people crude names, uses foul language, and sends dog-whistles of lawless
behavior to many of his supporters.
All of that is a question of free speech, personal taste, and political risk.
But threats to ignore parts of the Constitution are not matters of speech, taste or risk.
They reveal character traits that question the president’s fitness for office.
This is what it looks like when a Republican decides to put country over party and not
discard every shred of integrity in blind deference to a corrupt president.
And rest assured, Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst, is no Democrat or
liberal.
In this same profile, Napolitano is actually asked if he would vote to impeach Trump if
he was a Democrat in the House, to which he responded, “If I could modify your question
to ask if there’s a legal basis to argue high crimes and misdemeanors, then the answer
is yes.
That’s really beyond dispute ... If I were a Democrat in the House, which I am not and
never will be, I would vote to impeach.”
And the fact that I even have to qualify his party affiliation is a testament to just how
far the GOP has fallen.
That it’s news that a Republican can manage to admit that, oh I don’t know, extorting
a foreign country with legally allocated, taxpayer funded military assistance for help
in an upcoming election is NOT A GOOD THING BUT A BAD THING goes to show exactly the state
that the GOP is in these days.
The only problem of course, is that Napolitano isn’t in Congress, where you would THINK
that our elected officials on the right would have a better sense than ANYONE about what’s
right and wrong.
And yet they’re so scared of the backlash that would come from daring to criticize Trump
that they would rather be on record DEFENDING a president extorting a foreign country for
personal help in the next election, DEFENDING a president hiding incriminating summaries
of his calls in secure servers, DEFENDING a president blocking his officials from showing
up to testify to Congress in response to legally binding subpoenas.
Republicans are on record pretending – literally, pretending – that there’s some equivalency
between a debunked conspiracy theory about Joe Biden and Trump’s own ADMITTED criminal
behavior with regard to Ukraine.
They’ve come out and tried to muddy the waters with claims that the whistleblower
can’t be trusted because he or she is a partisan, despite not knowing who the whistleblower
is; that you can’t have second-hand information in a whistleblower complaint, even though
it’s perfectly acceptable; that impeachment is unconstitutional, even though it’s in
the Constitution; that Adam Schiff personally counseled the whistleblower, even though he’s
never met the whistleblower and it was Intel Committee staff who CORRECTLY advised the
whistleblower to seek legal counsel and file a complaint with the Intel Community Inspector
General; that Democrats were holding secret impeachment hearings in the basement of the
Capitol, even though the entire process is based on rules passed by REPUBLICANS in 2015;
that quid pro quos are perfectly acceptable, even though they are decidedly not perfectly
acceptable.
These are the hoops that Republicans are jumping through to defend the indefensible.
These are the ways that they’re debasing themselves and what they’ve claimed to believe
in, all for what?
To protect a president who can’t even crack 50% approval?
Who has presided over losses in deep red seats in Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, Wisconsin,
Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Minnesota, Colorado, Texas, Iowa, Georgia,
South Carolina, Illinois, Michigan, Utah, Kansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, California and New
Mexico?
Who drove Democrats to the biggest victory in the House in modern American history during
midterms?
I get that Trump’s base is with him no matter what, but is tearing up the Constitution really
worth it to appease that 30% of Americans who couldn’t tell you the first line of
the Constitution if their lives depended on it?
Is it really worth it to avoid an angry tweet in Trump’s twitter feed?
So far, the really unfortunate answer, it that apparently, it is.
So rest assured, Trump will continue to break our laws so long as he knows those charged
with passing them won’t have enough of a collective backbone to speak out.
He’ll continue to refer to the emoluments clause as phony so he can self-deal, he’ll
continue to extort and bribe foreign countries so he can get a leg up in yet another election,
he’ll continue to obstruct justice so that warranted oversight gets shut down.
The fact is, if you’re a Republican, you can either be in favor of the rule of law
or you can be in favor of protecting Donald Trump, but you can’t be in favor of both.