While Donald Trump is auditioning for the Nobel Peace Prize he has zero chance of ever being awarded, I want to talk about something else, why we have a man in the White House who hates American Democracy.
While he evokes feelings in us we never considered ourselves capable of having, there are actually rather uncomplicated reasons why we are having to endure having a president who doesn’t even believe in the democratic form of government he is supposed to lead.
The first is the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling on presidential immunity that was announced just about a year ago.
I have read that entire decision, and while it was a slog, it is quite revealing about the threat the conservative majority poses to the democracy they pledged to protect and preserve.
While I am not a lawyer, I am reasonably well schooled in logic, and from that perspective this ruling is nothing short of one logical fallacy after another that unavoidably lead to what can truly be characterized as tortured conclusions.
The justices, for example, distinguish between “official” and “unofficial” presidential duties, a distinction that doesn’t exist in the Constitution and then proceed as if they are simply reflecting what the founders intended, but never actually said.
What is more, they make this distinction without defining what either means practically, instead, pushing that responsibility onto lower courts while reserving the right to overturn any ruling that doesn’t define the terms the way the conservative majority wants them to be defined.
Then the court makes the very strange, if not laughable, claim that imposing the burden on a president to do his job (the male pronoun is used throughout the ruling) and at the same time abide by the nation’s laws places an undue burden in the execution of his duties.
In their own words, such immunity “is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch,” without explaining how every president in history was able to function quite well without such immunity until Trump came along.
If all of that sounds nonsensical, it’s because it is, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor underscores in her dissent: “I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority’s opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.”
Further, she says, the ruling “effectively creates a law-free zone…for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.”
But we don’t have to take her word for it. Trump has spent the first five months of his second presidency proving the foolishness and dangers of the court’s ruling in his open disregard for the rule of law in a variety of ways, his abuse of power, and his stunning level of grift, the likes of which we have never before seen in our history.
No wonder most Americans are upset, angry, troubled, and worried about the country’s future.
The second reason we have a man in the White House who hates American democracy is, of course, Donald Trump himself.
He’s a criminal at heart, with no integrity, no concern for truthfulness. His narcissism controls every word he speaks and every action he takes. His intellectual ability is at best average, but believes he’s better at his job than anyone has ever been.
Making everything worse, he is driven by a desire for revenge and an insatiable desire for money and power.
Trump is precisely the kind of corrupt man who would use this disastrous ruling to establish the presidency as the meta-branch of government not constrained by the other two branches or the nation’s laws.
He’s the embodiment of the worst case scenarios both Justices Sotomayor and Brown suggested in their dissents the nation would eventually face because of the ruling. As Justice Sotomayor wrote: “If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.”
Sound familiar? It should because that is how he is acting as president. It’s the kind of man he has always been. He owned a relatively small company with no board of directors, trustees, stock holders, or anyone to hold him accountable. He was the boss, the king, in so many ways having bad instincts and making very bad decisions, but who when he gave an order everyone followed it or was fired.
Given the fact that the case before the court was about Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, the majority seemed completely unaware of or concerned for the ruling’s real world impact. The reason every respected constitutional scholar in the nation was shocked by the ruling is because they were not.
So here we are, a moment the court itself said the nation had never faced before now, trying to hold on to our democracy because of that same court’s decision AND the man who is now President.
The third accelerant in the mix is the Republican Congress whose members have abdicated their responsibilities as the third branch of government.
Wearing Trump’s red hat is more important to them than upholding their sworn oath to support and defend the Constitution.
As bad as the budget proposal the Republican House passed is economically, it also includes a provision that says judges cannot enforce any preliminary injunction against the executive branch they may issue, practically voiding the meaning and purpose of such injunctions.
Senate Republicans would be ready to pass this flawed bill were it not for the non-partisan Senate Parliamentarian ruling that this provision must be excluded because it doesn’t relate to the budget itself, a requirement of the reconciliation process Republicans are using that avoids the filibuster (they get one per term).
Should the Red Hat Republicans choose to blow-up the reconciliation process and the Senate along with it by ignoring the Parliamentarian’s ruling, which they can, they will de facto be crowning Donald Trump America’s first king.
It’s difficult to know who is worse, Trump or them.
Three critical factors, then, have come together to create the dire circumstances we are in as a country: (1) the unprecedented Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity; (2) the kind of person Donald Trump is; and (3) feckless Republicans being in control of Congress who are determined to help Trump pull off his government coup.
The hard truth about the first two is that we have no control over either of them. We cannot change Trump, and we cannot persuade the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to make any better future rulings than they have with this one and others.
But, as I noted in my last blog, there is something we can do about the Republican Congress. And based on what we have discussed, it seems obvious to me that taking control of the House and Senate next year is not a choice so much as it is an absolute necessity.
The mid-terms are not about choosing whether Republicans or Democrats control Congress. They are, instead, about saving American democracy from a man who hates it.
linnposts.com 