Tag Archives: James Madison

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

As Trump amps up abuses of power, most Republican Senators shelter in place

October 7, 2019 update: Cable news anchors can’t get Repubicans to come on the air to defend Trump.

Michael Calderone of Politico on Twitter.

But when the NBA makes the wrong geopolitical call, watch out.

“The idea of China interfering in the sanctity of the NBA is somehow incredibly offensive to them, whereas the same standard for American elections results in the sound of crickets.” — Jake Tapper in an interview with Politico

Original post:

“This president doesn’t appear to know or care much about the Constitution, especially the limits it puts on his power.

. . .

Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution. Instead, he’s attacking it — by inflating and abusing his powers, ignoring laws he swore to protect and demanding unconstitutional reprisals against anyone who opposes him.” — Doyle McManus, in Sunday morning’s Los Angeles Times

The headline and sub head in Sunday’s print edition conveys the gist of the column — “A constitutional blind eye: Trump neither knows nor respects how our basic law limits his power” — which contrasts the President’s view of his power under Article II with the view of the founders.

McManus doesn’t mention checks and balances — which are referenced throughout the Federalist Papers (including Madison’s No. 51, “The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments“). It turns out that among the most important checks on a president is the Congress, established in Article I of the Constitution.

An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. (Madison, Federalist No. 48.)

As Trump approaches 1,000 days in office (on October 17, 10 days from now), a recurring question has been, When will Congress step up and check the President? An Iowan put the question to Senator Joni Ernst last weekend:

“Where is the line? When are you guys going to say, ‘Enough,’ and stand up and say, ‘You know what? I’m not backing any of this.’ ”

That’s a question for every Republican in the U.S. Senate, almost all of whom — while Mitch McConnell campaigns on a promise not to hold Trump accountable — have responded (as Mara Liasson reported) by “sheltering in place.”

Charlie Cook (who also used the expression, shelter in place) had an answer in July:

“Those who can’t understand why elected Republicans and party officials don’t stand up to Trump seem to miss a point. The survival instinct in humans is a powerful one. In anticipating human behavior, it should always be kept in mind. The track record of what happened to those who did is pretty clear. They lost primaries or chose retirement. Instead, for many pre-tea-party Republicans, the strategy has been to shelter in place. The thinking goes that there is nothing that can be done to stop Hurricane Donald. The key is to survive the storm and be in a position to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party after it has passed. They know that the final edition of Profiles in Courage has already gone to the printer.

Cook references pre-tea-party Republicans, those who (mostly in silence) still embrace conservative principles (who hope to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party post-Trump). That’s not everyone in the Senate, of course:

Ron Johnson exasperated Chuck Todd with his conspiracy-propaganda defense that has found support only in the conservative media bubble and Trump’s tweets. (“Senator Johnson–Senator Johnson, please! Can we please answer the question I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you are not criticizing him?!”)

And of course Lindsey Graham is determined not to be outdone on any given day by anyone else in the caucus. “If the whistleblower’s allegations are turned into an impeachment article, it’s imperative that the whistleblower be interviewed in public, under oath and cross-examined.”

Most Senate Republicans, however, are in a bunker, because when allies back up Trump, he often pulls the rug out from under them. As Robert Costa and Philip Rucker report, “…few Republican lawmakers have been willing to fully parrot White House talking points because they believe they lack credibility or fret they could be contradicted by new discoveries.”

“Everyone is getting a little shaky at this point,” said Brendan Buck, who was counselor to former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). “Members have gotten out on a limb with this president many times only to have it be cut off by the president. They know he’s erratic, and this is a completely unsteady and developing situation.”

The few who might harbor thoughts of opposing Trump are even less likely to speak out. As former Senator Jeff Flake put it, “There is a concern that he’ll get through it and he’ll exact revenge on those who didn’t stand with him.”

The founders didn’t expect Profiles in Courage. They anticipated men acting badly, but believed that institutional checks would hold. Personal ambition and rival interests, both good motives and bad, were all part of the equation:

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.“

They expected personal ambition, “opposite and rival interests,” and perhaps even institutional pride (or, in less positive terms, institutional jealousy) to be incentive enough to check an errant president.

But when Trump holds sway over Republican primary voters, and is ready to exact revenge for disloyalty, personal ambition requires sheltering in place.

Marco Rubio was ambitious. (“And two weeks from tonight, right here in Florida, we are going to send a message loud and clear.  We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist.” Trump beat Rubio by 18 points in the Florida primary.

“Lil’ Marco” is now pretending that Trump’s soliciting foreign help in an American election is just a joke, “just needling the press.”

Ted Cruz, (initially) declined to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 remarking, “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” but has come back into the fold of Trump’s Republican Party.

Given this environment, could Republicans break from Trump?

“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”

Expecting Republican Senators to “hold hands and jump simultaneously,” between now and November 3, 2020, even as we learn more about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine, is far fetched.

If the story metastasizes far beyond where we are now, might 3 or 4 Republican Senators vote for impeachment? I would regard that as a victory.

Meanwhile, Republican Senators can be expected to fall into 3 camps. From the first camp, we’ll see an avalanche of lies, diversions, attacks on Democrats and the media, and a bottomless narrative of grievance.

From the second camp, we’ll hear tut-tutting and murmurs of disapproval, but the conduct will not rise to the level of impeachment.

And, a third possibility, 1 or 2 or 3 (or …?) Republican Senators will acknowledge that Trump’s misconduct is undeniable and renders him unfit to serve. At least we can hope that this category is not a null set by the time the Senate votes on impeachment.

(Image: the Capitol via wikipedia.)

Democracy, Donald Trump

Amid deep background reporting and anonymous bravado, the overall picture is unchanged: a train wreck of a presidency

In a week when Bob Woodward’s “Fear” paints in chilling detail a portrait of a White House engulfed in conflict, chaos, and covert insubordination, and an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times attests to the derisive views of President Trump by those closest to him and persistent workarounds to keep him from getting his way, what have we learned?

Conflict in presidential administrations is commonplace. Appointees often represent wings of a political party with different priorities than the president. Directives are often ignored by cabinet members. Aides try to protect the president from his worse impulses. This is all normal.

“But,” Jonathan Bernstein writes, “what we’re hearing about in these Trump stories is sort of a radical version of standard operating procedure for White House staff and the executive branch when faced with a president who is utterly unfit for the job.”

Donald Trump is impulsive, indulges in reckless rants and incoherence, has a short attention span, is easily distracted, lacks intellectual curiosity, is ignorant of history and policy, and reveals an irrepressible narcissism. We already know all this (which touches only on Trump’s mental capacity, not on his prejudice, avarice, or lack of principle) from watching the public Donald Trump and, for anyone who reveres democratic government, this is frightening. In Bernstein’s words:

What’s really scary is that Trump’s ineptitude at his job means that the normal constraints that keep presidents from doing terrible things may simply not apply. Normal presidents care about their professional reputation among those they work with, and about their popularity among the nation at large, and so they attempt to do the sorts of things that would enhance their reputations and make voters like them. Because he’s unable to even try to do those things — because he has apparently has no sense at all of how the job works — Trump doesn’t see the clear warning signs and then back off things that damage himself and the nation.

Or, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien puts it, “he generally doesn’t care about the long-term damage he might inflict on himself or those around him as long as he’s the center of attention.” That’s truly scary because the entire political system, as those who have read Federalist 51 will recognize, depends on politicians who care deeply about avoiding damage to themselves.

Federalist 51, generally attributed to James Madison, describes the features of the Constitution intended to “furnish the proper checks and balances between different departments” of government, such as constraints on personal ambition and buffers against encroachment of one branch on another. As remarkable as Donald Trump’s incapacity is, equally remarkable is the implacable abdication of the Republican majority in Congress to provide oversight over the executive branch.

Two of the President’s ‘critics’ in the majority party – both of whom have chosen not to seek reelection, which would require them to face the GOP voter base (still in lockstep with Trump) – find no grounds for disputing the devastating portrait of their leader.

Senator Bob Corker: “This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one… I understand this is the case and that’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the President to stay. I thank General Mattis whenever I see him…”

Senator Ben Sasse: “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week. So it’s really troubling, and yet in a way, not surprising.”

Neither Senator proposed any activity by Congress to remedy the situation our nation finds itself in. Congressional investigations of the executive branch are commonplace, even when the same party controls both Congress and the White House. Yet taking a closer look at what is going on is not in the cards for this Congress.

There is ample evidence, dating back to Newt Gingrich’s first days as Speaker of the House, of Republicans paring back the capacity of Congress to do its job. The inability to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is the most glaring example of this failure in the current Congress (in part because no one on the Republican side of the aisle had developed the policy expertise to understand the ACA or to craft a plausible alternative, and no one in the leadership or among committee chairmen cared enough to do so).

Nonetheless, Speaker Paul Ryan and his team, which encouraged investigation after investigation of Benghazi (while boasting that it would harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election prospects) hasn’t simply forgotten Congress’s investigative role. Republicans have actually catalogued scandals and controversies that Congress could be investigating, if it had the will to do so (which is anticipated if Democrats regain the majority in the House this fall). A partial list from Axios, which obtained a copy of a document prepared by House Republicans:

  • President Trump’s tax returns
  • Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
  • Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
  • The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
  • James Comey’s firing
  • Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys
  • Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military
  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
  • White House staff’s personal email use
  • Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
  • Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
  • Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance
  • Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
  • The travel ban
  • Family separation policy
  • Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
  • Election security and hacking attempts
  • White House security clearances

Things aren’t normal in either the executive or legislative branches of government. (I’ll set aside for the moment consideration of the judicial branch, which will be transformed for at least a generation as Brett Kavanaugh takes a seat on the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate continues to approve ideologues to district and appellate courts nationwide.)

Things aren’t normal because the Republican Party has become an outlier, trashing traditional governing norms whenever it has glimpsed a partisan advantage, while ignoring – and diverting attention from – the resulting harm to the country.

September 9, 2018 update: Barack Obama reentered the political fray on Friday, decrying the course our nation is on, the absence of checks and balances, and the urgency of changing direction.

“This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.”

Image: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) running for dear life in “The Fugitive.”