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