God bless Frank Bruni, New York Times columnist, for speaking truth to power. From The New York Times:
The Unchecked, Unbalanced Reign of King Donald
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
Checks and balances.
I can’t count how many times I heard those words in the history and social science classes of my youth. They were less a phrase than a mantra, repeated endlessly by teachers assuring us of our Constitution’s genius. To answer monarchy, to deter despots, our nation’s founders had created this elegant separation of powers and these brilliant checks and balances, which supposedly had the added benefit of inoculating us from extremism. Checks and balances were our tyranny vaccine.
Its efficacy is fading fast. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has exerted unfettered authority over pretty much anything and everything that tickles his fancy, caresses his ego or bloats his wealth. And he has been largely unchecked by Congress, whose Republican majority is his pathetic pep squad. He has been inadequately balanced by the courts, as his administration contrives ways to delay, defy or otherwise evade their rulings and as he benefits from decades of Republicans’ painstaking elevation of jurists friendly to the party.
He’s the monster the founders dreaded, rehomed from their nightmares to the Resolute Desk, where he’s teaching us a lesson I didn’t get in school: Some of the most important checks and balances reside not in the architecture of our government but in the stirring of our consciences, the murmurings of our souls.
Why is Trump attempting and getting away with power grabs that so few of his predecessors — and certainly none in the past half-century — did? Because he’s unscrupulous and unashamed. Because he’s unmoved by precedent, propriety, decency. Because he’s rapacious and he has no interest in appetite control.
Presidents, as a rule, relish ruling and believe that they’re especially suited to it. That amalgam of ambition and arrogance is what made them reach for the presidency in the first place. But most of our presidents before Trump seemed to worry at least a smidgen about overreaching — about dictatorial behaviors that would alienate allies, offend voters and earn them damnation from historians. They felt pinpricks of honor. Flutters of humility.
Trump is carefree. “I have the right to do anything I want to do — I’m the president of the United States,” he said on Tuesday, when, for three appalling hours, members of his cabinet competed to find the loftiest superlatives, the rosiest adjectives to describe his majesty. Had one of his recent predecessors uttered that line, it would have been the story of the week, the month, the year.
But from Trump, it’s routine. It’s also an uncharacteristically truthful review of the past seven and a half months, during which he and his helpers have unrestrainedly brandished such tools as executive orders, emergency declarations, lawsuits and investigations to extort law firms and universities, dismantle programs that Congress already funded, lay claim to all trade policy and tariff rates, fire federal workers who might resist his corruption of the Department of Justice or undercut his claims of unalloyed success, torment people he regards as political enemies, intimidate and marginalize unsupportive media organizations and take over the policing of the nation’s capital. That’s a partial list. And Trump is probably just getting started.
We saw cracks aplenty in our vaunted checks and balances before this cursed year; we’ve had other presidents who treated them as annoyances to be ignored or ankle weights to be ditched. And history harbors noble as well as shameful examples of such willfulness. While Andrew Jackson’s flouting of a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of an executive order to round up and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry reflect our darkest impulses, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — also an executive order — reflects our brightest.
Trump, however, isn’t operating in a wartime context, no matter how much he huffs and puffs about migrant invasions and cities under criminal siege. He’s not animated, as was Lincoln, by any grand moral vision. Nor is he promoting and imposing any coherent ideology, a fact recently apparent in the right-wing socialism of his insistence on a 10 percent government stake in Intel and in his bids to set nationally uniform voting rules, to extract new congressional districts from Republican-led states and to sideline local law enforcement officials. So much for the free-market, small-government conservatism that Republicans once exalted. Trump exalts Trump, and his sole driver is domination — of the Kennedy Center, of the Smithsonian, of every corner of government, of every cranny of culture.
1 comment:
Donald Trump is a bad influence on federal workers and just look at the money they've blown on ICE. This immigration crack down is really about long run costs in social services which comes out of guess whose pockets... but how then can he justify the expenditures on massive enforcement efforts? How many billions? Is nobody paying for that?
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