To protect him in plain sight
Walter Shaub wrote a column in the form of a Twitter thread yesterday, and USA Today published it as a column today.
Oversight began only after the Democrats took the House. But Trump’s hold on the Senate was absolute. We don’t know what assurances he received behind the scenes, but we saw even longtime Republican senators abandon previously espoused principles to protect him in plain sight. With that protection, Trump engaged in a previously unthinkable level of resistance to congressional oversight. The collapse of this constitutional safeguard was a potentially mortal wound for our system of checks and balances.
I still don’t know why this happened. I still don’t understand why it’s worth it to all those longtime Republican senators to let this obviously terrible person – terrible in their terms as well as ours – do whatever comes into his rotting head.
A last line of defense in this war on ethics and law is the Inspector General community. They’re the eyes of the American people, objective investigators traditionally freed to pursue accountability by the safeguard of bipartisan congressional protection. But the Trump era is a bad time for safeguards. Trump’s eye has turned to the IGs, and Republican senators have forsaken them — no hearings, no media blitz, only a few meek chirps of mild concern. Even the self-anointed patron saint of IGs, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, has abandoned them.
What began with the fall of the ethics program is entering the end game with the potential fall of the inspector general community. The government is failing us, safeguards that took two centuries to build have crumbled, and authoritarianism is eyeing this republic like lunch. It’s down to the people. There is a chance in November to reclaim this land for democracy.
But there is every sign that nothing will stop them.
Authoritarianism at best, fascism at worst. Let’s hope the checks and balances kick in soon, because as far as I can see, Trump refuses to be held accountable to anyone or anything. Once you start telling the press the questions they can or can’t ask, and spout this ‘can do no wrong’ drivel, you have the makings of fascism. Not to mention the cronyism of appointing inept family members to positions they have no business holding. There’s a lot wrong here, it’s pervasive and corrupt.
Well, to be fair, if you yourself are inept and incompetent, hiring your inept and incompetent family members is probably the least of our worries.
It does seem to be the fear of Trump voters that is driving the Republicans. None of them seem to want any challenges in the Republican primary. They have become accustomed to getting what they want in their districts, and the rise of the Trump voters caught a lot of people off guard. Our system was no more prepared to deal with hateful, entitled, low-information voters than it was to deal with corona virus.
I do know that I spent a lot of my life assuming that most people want to do what is best, but simply have different ways of interpreting that (most of them self-serving). I have revised that opinion over the past two decades, but I think there are a lot of people who can’t…or won’t…recognize that there are people who truly do things just because of hatred of other people. They still try to assume it’s politics as usual, and evaluate things through those lenses.
But my suspicion is that the Republicans find Trump useful. While he is doing his thing before the cameras, fascinating the entire country in either delight or horror at his antics, they are freer to do things they might want to do that aren’t so savory. Trump has dominated the news cycle for four years now, and whatever they might do – corruption, even crimes – gets barely noticed. Plus they have judges that are friendly to them, and will rule ideologically rather than judicially.
The puzzling thing to me is, why is a position of oversight over the presidency – the inspectors general – subject to being fired by the president? That seems to render them pointless, to me.
Well quite. I think they’re not supposed to be subject to being fired by the president but it’s yet one more of those items that Trump just ignores while the Republicans run interference for him.
Trump seems to believe that he has the authority to fire anyone in the country that he wishes. If the bosses of said people are willing to take the action Trump wants, he does gain that authority, albeit indirectly. This is not really a power of the president, but too many people seem to think the president has absolute power. The Republicans in Congress are willing to agree with that, as long as the president is a Republican, and is doing what they prefer. They may not actually want Trump to fire the IGs, but for the most part, they may consider it a small price to pay for getting whatever it is they do want…which at this point isn’t completely clear. These are strange times we live in.
A few Senators have issued a statement rebuking Trump’s firing of Atkinson and saying his stated reason is not adequate. The surprise here is that some of them were Republicans – Grassley, Romney, Collins and I think one more. Now to see if that makes any difference to anything.
And all of those not named Romney had a chance to keep this from happening, but chose to acquit the monster of charges that were backed up by substantial evidence – which some things I’ve read suggest they knew, but decided to overlook in their partisan rush to throw the entire country under the bus. And yes, the rich people, too, who think they will come out of this richer and greater, but who will almost certainly suffer from the Trump administration eventually.