Brink
Brian Beutler at the New Republic sums it all up chillingly: it’s an authoritarian crisis waiting to happen.
The scope of that crisis is much clearer now that the Washington Post is reporting that Trump is discussing the possibility of pardoning himself, his family, and his closest aides to short-circuit the sprawling investigation of his campaign’s complicity in Russia’s subversion of the 2016 election. Trump’s team is also, according to the Post and another Times story, digging up dirt on the special counsel investigators in an attempt to discredit them.
It’s not Sessions, he says, it’s Mueller, and Trump’s telling the Times he thinks Mueller’s investigating his financial doings crosses a line.
In a more rule-bound environment, Mueller’s interest in opening Trump’s books would probably be checkmate for the president. Quite apart from the question of whether his campaign conspired with Russian intelligence to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it is widely suspected that a peek under the hood of the Trump organization will reveal serious financial crimes. Assuming that informed speculation is correct, and assuming our system of checks hasn’t broken down, Mueller would uncover the wrongdoing and bring down a president, or Trump would fire Mueller and Congress would step in to edge Trump out.
But at the moment there are no reliable sources of accountability. None.
The sources of accountability are all contingent on political power. That’s no good.
Should Trump fire Mueller, with the tacit assent of Republicans in Congress and the DOJ leadership, there will be little recourse. It is feasible (though difficult) to imagine a GOP House and Senate passing an independent counsel statute to restore Mueller to his job; it is nearly impossible to imagine them doing so by veto-proof margins. And should Trump pardon himself and his inner circle, it is dispiritingly easy to imagine Republicans reprising their familiar refrain: The president’s power to pardon is beyond question.
So we could be living under a complete Trump takeover in a matter of weeks.
I saw briefly on Twitter someone claim that accepting a pardon is also legally an admission of guilt. If true, that could have interesting ramifications if he pardons himself and accepts it.
And anyway, pardoning yourself?! That should not even be possible.
He’s only showing a rare dusplay of good manners. A pardon should always be issued for a trump.
(Sorry, British humour and all that).
I’m actually genuinely afraid now. There seems to be nothing Trump can do that will convince Republicans to lift a finger to stop him. I’ve mused on this a lot recently and the only thing these monsters respond to is their own venal self-interest. It’s appalling. And the Constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if we are reliant on political will to save us.
Looking in from the outside I always find it remarkable how great the powers of the US president are, and how little that seems to have troubled Americans so far. If my understanding is correct, they can order drone strikes without a formal declaration of war, conflict of interest laws don’t apply to this office but to all others, and they can simply commit a crime and then pardon themselves for it.
It is doubly fascinating because when I went to school in Germany and read German history books the USA were sold as this place that invented checks and balances, that had a constitution with superb checks and balances, often in the context of lack of the same and having to powerful a president supposedly being what doomed the Weimar Republic.
AoS: it’s ok, I’m a right-of-the-ponder, too.
Alex SL – we’re finding it remarkable from the inside, too.
We’ve known it all along to some extent – I was always aware that executive orders I approved of from Obama were the flip side of EOs I scowled at from Bush2…or rather that the principle I didn’t object to during Obama’s prez I did object to during B2’s.
But I certainly didn’t grasp how weak the supposed “checks and balances” are, and I think a lot of us can say the same. We didn’t realize that most or all of them wholly depend on which party is in power.