Not a president but a poltergeist

Aug 30th, 2017 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Jane Chong and Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare say it’s time.

The evidence of criminality on Trump’s part is little clearer today than it was a day, a week, or a month ago. But no conscientious member of the House of Representatives can at this stage fail to share McConnell’s doubts about Trump’s fundamental fitness for office. As the Trump presidency enters its eighth month, those members of Congress who are serious about their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution” must confront a question. It’s not, in the first instance, whether the President should be removed from office, or even whether he should be impeached. It is merely this: whether given everything Trump has done, said, tweeted and indeed been since his inauguration, the House has a duty, as a body, to think about its obligations under the impeachment clauses of the Constitution—that is, whether the House needs to authorize the Judiciary Committee to open a formal inquiry into possible impeachment.

It’s not a hard question. Indeed, merely to ask it plainly is also to answer it.

I keep thinking it’s surprising that Republicans aren’t more eager to get rid of him than anyone else, for the same sort of reason that I especially hate him as an American. So much that’s wrong with Trump has little to do with political views but is instead mostly about what he is as a person. I say “little” as opposed to “nothing” because I think some of his terrible qualities are more compatible with being a Republican, but that’s a minor point. The major point is that I think his hideous moral character should be repulsive to anyone who holds public office. I would think Republicans would want to dump him as soon as possible because he’s ruining the brand.

In our view, Congress should be evaluating at least three baskets of possible impeachable offenses. There is a good deal of overlap between these classes of misconduct, but they are sufficiently distinct to warrant individual attention:

  • his abuses of power, most obviously exemplified by his conduct with respect to the investigations into his campaign’s collusion with Russia;
  • his failures of moral leadership; and
  • his abandonment of the basic duties of his office.

At the extreme, each type of misconduct not only denigrates the presidency but also fundamentally undermines the security of the United States.

The security and so much else – the reputation, the standing, the credit. We dented the bejezus out of all of those during the Cold War, overthrowing lefty governments and installing right-wing dictators all over the place, but we still had some.

They go over a lot more detail, and then get to the issue of just plain not doing the job.

The most obvious kind of abandonment boils down to failure to make appointments, a task critical to ensuring the executive branch’s efficacy and accountability. To date, most key executive branch positions remain empty and their nominees unnamed seven months into the Trump presidency, including those he is legally obligated to fill; to date, 62 percent of the almost 600 positions that require Senate confirmation lack a nominee. Even while threatening “fire and fury” against nuclear North Korea and threatening military action in Venezuela, Trump has deliberately gutted the State Department, leaving the country rudderless on the world stage.

Count us as skeptical that delays in making appointments could become a stand-alone basis for impeachment, except in the most egregious cases of blatant refusal, and the macro numbers in any event indicate Trump, while behind, is not wildly out of range of his modern predecessors. There is a far more ominous form of delinquency Congress must consider, and that is abandonment as an outgrowth of Trump’s extreme incompetence. He is sufficiently deficient in judgment and discretion that he requires perpetual, and very public, babysitting; in many respects, he appears to have relinquished the job, but his advisers also live in constant fear of what will happen if he shows up to do it. Political scientist Dan Drezner has even been keeping a tally of times Trump’s advisers are quoted talking about him as though he were a toddler.  In fact, the only way to mitigate the damage Trump has proven capable of doing, particularly in the foreign policy arena—whether by way of an improvised threat to North Korea, Venezuela or Mexico or an an indefensible tweet at odds with his own administration’s diplomatic objectives—is for his advisers to counteract him, either by downplaying him or flat-out contradicting him. The result is not a president but a poltergeist, who does little more than make noise and threaten damage. He has all but abandoned the office for purpose of substantive leadership and governance, but is sufficiently present to make a mess. At some point, surely that amounts to more than “maladministration” but to the “gross and wanton neglect of duty” that Black described.

One would hope.

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