Tag: Coup

  • Because he knows that no one will stop him

    Will Bunch on Trump the norms-buster.

    The main reason that Trump violates long-standing norms and established rules, or tells so many easily disprovable lies from the presidential podium, is because he knows that no one will stop him. And that exercise of unchallenged power isn’t just a weird quirk of the Trump presidency. It is, rather, its driving force.

    …

    I’m talking about forbearance, and if that word lulls you to sleep, maybe that’s part of the problem. What that term means — and it’s laid out brilliantly by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 best seller with the chilling title, How Democracies Die — is “not deploying one’s institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it’s legal to do so.” In other words, an American president can launch a nuclear first strike, add justices to pack the Supreme Court, fire prosecutors investigating him or his family or, failing that, issue full pardons to his allies or even perhaps himself. There are no laws and clauses in the Constitution to stop him from doing these things. Only tradition and a sense of what’s right and what’s good for America.

    And Trump, of course, has absolutely no interest in either.

    Trump’s lawyers are now out there openly saying they believe the president of the United States is above the law. This weekend, the New York Times published a 20-page letter that Trump’s personal attorneys sent to special counsel Robert Mueller seeking to avoid an interview with the prosecutor, which includes the stunning claim that it’s impossible for the White House to obstruct justice because, in the end, the president is justice.

    The secret letter, drafted in January, argues that Trump has sweeping constitutional powers, including the ability to kill off a probe into criminality in his own campaign — to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.” That means, they argue, it’s also within Trump’s rights to fire Mueller or the prosecutors overseeing him — even though a similar move by Nixon in 1973 triggered a flurry of impeachment resolutions.

    L’Etat, c’est moi. Trump and his lawyers are claiming the rights, and the powers, of a king — not a democratically elected president.

    And a king of the absolutist kind, not the constitutional kind we’re familiar with now.

    Trump is wearing down the American people, one lie at a time. He is chipping away at our notion of what constitutes American justice, one crony pardon at a time. And he is eroding the foundation of our democracy, to make it so weak that by the time he makes his inevitable moves to nullify the Mueller investigation, the remaining frayed house of cards may be too weak to fight back.

    Trump is doing very little with his presidency but to dictate things. He wakes up every morning and dictates lies, then he dictates arbitrary justice, and then he dictates unilateral policies — trade wars with our allies in Canada or in Europe, requiring power plants to burn dirty fuels like coal, or ripping little kids from their mommies and daddies at the border — that could never win political or legislative support, because they lack common sense or morality, or both.

    Hour by hour, lie by lie, dictate by dictate, Donald Trump is becoming an American dictator. And recent days have proved what many of us have long feared: That no one knows how to stop this. Not the Republicans or Democrats on Capitol Hill who, for different reasons, are too cowed politically to take substantive action. And not a news media that doesn’t have the mechanisms for informing the public when a president is a compulsive liar. Maybe things will change after the November midterm election — but there’s no guarantee, and that feels like a long time away.

    People are patronizingly telling me they’re not surprised by Trump’s announcement that he has the absolute right to pardon himself, but surprise isn’t the issue. I don’t really care whether or not you’re surprised that the house is burning down; the issue is how the fuck do we get out of here?

  • The constitutional conservatives don’t much care

    Jennifer Rubin points out that Republicans have done everything they can to enable Trump so far – refusing to legislate to protect Mueller, refusing to remove Nunes from the House Intelligence Committee – with the result that Trump is seizing even more rope.

    Trump and his legal team seem to have drawn the lesson from Republicans’ muteness that there is little Trump could do or say that would cause Republicans to stop his executive overreach and attacks on the rule of law. Seeing no objection, Trump and his legal team now feel comfortable throwing around talk of self-pardon or making claims that he is beyond the reach of laws prohibiting obstruction of justice.

    And the world seems to be yawning and turning over in bed. Trump has just declared himself beyond the reach of the law.

    David Frum has an excellent thread on how the Stuart kings tried to do exactly that.

    There’s more, and I didn’t know any of it; I need to read up on the 17th century.

    How did Trump get the idea he has powers that allow him to fire anyone, even for an illegal reason (e.g., a bribe)? We’re only talking about self-pardon (Trump tweeted this morning, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?”) because Republicans were largely indifferent to pardons of cronies such as Joe Arpaio and right-wing race-monger Dinesh D’Souza. When reports suggested that the president’s team might have dangled pardons in front of key witnesses, you did not see Republicans in Congress leap to object.

    This is what I’m saying. Everyone should be highly alarmed right now, but apparently not everyone is.

    To be sure, Democrats are speaking up. “Donald in Wonderland: through a legal looking glass, no President can be prosecuted because whatever he says is the law. Too absurd even for fiction. In fact, no one is above the law,” tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). In a similar vein, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), pointed out, “The President’s legal arguments would render whole sections of the Constitution moot, and allow a president to engage in any form of criminality and obstruct an investigation into his own wrongdoing. Nobody is above the law. Not this President. Not any president.”

    But Democrats are the minority, and the Republicans are looking fixedly out the window and whistling.

    In short, the reason Trump feels emboldened to make frightful claims of vast executive power is that the constitutional conservatives don’t much care about the Constitution and aren’t conservative in any meaningful sense of the word. Elected Republicans created a constitutional monster — and, along the way, violated their oaths and their moral authority to govern. The larger conservative media have become cheerleaders for an executive power grab they would never tolerate in a Democratic administration. The voters in November will get to decide if that’s the sort of government — absolute power for Republicans — they want.

    If the voters are still allowed to vote by then.

  • A day that will live in infamy

    The Times leans back and puts its feet up and swirls the ice cubes around in its glass of bourbon, and drawls comfortably that the legal thinking on whether Trump can pardon himself isn’t quite as simple as he thinks.

    President Trump declared Monday that the appointment of the special counsel in the Russia investigation is “totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!” and asserted that he has the power to pardon himself, raising the prospect that he might take extraordinary action to immunize himself from the ongoing probe.

    Yes but that’s not the only prospect that extraordinary assertion raises. It also raises the prospect that he thinks he can do anything at all with impunity. Why should we assume that Trump is thinking only about the Mueller investigation here?

    In a pair of early-morning tweets, Mr. Trump suggested that he would not have to pardon himself because he had “done nothing wrong.” But he insisted that “numerous legal scholars” have concluded that he has the absolute right to do so, a claim that vastly overstates the legal thinking on the issue.

    No shit, but the point is, it’s what he’s claiming right now, and he could act on it in all sorts of terrible ways. We seem to be paralyzed to stop him.

    Monday’s tweets by the president went further than before in attempting to undermine the legal basis for the investigation into whether people on Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian meddling during the election, and whether anyone in the administration tried to cover up their activities.

    The president’s assertions came in tweets just a day after Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of his lawyers, told HuffPost that Mr. Trump is essentially immune from prosecution while in office, and could even have shot the former F.B.I. director without risking indictment while he was president.

    I doubt that Giuliani really does think that – my guess is that that’s just his re-wording of the reality that Republicans are in the majority in both houses and will never do anything to stop Trump.

    Mr. Giuliani also said over the weekend that the president “probably” has the power to pardon himself, but said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it would be “unthinkable” for him to do so.

    Doing so, Mr. Giuliani said, would “lead to probably an immediate impeachment,” adding that he “has no need to do that. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

    Well I tell you what, I hope Giuliani hustled his ass right over to the Oval Office this morning to explain to Trump that if he did “pardon himself” he would be instantly impeached, because Trump didn’t mention that part in his I Am Dictator tweet.

    Mr. Trump’s statement about pardons on Twitter went further than Mr. Giuliani and raises the prospect that the president might try to test the limits of his pardon power if Mr. Mueller, tried to indict him for obstruction of justice in the case.

    Or for any other reason that pops into his rotting head.

    The comments by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani about the legal limits of presidential power follow a report in The New York Times that the president’s lawyers had authored a 20-page memorandum in January arguing that Mr. Trump could “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.”

    In the memo, sent to Mr. Mueller’s office in January, the president’s legal team said that the president cannot, by definition, illegally obstruct any part of the Russia probe because the Constitution gives him the power to end it in the first place.

    Lawyers are supposed to do what it takes to defend their client…but surely they are also supposed to respect and protect the rule of law? Surely they shouldn’t be trying to make it legal doctrine that presidents can flout the law with impunity? Surely they know presidents swear a fucking oath to protect and defend the Constitution?

    I just can’t believe what we’re seeing here. Watergate was bad enough, but this is Watergate with the criminals winning.

  • This is not a drill

    To be exact…Trump’s announcing this is surely an emergency. He’s saying he’s not constrained by any law, because he has an absolute right to pardon himself.

    We can’t be having a president, with the powers a president has, who thinks and says he is bound by no law.

    He could do anything. He’s a lunatic, and a rage-prone vindictive impulsive lunatic at that. He’s all of that and he claims the law cannot touch him.

    Sure looks like an emergency to me.

  • Trump declares himself above all law

    Trump walks farther out on the tightrope.