Last night I was engaged in some photoshop therapy and was thinking of writing something about how we needed to Windex the glass obscuring the true identity of the president so his supporters could see him for who he is. I made this image but realized I had nothing more to write about it. Now it is a good way to illustrate this story.
Today one of my favorite columnists, Dana Milbank, wrote the story to accomoany the picture for me: Trump’s not claiming executive power. He’s going for divine right. It’s in the Washington Post so some of you may not be able to read all of it so here is an excerpt.
In 1787, the framers gave us a president, not a king.
On Tuesday, lawyers for President Trump gave a dissenting opinion.
In the first of many courtroom showdowns between Trump’s executive branch and the legislative branch, Trump’s lawyer William Consovoy argued to U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta that Congress has no authority to pry into Trump’s finances. That was expected. Unexpected was Consovoy’s broader argument: that Congress has essentially no authority to investigate any president for anything. Sorry, Sam Ervin: Even the Watergate investigation would have been illegal under the theory offered by Trump’s team.
Consovoy, a beefy former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, offered two related points:
(A) Congress can’t issue a subpoena or otherwise probe a president unless it is doing so for a “legitimate legislative purpose.”
(B) Any “legitimate legislative purpose” Congress could conceivably devise would be unconstitutional.
As a result, Consovoy argued, Congress can’t investigate to see if a law is being broken, can’t inform the public of wrongdoing by the executive and can’t look for presidential conflicts of interest or corruption, because that would be “law enforcement.”
Forget about the Unitary Executive Theory. This one is closer to the Divine Right of Kings.
Milbank highlights a portion in the 90-minute argument when the judge asked Trump’s lawyer why the House wanted the president’s private business records and the lawyer said “this is not an impeachment proceeding.” He notes that members of Congress investigating Trump would have more constitutional authority if they launched impeachment proceedings.
Milbank posits that Trump’s lawyer was making a reckless legal argument which is a way in which he is “goading the House” to impeach the president.
I have my doubts that Trump actually instructed his lawyer to make this legally untenable argument in order to move the House closer to impeachment hearings. It may be that the lawyer made this agrument because, ridiculous as it was, it was the only possible argument to make. I suspect he knew he had to please the president and make some kind of argument.
I don’t think Trump has made up his mind about whether impeachment would benefit him. In part this is because I consider Trump a mentally unstable dolt who can’t analyze the pros (mainly that it could rally his base) and cons of impeachment (it will further expose his wrong-doing) in a dispassionate rational manner.
What do you think?