President Joe Biden has been president for more than month now. His worst scandal so far seems to be that his dog is somehow not presidential. But at least he can’t salute anyone while holding his dog.
While it’s a relief to not have to think about failed businessman and dictator wannabe Donald Trump every single damn waking moment, we still need to talk about him: how can we repair the damage he caused and prevent him or anyone else from destroying our democracy?
In a column for The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch identifies five ways Trump has damaged the Constitution (I read the column on MSN). The article is titled “The 5 Trump Amendments to the Constitution,” which made me think it’s about the five amendments the Constitution needs to repel another overthrow attempt.
That’s not what Rauch meant, but I do think he wants us to think about that. In a sense, Trump, with the help of his enablers in Congress, has informally amended the Constitution, and those changes will have disastrous consequences if they’re not formally and officially prohibited.
Amendment 1. No president shall be removed from office for treason, bribery, or any other crime or misdemeanor, no matter how high, should a partisan minority of the Senate choose to protect him.
The Founding Fathers seem to have been more concerned with a simple majority making a hasty decision than they were with the possibility that an American political party could descend from noble beginnings to crazed treason death cult, and protect an obvious criminal from any consequence for any of his many crimes.
The impeachment mechanism was intended to be a check on presidential misbehavior; instead, post-Trump, it is now more like a partisan permission slip, allowing presidents to do as they please provided they keep their party in line. In other words, from now on, presidents should assume that the way to hold on to power is to stay not on the right side of the law but on the right side of their party. To put it mildly, that is not what the Founders intended.
A formal amendment to require witnesses in the Senate trial and clarify that former officials can tried by the Senate for disqualification would be a good start, in my non-expert opinion.
Amendment 2. Congressional oversight shall be optional. No congressional subpoena or demand for testimony or documents shall bind a president who chooses to ignore it.
Shouldn’t Trump have been impeached for that? Maybe. But we already know how that would have turned out…
Amendment 3. Congressional appropriations shall be suggestions. The president may choose whether or not to comply with congressional spending laws, and Congress shall have no recourse should a president declare that his own priorities supersede Congress’s instructions.
This of course refers to Trump’s dumb border wall, more a monument to racism than an actual obstacle to all the “not the best people” Mexico supposedly sends us (we need to apologize for Ted Cruz, by the way). Congress did give Trump $1.4 billion for the dumb wall. Too much as it was, but Trump wanted $5.7, so he stole from our troops and their families.
Amendment 4. The president shall have authority to make appointments as he sees fit, without the advice and consent of the Senate, provided he deems his appointees to be acting, temporary, or otherwise exempt from the ordinary confirmation process.
There has already been a law designed to prevent this very thing, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, but unfortunately that law is full of loopholes.
Amendment 5. The president shall have unconstrained authority to dangle and issue pardons for the purpose of obstructing justice, tampering with witnesses, and forestalling investigations.
Rauch explains that presidents up to President Barack Obama had underused their power to pardon, even in cases with blatant miscarriages of justice. Despite underuse of the pardon power, there had been suspicious pardons, like the elder President Bush pardoning the Iran-Contra felons. And then Trump came along.
Characteristically, he managed to make both problems worse. [Trump] used pardons more sparingly than any modern president except the two Bushes, granting only 2 percent of clemency requests, versus more than a third under Nixon, who was no slouch on law and order. More striking, though, was the way Trump used the pardon power: corruptly.
At least Trump didn’t try to pardon himself. Though maybe that should still be clarified, that presidents can’t pardon themselves.
I think it would be more important to formalize the pardon vetting process, requiring a showing of altruism that’s easier to satisfy in death penalty cases. I do think the death penalty should be abolished, but that’s a separate issue.
Of course formal amendments are very difficult. The 27th Amendment took more than two centuries to be ratified. Which is why the efforts to abolish the Electoral College have instead focused on an inter-state agreement to turn the Electoral College into a mere formality. An amendment to actually delete that antiquated institution from the Constitution would certainly take more than two centuries to get ratified.
Meanwhile, on a parallel Earth, U. S. President Hillary Clinton (D) was impeached in her first term for some nonsense reason or other, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) still somehow wound up proving himself a hypocrite on the topic of impeachment; he’s awful in every parallel Earth.