VIEWPOINT / PONDERING A QUANDARY

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

Clearly, the liberal agenda to bend government toward more alms for the poor and fewer for the rich has been sharply disrupted. Our preference for soft power versus hard power is being reversed. We believe that America lending a helping hand is better for our standing and power in the world than America First and screw the rest. We believe that a bipartisan, comprehensive approach to immigration reform is superior and more effective than a draconian roundup of millions and kicking them out of the country. Such a policy will create economic chaos and give us a black eye to the rest of the world. We believe in free trade, or something close to it, with appropriate adjustments for cheaters and scammers. We believe health care is a right, not a commodity on which corporations’profit.

Revealing the connections various FBI agents had to the January 6 prosecutions is wrong as a matter of national security. It would set the stage for every President to take revenge on agents who investigate friends, associates, supporters, and fellow politicians, rendering agents trapped between doing their jobs without political considerations or becoming a part of a police state to suppress dissension. Senator Menendez would not have been investigated or prosecuted with such an FBI. No friend of a President would ever go to trial.

El Salvador has offered to take America’s worst offenders, whether undocumented or confirmed citizens and incarcerate them in El Salvador’s new supermax prison built to house violent gang members and criminals in that country. This would terminate prisoner rights and due process for the people we ship to El Salvador. There would be no access to legal aid, to say nothing of the inhumane treatment these prisoners would receive.

But what can be done to check these excesses?

WHEREFORE ART THOU, CHECKS AND BALANCES?

Our system of failsafe checks and balances relies on the various power nodes of the federal government to exercise their power to check the other nodes. If one branch usurps power granted to another, the other can block it. That is the core element that makes the system work–at least as well as it can, given that it is a human creation reliant upon humans to behave responsibly and rationally. The system assumes that each branch will exercise its powers to block encroachment from another branch.

Our problem today is that this underlying assumption is being proven wrong. Congress is the sole check on the Executive, but they refuse to act to preserve their powers. The judiciary is a secondary check. Yet, the judiciary expanded, not delimited, the President’s powers by ruling that his official acts are immune from prosecution and punishment. Only Congress retains the power to impeach and remove the President without recourse to the Courts–impeachment is not appealable.

Trump is losing…in court. It matters little that judges have placed stays or injunctions on implementing the funding freeze, the buyout program, blocking Musk from access to Treasury data, and closing USAID. Trump is free to ignore these courts and judges. There are no consequences for refusing to obey these court orders when the President is acting in his official capacity. What could be more official than Executive Orders? Trump’s executive orders have primacy.

It should be in the self-interest of Congress to impeach when the President repeatedly breaks the law in his official acts, especially when those official acts usurp the powers of Congress. As Adam Smith put it, the only reliable human motive is self-interest, but what happens when that self-interest becomes individual self-preservation?

This executive has proven that he can undo a congressman’s tenure in office and its perks and power by “primarying” him. In Force Field Analysis, equilibrium breaks down when pressures from one side exceed those of the other. The system will always seek equilibrium, but for now, the country must endure an ever-more aggressive President immune from prosecution, and impeachment, unless Congress acts.

HOW TO RESPOND?

What is the moral stance when we know that these policies are harmful to the cause of liberal democracies worldwide? If we are right, which is better–give these Trumpian policies a chance to fail utterly, or revolt? Should we oppose this administration’s policies with every tool we have to prevent it from being implemented? Protests, marches, civil disobedience?

Waiting and “telling you so,” could hurt millions of people around the globe. Yet, in the long run, isn’t it more important to demonstrate once and for all what such authoritarian regimes can do to our proud nation and its allies?

What do you think? What is better–try to prevent the harmful results or let them happen so we have proof that rightwing politics is ultimately terrible?

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