No checks, no balances
Don’t worry, we have checks and balances.
Except that we don’t.
We have them provided various conditions apply…but otherwise, we don’t. So they’re not really checks and balances in the sense we’ve always understood, are they.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic points out this obvious problem.
Donald Trump’s Thursday press conference was so meandering and deranged that it brought the basic ebb and flow of all politics to a halt, as power brokers across Washington, including Republicans on Capitol Hill, stopped what they were doing to watch along in amazement.
Amazement at what? It’s been obvious all along how mindless and malevolent he is, hasn’t it? So amazement at what? I guess the fact that no one stopped him, that he didn’t make any attempt to restrain himself, that he went on that way for so long, that it kept getting worse and worse? Something like that, I guess. I was amazed myself, despite the obviousness all along. I don’t really know why – maybe it’s just something about human psychology.
But as surreal as the spectacle was, it wasn’t disturbing enough to shake Republicans out of their determined obliviousness to the chaos of the Trump administration. We’ve seen the pattern repeat itself so many times, it’s grown tiresome: Trump becomes unhinged; Republicans pretend they didn’t see it, or say they won’t comment on every offhanded Trump comment, or just chuckle about his “unconventional” presidency; and everyone moves on.
Oh, no, it’s been tiresome all along – or rather, not tiresome, but disgusting.
Their ostrich-like reflexes have been a running joke in politics for months now. But in this case, a great deal of reporting indicates Republicans awoke to the frightening implications of letting an unstable man have free reign over the government, yet remained committed to the course they’ve chosen nevertheless…
Because he’ll do a lot of things they want done. That’s all. All we can do is try to make it so costly that they’ll draw some lines.
[T]he unexpected, and abrupt, transition between completely divided and completely unified government has revealed a fatal weakness in our systems of political checks, which Republicans are placing under great strain.
These systems and processes—congressional oversight, Justice Department autonomy, and legislative independence—weren’t designed to withstand a vengeful, lawless, id-driven madman taking over one party, and then the government, without popular support.
Weren’t they? Then they should have been. It’s not as if the founding dudes were not familiar with monarchy.
If congressional Republicans were going to use their power to check Trump, the way they would a non-partisan political or national security threat, we have a pretty decent sense of what they’d do.
In the policy realm, they might restrain his Muslim ban and deportation force designs; in the oversight realm, they would force him to sell off his assets, or at least release some of his tax returns, as well as launch a full inquiry into whether his campaign colluded with Russian intelligence to disrupt the presidential election. As a matter of basic governing competence, they would try to sideline reckless advisers like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the now-deposed Michael Flynn. Republicans probably can’t stop Trump from holding destabilizing press conferences, but they could make life uncomfortable for him and his team unless and until they started to show some semblance of control.
Instead they choose to whine anonymously to the press.
In other words, they’re shits. Like this shit:
https://twitter.com/CGasparino/status/832290508823265281
Representative Jason Chaffetz, the GOP’s chief investigator, has asked the Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges against a former Hillary Clinton aide who helped set up her private email server. The same man who continued issuing subpoenas at an impressive clip after the FBI shelved its Clinton investigation believes the appropriate number of subpoenas the scandal-plagued Trump administration should face is zero. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who called on his predecessor, Loretta Lynch, to recuse herself from the Clinton investigation for extremely flimsy reasons—is resisting demands, based on clear-letter rules, that he recuse himself from federal investigations of Trump’s aides and their potential ties to the Russian hackers who disrupted the election.
Kakistocracy as far as the eye can see.
I think the ‘amazement at what’ was part of what I was getting at in the ‘Lugenpresse’ thread. But, like the author of the article, I am unenthused at the possibility that Republicans at large will take Thursday’s Parteitag as a point of departure from the norm they’ve established in the last month.
Your comments are part of why I asked the question. I share the amazement, renewed every day like the magic tables in fairy tales, yet I also realize how absurd it is.
Maybe also, though…I don’t want to get used to it. I want to go on seeing it as abnormal.
I always find this thing with the checks and balances rather annoying. There are so many people who seem to believe that if you just design your constitution exactly the right way, democracy is forever safe; which implies that failed democracies of the past failed because they had a design error in their set-up.
Now really if we imagine a two times two table, with the columns headers “constitution with good checks and balances” and “constitution without good checks and balances”, while the line titles are “nearly all voters in favour of democratic governance” and “40% of voters think they’d be better off without democratic governance”, which of the four fields of the table would show institutional failure? The two on the right or the two at the bottom?
In my eyes anybody who thinks that even the most perfectly designed constitutional order could survive a large part of the electorate wanting to trash that order is kidding themselves. Whether either the first or the second part of this statement applies to the contemporary USA (or Weimar, or whatever) is another question.
The founders didn’t design something to avoid a Trump because they wrote a system in which only white male landowners voted. They never planned to extend the franchise to everyone.
Of course, it was the white males who did this, but then, how could they know the white males were going to become totally unhinged the minute someone else was allowed a voice in the running of the country, and might possibly be allowed to apply for the jobs they want, sit in classrooms with them, and, horror of horrors, even be the teachers in classrooms where their lily white male children were being taught their ABCs?
I just wonder if it’s not time to reduce the president’s role to that of figurehead and spread the executive power across a “prime senator” and associated cabinet. It’s not perfect – we’ve still managed to get a wannabe dictator in the top job – but it does add in a few extra checks: ones that are not ultimately controlled by the person they’re supposed to be checking.
No one really has an excuse to be surprised by Trump’s conduct. The scale of the outrage, and its recklessness may be greater than most of us thought, but he is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. And he’s behaving exactly the way he always has.
The notion that the Republicans are going to ‘control’ or ‘check’ him is as unreasonable as all the vague hopes that he would turn out not to be as crazy as he had demonstrated himself to be. The odd leak here and there, the ‘principled’ mutterings of McCain etc….and the rubber-stamp unanimous backing for any lunacy Trump proposes. Trump is NOT some fringe figure for the Republicans, he is putting into action the agenda they’ve been screaming for for the last quarter century:
No voting rights, no financial regulation, no taxes for the rich, unlimited access to guns, no physical autonomy for women, uncontrolled political power to self-appointed theocrats, free access to public land for looting and pillaging….
Trump is doing what they want. And the left blames Obama for not magically overcoming their relentless opposition?
I don’t know that it’s even possible to design a perfect system of checks and balances. In fact I think it would be a rather bad idea to try. The more detailed and proscriptive the rules and regulations you make, while endeavouring to allow liberty of some form, the more you increase the scope for loopholes that, once applied, would be beyond challenge and could actually hand excessive power to a like minded cabal.
Better to have a more general document supported by an overlapping array of principles based legislation that is embedded (requires a super majority to change). Make one of your planks a free and independent press and the other a strong judiciary.
The USA has some of those things, but not all. Commonwealth countries have some of those things, but not all.
Civics classes would be a big help, but could also be prone to abuse.
What we are seeing now is the culmination of decades of attacks on education standards, erosion of dialogue, fear-mongering and the cynical pursuit of power for it’s own sake.