If we can keep it
Is he thinking (or more likely being told) that if he does it openly then it’s not a crime?
This is apparently going to be the play — repeat the impeachable offense out in the open and pretend that it’s a totally normal thing to do.
Legal eagles on Twitter are pointing out that it’s still a crime. Hillary Clinton for one:
Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.
Nixon: “ If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”
Trump: “If this stable genius does it in broad daylight, it couldn’t be impeachable.”
Q: How dumb does he think we are?
A: Dumb as rocks.
The President cannot use the power of his office to pressure foreign leaders to investigate his political opponents.
His rant this morning reinforces the urgency of our work.
America is a Republic, if we can keep it.
That last line came up in the press conference with Pelosi and Schiff yesterday. Pelosi said it:
Since the Chairman mentioned our Founders, they put guardrails in the Constitution because they knew there might be someone who would overplay his or her power. They never thought that we would have a President who would kick those guardrails over and disregard the Constitution and say, proposition, ‘Article II says that I can do whatever I feel like.’
So, this is sad. We have to be prayerful. We have to be worthy of the Constitution as we go forward. We have to be fair to the President and that’s why this is an investigation: an inquiry, and not an outright impeachment, and we have to give the President his chance to exonerate himself. But, he thinks what he did was perfect. So, we have that situation, but I say to my colleagues, ‘Calmness, quiet so that we can hear, that we can hear what is being said in this regard.’
Again, on that very day, September 17th, that was Constitution Day, a Tuesday. Two Tuesdays ago from yesterday. That was when that explosion hit of what possibly happened in that phone conversation, which the President confirmed to me in our call.
Q: Madam Speaker?
Speaker Pelosi. And that day was the day we observed the adoption of our Constitution, September 17th. On that day, way back when, when Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall, people said to him ‘What do we have, Dr. Franklin, a monarchy or a Republic?’ He said ‘A Republic, if we can keep it.’
It is our responsibility to keep that Republic with the genius of the separation of powers, three co‑equal branches of government, each a check and balance on the others, separation of power, a Republic, if we can keep it. That’s our responsibility, that’s the oath of office that we take, and that is what is the basis – one of the reasons why we just have to look at the facts and the Constitution.
Big, big if.
The thing is, he was only able to kick the guardrails over because so many presidents had already weakened them – with the full knowledge and support of Congress. The presidency has accumulated massive power that it was never given by the Constitution; it was seized by presidents from a Congress eagerly thrusting those powers in their direction.
The founders may have envisioned a wannabe king becoming president, but I doubt they expected the entirety of a major party would throw away their job as stewards of the constitution out of naked desire for power. In retrospect, as revered as those people are, they also seem a tad naive.
Holms, to be fair (not really), they assumed the president would always be a white male landowner, and they felt that those were the people who would be most likely to govern with fairness and integrity. This, of course, is because they were white male landowners. They also assumed a high level of education, and that the educated would be less likely to lead to someone like the Donald (if the Donald could have even been imagined in that age. Yeah, actually, I think he could have. I mean, they almost certainly read the works of people like Moliere and Ben Jonson).
The catch is that D J Trump is a white male landowner who did go to one of the better schools. So the problem was not just in their assumption that it would always be landowners who ruled (white male would have been default, so I’m sure it never occurred to them it would ever be otherwise), but also in the assumption that this would guarantee a high moral character and a commitment to the country as a whole. They should have been able to tell that from some of their own contemporaries.
The core Donald was doubtless in their ken, but the recipe of Donald plus mass media, especially the internet, was not.