A staggeringly broad interpretation of executive power
It all points to Trump’s desire to be a dictator.
A common thread is emerging from the impeachment bombshells, court fights and multiple scandals all coming to head this week inside the one-year mark to the next general election. It’s a picture of a President and his men who subscribe to a staggeringly broad interpretation of executive power and have no reservations about using it[,] often for domestic political ends.
The trend, which threatens to recast the conception of the presidency shared by America’s founders, shone through the first witness testimony released from the impeachment inquiry Monday.
One former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who apparently had been in the way of Trump’s plans to get dirt from Ukraine on former Vice President Joe Biden, was shocked when the President told his counterpart in Kiev on a phone call that the official US diplomatic representative to his country was “bad news.”
“I was very concerned, I still am,” Yovanovitch said in her October 11 appearance before investigators, saying she felt “threatened” by the harassing words of her own President.
Head of state 1 isn’t supposed to tell head of state 2 that 1’s ambassador is “bad news.” That’s not how the system is supposed to work.
Another top State Department official, Michael McKinley, testified that he had resigned partly because of the use of the State Department to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents.
“In 37 years in the Foreign Service and in different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that,” McKinley said, according to a transcript also released on Monday.
McKinley also said under oath that he had asked his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for a statement of support for the beleaguered Yovanovitch.
Pompeo told ABC News last month that McKinley had never raised the issue. And the top US diplomat emerges from the testimony as more loyal to Trump’s political goals than his own department’s mission.
We’re not even relevant in all this, we the people – we’re just the serfs, the proles, the cannon fodder. Trump’s only mission is to expand and secure ever more power and money for himself.
Trump’s whole career has been one of feudalism. The little people do stuff for him, stuff he can’t do for himself because he lacks the skills and knowledge (for just about anything). He declines to pay the little people. That is their part in his feudal world. They do for the lord, he does nothing for them.
Of course, even in feudal times, it was considered prudent to at least throw a bone to the ones working your land for you and providing goods for you – once or twice a year, at least. Bad feudal lords sometimes got overthrown.
I have noticed lately that a lot of Americans, including many on the left, believe the presidency was created with near monarchical powers. They don’t understand how very limited the role of the president was intended to be. I think there are a couple of problems that led to that. One is that there seems to be a core of people in this country who long for a king, and all the pomp and circumstance that accompany royalty (and, of course, dream of themselves marrying the princess and rising to be king themselves someday, or maybe just being noticed by the king and given a few favors).
But the other is that the president may be the only politician most people really know about. The members of Congress represent more limited districts; I mean, how many of us know who the representative is for the district that includes Fargo, North Dakota? (Kelly Armstrong, R, who represents the entire state because they are so low in population). A lot of people don’t even know who their own representatives are. (Mine is Adrian Smith, more’s the pity) So the president is the one that is known by everyone, and feels like everyone’s representative, because he is the only one who gets elected nationally.
Our system is broken. I sometimes suspect it was born broken, or maybe it is just a Rube Goldberg machine that relies on too many working parts; one thing goes wrong, and…it’s not pretty.
iknklast,
And because people don’t understand the system, they end up subscribing to what’s been dubbed the “Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.” Believers assume that the president can do whatever he or she wants, and therefore any problem that doesn’t get solved on a president’s watch is because he just didn’t try hard enough. (Green Lantern is a DC Comics superhero who has an essentially magic ring that can do pretty much anything — the only limitation is the willpower of its user.)
A hell of a lot of criticism of the Obama Administration falls into this category. Not that there aren’t legitimate criticisms of Obama, but if a complaint doesn’t explain how he was supposed to accomplish X with a Republican House and Senate for 6 out of 8 years, then it has a serious hole.
Of course, some presidential candidates encourage this nonsense by pretending that they would have influence over things they don’t.
Thanks, Screechy. I was familiar with Green Lantern from my youth (but not recently), but did not know anything about the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power. Nice new term to add to my vocabulary.
And, yeah, people will blame the president for what the stock market does (very little of which is attributable to the president) all the way to what the weather does (none of which is attributable to the president). That old “do you remember how nice things were when we had that nice Ike for president?”
I even see it in here, where people criticize the Constitutional Convention for giving the president monarchical powers, when they did the exact opposite. Those power were seized over the years by presidents who wanted to do things they weren’t able to do, and this was aided and abetted by Congress, which seemed more than eager to give up collective power to the one man who sat in the White House. One of the first instances of that was for a good purpose – protecting natural resources by putting forests under government protection – but it is an abject lesson to us about allowing overreach when it’s “our” guy. Once “our” guy overreaches, then “their” guy is empowered, and may not use it for something noble or good. (And yes, as we all know, he and guy are accurate to describe every president of the United States. None of them that I am aware of have come out to identify as “she” or “they” or “ze” or “zir”. Males all the way down).
Males all the way down to the bottom, the nadir.