Thursday was arguably President Donald Trump’s worst day in office, marked as it was by the other two branches of government forcefully reminding him that they are coequal.
This is proving an ongoing issue for the president, who reportedly is shocked to discover that presidenting is hard because the government as constructed by the Constitution is full of nasty checks and balances.
Both of the other branches of government flexed their muscles on Thursday, to Trump’s detriment. First the chairman and ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wrote a letter to the director of the Office of Government Ethics formally asking him to “recommend … appropriate disciplinary action” against Trump aide Kellyanne Conway after she promoted Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing during an interview Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” apparently violating federal law in the process. Pointedly the letter noted that “in this case there is an additional challenge, which is that the President, as the ultimate disciplinary authority for the White House employees, has an inherit conflict of interest since Conway’s statements relate to his daughter’s private business.” Separately Chaffetz described Conway’s comments as “wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Cartoons on President Donald Trump
This is a sharp break for Chaffetz, who has drawn sharp criticism for taking a laissez-faire approach to Trump’s manifest conflicts of interest, hiding behind the fact that ethics laws prohibiting such conflicts don’t apply to the president – which might dispel legal concerns but not ethical ones. When Chaffetz issued a 43-item agenda for his committee last month, none had to do with Trump’s conflicts. And when Trump summoned him to an Oval Office meeting this week, “Before my bum even hit the chair, the president said, ‘No oversight. You can’t talk about anything that has to do with oversight,'” the Utah Republican told reporters afterward.
Indeed, despite the letter targeting Conway, Chaffetz caught hell at a town hall meeting in his district Thursday night, facing a querulous overflow crowd that “reacted negatively to nearly all of his statements,” according to the AP’s Hallie Golden and Michelle Price. When Chaffetz noted to the crowd that Trump is exempt from conflict of interest laws, the audience responded with chants of “do your job!”
The formal and direct nature of Chaffetz’s actions are also striking – it seems unlikely that the committee chairman would make the move without at least the tacit support of the speaker of the House. This may have been practically forced by an administration that, as a Politico piece put it Thursday, has been leaning into its connections with Trump’s businesses – but it’s a start nonetheless for a Congress that has been quiescent to date.
The third coequal branch of government, the judiciary, has been more aggressive, and that too was on display Thursday as a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Ninth Circuit unanimously ruled against the government’s request to lift a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive order halting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. The court’s opinion was a thorough-going slap-down of a poorly drafted presidential power-grab. “The ruling is about as broad and thorough as opponents of Trump’s de facto Muslim ban could’ve hoped for,” Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate.
Trump reacted characteristically, tweeting, “SEE YOU IN COURT” – the presidential use of ALL-CAPS apparently indicating that he’s super-duper-uper serious. (The tweet raised the question of whether he understood that the decision itself came from a court; Washington Gov. Jay Inslee replied, “Mr. President, we just saw you in court, and we beat you.”)
All of this has reportedly left Trump frustrated about how hard it really is to be president. “It has become apparent, say those close to the president … that the transition from overseeing a family business to running the country has been tough on him,” Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, Kenneth Vogel and and Josh Dawsey wrote Friday morning, in an article rife with damning anecdotes and details. “Trump often asks simple questions about policies, proposals and personnel,” they write, going on to say that “when discussions get bogged down in details,” Trump will quickly change the subject so as, as one senior government official said, to “seem in control at all times.” Trump and his staff reportedly believe that career staff detailed to the National Security Council “are out to get them.” And they may be not wrong: “In turn some NSC staff believe Trump does not possess the capacity for detail and nuance required to handle the sensitive issues discussed on the calls” with foreign leaders. Just digest that for a moment.
Perhaps the most dangerous part of the article was this, however: “Trump has privately expressed disbelief over the ability of judges, bureaucrats or lawmakers to delay – or even stop – him from filling positions and implementing policies.”
This is elementary school civics stuff – the checks and balances that the Founding Fathers built into the system to prevent any one branch from dominating the others; to prevent a dictator. It can be frustrating and can be taken too far, but the system has worked well for a couple of centuries of history.
But Trump both has an authoritarian bent and also famously resists adjusting his beliefs and behavior to suit, well, reality. He seems to believe that he has or should have authority with far fewer if any checks than are in the current system. (Government lawyers had, astoundingly, argued that the court’s don’t even have the authority to review his actions in the area of national security.) What will happen if a crisis arises allowing him to grab some of the power he thinks he should have and/or eliminate the checks he finds so frustrating?
Credit: Source link
