Here is an opinion piece about checks and balances. It's from the NY Times. written by Frank Bruni.
--Kim
I can't count how many times I heard those words in the history and social science classes of my youth. They were less a phrase than a mantra, repeated endlessly by teachers assuring us of our Constitution's genius. To answer monarchy, to deter despots, our nation's founders had created this elegant separation of powers and these brilliant checks and balances, which supposedly had the added benefit of inoculating us from extremism. Checks and balances were our tyranny vaccine.
Its efficacy is fading fast. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has exerted unfettered authority over pretty much anything and everything that tickles his fancy, caresses his ego or bloats his wealth. And he has been largely unchecked by Congress, whose Republican majority is his pathetic pep squad. He has been inadequately balanced by the courts, as his administration contrives ways to delay, defy or otherwise evade their rulings and as he benefits from decades of Republicans' painstaking elevation of jurists friendly to the party.
He's the monster the founders dreaded, rehomed from their nightmares to the Resolute Desk, where he's teaching us a lesson I didn't get in school: Some of the most important checks and balances reside not in the architecture of our government but in the stirring of our consciences, the murmurings of our souls.
Why is Trump attempting and getting away with power grabs that so few of his predecessors — and certainly none in the past half-century — did? Because he's unscrupulous and unashamed. Because he's unmoved by precedent, propriety, decency. Because he's rapacious and he has no interest in appetite control.
Presidents, as a rule, relish ruling and believe that they're especially suited to it. That amalgam of ambition and arrogance is what made them reach for the presidency in the first place. But most of our presidents before Trump seemed to worry at least a smidgen about overreaching — about dictatorial behaviors that would alienate allies, offend voters and earn them damnation from historians. They felt pinpricks of honor. Flutters of humility.
Trump is carefree. "I have the right to do anything I want to do — I'm the president of the United States," he said on Tuesday, when, for three appalling hours, members of his cabinet competed to find the loftiest superlatives, the rosiest adjectives to describe his majesty. Had one of his recent predecessors uttered that line, it would have been the story of the week, the month, the year.
But from Trump, it's routine. It's also an uncharacteristically truthful review of the past seven and a half months, during which he and his helpers have unrestrainedly brandished such tools as executive orders, emergency declarations, lawsuits and investigations to extort law firms and universities, dismantle programs that Congress already funded, lay claim to all trade policy and tariff rates, fire federal workers who might resist his corruption of the Department of Justice or undercut his claims of unalloyed success, torment people he regards as political enemies, intimidate and marginalize unsupportive media organizations and take over the policing of the nation's capital. That's a partial list. And Trump is probably just getting started.
We saw cracks aplenty in our vaunted checks and balances before this cursed year; we've had other presidents who treated them as annoyances to be ignored or ankle weights to be ditched. And history harbors noble as well as shameful examples of such willfulness. While Andrew Jackson's flouting of a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of an executive order to round up and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry reflect our darkest impulses, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation — also an executive order — reflects our brightest.
Trump, however, isn't operating in a wartime context, no matter how much he huffs and puffs about migrant invasions and cities under criminal siege. He's not animated, as was Lincoln, by any grand moral vision. Nor is he promoting and imposing any coherent ideology, a fact recently apparent in the right-wing socialism of his insistence on a 10 percent government stake in Intel and in his bids to set nationally uniform voting rules, to extract new congressional districts from Republican-led states and to sideline local law enforcement officials. So much for the free-market, small-government conservatism that Republicans once exalted. Trump exalts Trump, and his sole driver is domination — of the Kennedy Center, of the Smithsonian, of every corner of government, of every cranny of culture.
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And of the lawmakers who could try to stand in his way. For Congress to check and balance Trump, its members must first be willing to. It's a separate power only if those members hold themselves separate. But the Republicans who control the House and the Senate have instead surrendered all control to Trump, whose vanquishing of Democrats and potential wrath speak more loudly to them than ethics, a word I feel silly typing. They're dutiful handmaidens and gushing cheerleaders who have given him whatever he wants, including a roster of senior administration officials who are, incredibly, yet more dutiful and gushing than they are. Where two or three gather in Trump's name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he were extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them were calling dibs on a different toe. No checks and no balance there.
For the free press enshrined in the First Amendment to check and balance Trump — or, for that matter, any other president — the best information must be distinguishable from the worst, and it must find an audience with open minds. But the digital revolution has created a chaos of boutique obsessions, splenetic social media posts, deepfakes and slop. Reality is whatever we've decided to purchase at the pick-your-truth bazaar. We don't hold our politicians to account; we turn to the cable news channel or click on the link that tells us what we prefer to believe about them and validates the simplicity of a black-and-white worldview and allegiance to our tribe.
We, the people, have always been the real check, the most important balance, with the power, through our votes, to reject and depose any would-be king with an unstirred conscience and a dormant soul. But we must recognize what's happening, sit with the alarm of it and rouse ourselves to push back.
I mentioned Roosevelt and his internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. That happened not only because the Supreme Court, stuffed with his appointees, declined to check it. Not only because Congress fell in line. It happened also because he silenced whatever qualms he felt — and his occasional use of the term "concentration camps" perhaps suggests he felt some — and because the American public supported it. The law that Roosevelt relied on was the same one that Trump has invoked to help authorize his mass deportations, which have junked due process and are being hastened by his tripling of the budget for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and his turning of ICE officers into his own paramilitary force. His actions are wholly unbalanced. Will they go unchecked?
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