Trump Has Revealed a Gaping Hole in the Constitution
The Founding Fathers never accounted for having a president who flouts all checks and balances – and a Congress and a Supreme Court that enable him.
Donald Trump’s second administration is outmaneuvering the Constitution and laying bare a gaping hole in the system of checks and balances.
Think about it. Although Congress has the power to dictate how money is spent, the president controls the actual bank account. Although Congress has the power to declare war, the president controls the troops and the drones and the bombs and the tanks. Although Congress has the legislative power to create the federal bureaucracy and dictate the role of federal agencies, the president hires and fires people. Although the Constitution requires due process, free speech, and other constraints on how law enforcement treats individuals, the president controls the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and now ICE.
The president has all the really serious power and is supposed to play by the rules and only use that power within the limits set by Congress, the Constitution, and the courts – none of which have their own police forces or armies. The president is supposed to check with the other two checks on his power before he uses it. It’s very much a “trust me” kind of system. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 62 that good government implies first and foremost “fidelity to the object of Government, which is the happiness of the People.”
This has worked pretty well for over 238 years because presidents went along with the program. They (mostly) accepted that they’re supposed to defer to Congress’s directions on how to spend money. They accepted that they’re supposed to follow the law before willy-nilly firing executive branch employees. They accepted that they’re supposed to respect the Constitution when it comes to arresting and detaining people or tolerating speech that they might not like. (Generations of comedians have made it their stock-in-trade to make fun of presidents, after all.) Although these presidents made mistakes – some very serious ones – they seemed to share some shred of a common belief in the American experiment and the ideals underlying the Constitution.
The framers didn’t really anticipate someone coming into office who would just flout it all. Then came Trump.
The Enablers
Polling in April showed that a majority of registered voters – 57% – agree that the US is in a constitutional crisis. What that means is somewhat elusive, but the basic notion is that if power is consolidated in one branch of government, rather than separated and checked between the three, then the system is not working. There are two primary reasons why it’s not working now.