How Republicans Violate the Constitution

Heretofore, in this blog I have been focusing on the threat that President Trump poses to our democracy.  Since Congress has the authority and responsibility to control the president’s anti-democratic behavior, however, it’s important to broaden our study to include the failure of Congress, and specifically the Republican Party, to fulfill its constitutional obligations.

The Constitution is not a perfect document and can easily be misused.  But with its amendments and interpretations through the courts, it is still the bedrock of our political life together to which government must ultimately defer. 

Article 1 of the Constitution explicitly obligates Congress to curtail presidential abuse of power.  Having experienced the tyranny of the English King George III who had ruled the colonies with an iron fist, the framers of the Constitution limited the president to only a few absolute powers and gave both the legislature and the courts the authority and the responsibility to check the president’s abuse of power. 

Since President Trump’s inauguration, however, Congress has abdicated this obligation.

As I have explored in the past four posts,

The Constitution explicitly assigns the president [only] the power to sign or veto legislation, command the armed forces, ask for the written opinion of their Cabinet, convene or adjourn Congress, grant reprieves and pardons, and receive ambassadors.

The president also has significant power to control the formation and communication of foreign policy although Congress ultimately has the power to limit this, too.

 
There are two procedures through which Congress can limit the abuse of presidential power.

• First, Congress can pass legislation nullifying the specific presidential action.  This happened recently when the President withdrew sanctions on Russia; Congress immediately passed legislation to reinstate the sanctions.  The president, however, can veto any such legislation, and the veto can only be overruled by a two-thirds vote of both houses.  
• Second, Congress can impeach the president and remove them from office.  Impeachment requires only a majority of the House but removal requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

Neither party has had a two-thirds majority in either house of Congress since 1945; therefore, any veto override or impeachment has required bipartisan cooperation.  Since the Democrats currently would vote almost unanimously to control Trump’s excesses, the Republican Party is solely responsible for Congress's failure to limit the President. 

The Republican Party is complicit in all of the President’s threats to democracy.

One Republican bears special responsibility.  Senator Mitch McConnell has used his power as Majority Leader to prevent any legislation challenging the president from even being considered or voted upon by the Senate, so he is primarily accountable for congressional inaction.

As I’ve written in a previous post, historically, this particular congressional failure is not the only or even the most important of the abdications of its constitutional role.  Certainly more important has been Congress’s ceding to presidents the power to declare war.  This has been a gradual process over the last century, however, so the responsibility must be shared by many different congresses over decades.  It’s reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the current unwillingness to prevent Trump’s attack on our democracy is the broadest and most important single failure of congressional responsibility in the history of our country.

To summarize: we now have a breakdown in the essential checks and balances between Congress and the President that has

• historic roots in Congress’s long-term failure to maintain its exclusive power to declare war, and
• current roots in Republicans’ refusal to rein in Trump’s excesses.

The politics of this breakdown, I’m afraid, make its reversal problematic.  In practical terms, it would take a two-thirds majority of Congress and a president from the opposite party to restore proper checks and balances according to our Constitution. 

That’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Even aside from the politics involved, the nature of the presidency has changed so much since the country’s founding that abiding by strict constitutional limits would wreak havoc in our government.  By “the president” the Constitution means the entire administration of government and the vast number of powers ceded to the administrative functions upon which government (and every individual) rightly depends.

And if we can’t abide by the original limits, some might say, perhaps we need an amendment to the Constitution that would address how the role of the president has changed over 200+ years.  Given the complexity of government, however, how could such an amendment to our Constitution be formulated or passed, to say nothing of being implemented? 

In the end, then, we’re stuck with a Congress that could limit any particular action by the president but won’t.

That places all hope of change from within government on the courts, which, we must acknowledge,  have so far been relatively dependable in slowing down the American movement toward autocracy; but only in slowing it down.

The precariousness of our democracy is obvious, and there no permanent fix.  At this point in American history, then, the temporary stability of our democracy depends upon our electing an emotionally and mentally stable president, who is willing to and able to place the interests of the country over their own.  We have two years to educate ourselves, choose and support strong and stable candidates at all levels, and elect a president who will, at least for the time being, give America’s fragile democracy some breathing room.