President Sabotages Mail-In Voting (Part II )

[This is an expansion and continuation of the post from two days ago that was intended to be the first part of a two-part post.]

Since my last post the Postmaster General Louis deJoy announced that the post office will postpone until after the election the changes in postal service that had threatened to slow ballot delivery and disrupt the election.  His announcement also disrupts this second part of the post I intend to send you today.

Several of the points I made last time are still relevant, however.

• Trump's behavior both trying to institute the delay and then postponing it gives further evidence of his unhinged logic and his inability to recognize even his own self-interest.  It took the groundswell of objection and anger to persuade him to retract the changes.  It further supports the charge that even his own staff could not keep him tethered to reality, at least from the first decision to implement the delay.  And that further supports the concern that he is fundamentally unfit for office.
• Once again, Trump tried to use his extraordinary presidential power to trash long-standing norms and universally recognized rights.  As in other situations, it was not against the law: the president does technically have authority to change the functioning of his own administration's agencies.  The actual impact on voting rights, however, would probably have been unconstitutional, although that judgment would probably not been rendered until after the election.
• The most important impact would have been to throw much of the November 3 election into chaos much as I described in the first post:

- Many people would understandably have been confused about how to vote. 
- For others, fear of the pandemic would have kept them from the polls. 
- The ballots of those who did vote by mail might have arrived too late to be counted.
- If the election were at all close, the postal slowdown would have caused significant delays in declaring the winner, further undermining the appearance of the integrity of the elections.

• Trump has, even yet, not agreed to accept the results of the election.  With any uncertainty he may well have used the ambiguity about the results to reinforce his continuing claim to remain in office.  The courts would undoubtedly have struck such action down, but, in the meantime, the confusion would have further polarized the country.

Fortunately, this time the public uproar has taken the major threats away.  But the postal service's initial decision demonstrated the President's perception of his unilateral, undemocratic power. 

I am personally now convinced that the President will not be re-elected in November.  I do, however, worry about what he might do in the remaining 2½ months until the election and, especially, in the 2½ lame-duck months after the election but before the Jan 21 Biden inauguration.

But the greatest concern for me — as it has been since the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency — is the continuing damage done to the institution of the presidency.  Under emergency, presidents have frequently taken new powers, in intelligence and national security, for instance, but even after the emergency is over, they have not generally given those powers up willingly**.  Nor have those presidents who followed them.  In 1950, for instance, calling it a "police action," President Harry Truman took us into the Korean War without a constitutionally-mandated congressional declaration of war.  Since that time the United States has been in constant "military conflict" without a single congressional declaration  of war.  Presidents — both Republican and Democrat — have frequently used non-constitutional "signing statements" or "executive orders" to go around Congress and create the non-binding but usually enforced equivalent of “law.”

Since his inauguration, President Trump has appropriated funds not approved by Congress to build the Mexican border wall, claimed immunity from congressional investigation, used the Justice Department for partisan purposes, used his presidential power to enrich his businesses, and arrogated for the first time in American history many other powers to a president.  How many of these powers will future presidents give up when confronted with the perceived need to use them?  Will a future president refrain from intervening when the Justice Department prosecutes someone whom the president judges should not be prosecuted?  Will future presidents countermand Environmental Protection Agency regulation that they deem inappropriate?  Will a future president resist firing an Inspector General whose investigation tarnishes the president?  Given that the current President has gotten away with these uses of his power, how will the democracy claw its way back to the appropriate balance of powers?

We may call President Trump an aberration, which he certainly has been.  But what will a future president do when a crucial Trump-broken precedent would be very useful … especially for a "good" purpose? 

It will not be possible to put the toothpaste completely back into the tube.  And our democracy will be the worse for it.

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** Richard Nixon was forced from office and Congress subsequently curbed some of his abuses of presidential power.