Why Don't They Stop Him?

 

To wit:

• A President should not be able to pay himself out of the U.S. Treasury. Do we need to say more? (Not for nothing, but the 27th Amendment doesn’t even let Congress give itself a pay raise without the approval of their constituents.)
• Apart from the Appropriations Clause (Art. I, Sec. 9, Cl. 7) which requires that Congress have the power to determine public expenditures (which means that outside funds have to be deposited in the Treasury first), the Army Clause limits appropriations for the Army to two years, precisely to ensure that Congress has a frequent check on the President’s command authority to prevent him from abusing it. Imagine if George Washington had gone rogue and wanted to be a dictator and turn the armed forces against the country. If Congress refused to give him money, could he have simply turned to King George III and said, hey man, help a brother out? I don’t think so. The same thing applies to whatever “private donor” is at play here.
• The White House is federal property, and Trump is a tenant, not an owner. I don’t know the specific rules and regulations that govern White House remodeling — it may well be that if a sitting President wants to paint the walls of every room chartreuse, he has the power to do that — but I suspect that latitude doesn’t extend to major structural alterations. When I got my downstairs bathroom upgraded from a half to a full, I had to get a permit and two visits from the city (and my house is old but not a historical landmark or part of our country’s cultural heritage). I mean, if this is OK, what’s the logical stopping point? Can Trump build condos in federal parks? Blow one of the faces off of Mt. Rushmore and add his own? Start renting the White House for weddings?

So, we all know this is wrong. And the natural inclination is to ask; how can he do this? What laws are being broken? Who has standing to sue?

Our constitutional system is not designed to handle this kind of extra-constitutional lawlessness. We encountered a version of this when Elon Musk was taking his proverbial chainsaw to the federal government. Our system has two major checks in place, and one failsafe: the two major checks are the courts saying what the law is and Congress exercising its power of the purse. If court decisions are disobeyed and the power of the purse is meaningless, then the failsafe is impeachment, also in the hands of Congress. That’s it. That’s the system.

The point here is, we have a system that does work, but only when everyone on the team is doing their part. But if the people assigned to their positions on the team refuse to fulfill their role, or fake injury and don’t perform at all, the whole thing falls apart. And if that happens, we are being defrauded from the honest services of our government.

I say all this to highlight that at some point we need to stop focusing only on Trump and retrain our sights on the relatively small number of people who could put a stop to this insanity. We’re talking about a dozen people. They, not Trump (or at least, in addition to Trump), need to be named, shamed, and held to account, just as the NBA players were in the indictment that was just filed. The question isn’t (just) what the mad king is doing or what laws he is breaking, it’s why the people who are assigned to stop it aren’t doing anything.

-Asha Rangappa, The Freedom Academy