We are taught to believe that the men who framed the constitution were infinitely wise, but in fact, the government they framed was flawed in many respects. Ben Franklin was quoted as saying that they had framed a “Republic if you can keep it”, but in many ways the constitution itself makes keeping a republic difficult.
The person currently holding the office of president of the United States has exposed many of those flaws, particularly those relating to the office he holds.
We often hear about the things the Democrats should do should they win the presidency and the Senate, but no one, to my knowledge, has suggested that they do whatever they can to limit the ability of the president to abuse the powers of the office.
The following assumes that Trump is unable to steal the election in November.
If our politicians (of both parties) were the rational beings the Framers allegedly expected to jealously guard the prerogatives of their respective governmental branches, we might expect, once the genius is gone, that they would put their collective heads together, and come up with some way, preferably by constitutional amendment, to make sure that the abuses we have witnessed will never happen again. Inasmuch as we can’t expect the Democrats to take the two thirds of each house it would take to pass a constitutional amendment or to control two thirds of the nations legislatures, and inasmuch as the Republican Party has already proven that it does not object to presidential malfeasance as long as it is committed by a Republican, and inasmuch as those same Republicans are secure in the knowledge that the Supreme Court that has largely greenlighted Trump’s authoritarianism will not allow similar behavior by a Democrat, we can’t really expect that a constitutional amendment is likely to pass.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to try to raise the issue, educate the public on the true extent of the abuses, and try, where possible, to address presidential abuse by legislation. There are a number of very obvious things that must be addressed. Perhaps first among them is the question of presidential crime: when and how can it be prosecuted. It is a thorny question, given the fact that it is difficult to see how to get politics in its basest form out of it. Perhaps the Attorney General should be an elected official, but that obviously presents problems of its own if, in the current situation, the president is a Democrat and the Attorney General a Republican. No doubt Bill Barr would easily see criminality where he is blind to it today, and would, in addition, see it where no one sees it now. In any event, that would take a constitutional amendment, and that’s not happening in the lifetime of anyone reading this post.
If the Democrats take over, they will be in a position to hold hearings on what may be the most important issue of our time, since Trump has conclusively proven that a President can avoid all checks, and that there is no balance. Perhaps the only thing that may save us short term is the fact that he is so incompetent he has not been capable of creating the dictatorship he so much wants. Someone as smart as…, say… Hitler, could probably pull it off. We really need to take some preventative measures to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Should the Democrats take over both houses, they will be able to effectively subpoena witnesses to the criminality of Trump, Barr, and the other enablers, and will also have an executive more than happy to delve into the records they leave behind to further inform both the Congress and the people of the extent of the corruption of the present administration. Even if they can’t fix the constitution, which will probably never occur to them anyway, they can pass legislation that may prevent future occurrences of the worst of the things we’ve seen.
One thing’s for sure. We can’t, this time, consign the criminality to the memory hole, as Obama did for the Bushies. We now have proof positive that doing so simply encourages them to commit even greater crimes.