Trump has hired Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr to his defense team. This morning, he tweeted this:
The defense seems to be: Trump wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is the law. Trump can do as he pleases with foreign policy.
This effectively obliterates checks and balances and reduces Congress to carrying out the president’s commands.
Two things for Republican Senators to keep in mind.
First, this finding will apply to future presidents as well. So unless the GOP intends to establish a monarchy or Putin-style presidency (and there’s indication that the far right wing wants this) a Democratic president will step in with vast power.
A democratic president elected in 2020 will have unprecedented powers under such a finding to rapidly undo everything the GOP has done. That means moving quickly to battle climate change, fix the tax code, and regulate elections so that they comply with common sense security.
The second next thing to remember is that it’s simply wrong.
The president does not have absolute power over foreign policy. See the attached from one of the impeachment docs:
There have been hints for a while that Trump’s defense may be, “Yes I did it, and there was nothing wrong with it.”
In November, I wrote this NBC Op Ed when I noticed that Trump didn’t appear to be denying the underlying facts. Trump seemed to believe that he was entitled to direct foreign policy according to his whims and for his own benefit.
I quoted Hungarian scholar Bálint Magyar who described “mafia states” arising in the former Soviet Union. They operate exactly this way: The ruler takes over the nation’s industries and business and eventually owns the country. A new form of oligarchy.
Many members of the Senate Republican caucus are perfectly willing to make a finding that Trump is entitled to conduct foreign policy for his own personal benefit. They prefer Putin-style oligarchy to a true liberal democracy. See this post.
There’s a theory on Twitter (and perhaps elsewhere!) that Sens. Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell and others fall in line because they are compromised. According to this theory, they are backing Trump’s quest to turn the US into the United States of Russia because they are blackmailed.
I argue that the Republican senators who fall in line behind Trump do so because they prefer Putin to liberal democracy.
Good point: When we talk about white supremacy and a Putin-style oligarchy, it’s about money because it is about a select group of white men [Trump and pals] who possess both power and the nation’s industries and resources. They want both wealth and power. (Timothy Snyder points out that this distinguishes them from their 20th century fascist counterpoints, who wanted only power).
Here’s the thing: There’s a direct line between the patriarchal theories of Confederacy and Putin-style oligarchy.
We’re still fighting the Civil War.
Ironically enough, we come to this moment partly because of the first impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Without going into the details of that impeachment, basically not removing Johnson allowed Johnson to empower the former Confederacy and allow them to entrench. The Confederacy didn’t win the war, so they got themselves back into power, enabled partly by the electoral college, which gave rural states an advantage.
A majority of Confederate-sympathizing Supreme Court justices, in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson), found that segregation didn’t violate the 14th Amendment (the 14th Amendment was one of the three Amendments added after the Civil War to give civil rights to blacks.)
The 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson gave us Jim Crow, and reestablished white dominance.
In 1954, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling in Plessy. We’re still riding the backlash from that decision. And here we are.
Still fighting the Civil War.
