| | | Congress and all of us have to stop emboldening the Anti-American President to continue his traitorous crime spree. The more leash he is given the farther he will go.
Trump has been emboldened to defy the law. And not without good reason.
His willingness to push the newly elected president of the Ukraine to dig up dirt on the former vice president may have been, as Neal Katyal and George Conway write, “the ultimate impeachable offense,” but he knows that he will never be impeached and removed from office.
Trump’s brazenness, the Washington Post reports, “reveals a president convinced of his own invincibility—apparently willing and even eager to wield the vast powers of the United States to taint a political foe and confident that no one could hold him back.”
Trump thinks that he skated on the Mueller probe and he has watched the fecklessness of congressional Democrats who have repeatedly failed to hold him accountable for much of anything. He also has figured out that he never—as in never—has to worry about his own party showing anything resembling a conscience. He does not belong to the Republican party. The Republican party belongs to him.
From the beginning of his presidency, he has cultivated a contempt for constitutional norms and the legal limits on his power. But, the Post notes,
Trump’s sense of himself as above the law has been reinforced throughout his time in office
As detailed in the Mueller report, he received help from a foreign adversary in 2016 without legal consequence. He sought to thwart the Russia investigation and possibly obstruct justice without consequence. Through the government, he has earned profits for his businesses without consequence. He has blocked Congress’s ability to conduct oversight without consequence.
Katyal and Conway warn of the precedent being set:
Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean’s haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow. Congress bears the duty to use the tools provided by the Constitution to remove that cancer now, before it’s too late. As Elbridge Gerry put it at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” By now, Congress should know which one Trump is.
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