The president can do no wrong
To the Editor:
Congratulations, by now the president has been acquitted of high crimes and misdemeanors. The Republican Senate has determined without any witnesses or documents that Trump had a “perfect call.” There never was any question about the facts, to quote Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, “It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation”.
The real question always was the power of this president. In voting to give the president a pass in this case, the Senate has rewritten the Constitution by demoting the Congress as a coequal branch of government. No longer can any Congress investigate any thing any president does because according to Donald Trump, “Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.”
It is one thing for the president to say he can do whatever he wants, it is another thing for his attorneys to create a legal fiction to grant him that power as a matter of law. According to this newly created theory of presidential power, as long as the president does not commit a specific crime, and he believes he is acting in the public interest, he cannot be impeached. That is ridiculous.
According to his attorneys, if the president believes that he knows what is best for the country, or that he his reelection is always in the public interest, then anything he does “that is not a specific” crime, is OK. Congress has no right to investigate or demand any documents and he is not bound by any law, or even the constitutional power to impeach.
There is no specific law against giving the nuclear launch codes to his friend Putin. If President Trump believes it is in the public interest to do that , then that would be OK. If the President dissolved the Energy Department and gave the power to manage all our energy production to his friend Rick Perry, that would be OK. That is exactly what Putin did in Russia to enrich his political allies. You could make up a thousand examples of possible corruption or dangerous action by the President that would all be OK, according to this new legal fiction.
The founding fathers fought a revolution against King George. The one thing that they feared most was the creation of a powerful president that would in essence become a king-like figure. A head of state who could say “I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” President Trump’s attorneys have just created the legal framework to make that happen.
Louis Vitale
Franklin
