I keep hearing that if
Trump fires Mueller we’ll face a constitutional crisis.
Or if Mueller
subpoenas Trump to testify and Trump defies the subpoena, it’s a constitutional
crisis.
Or if Mueller comes up
with substantial evidence that Trump is guilty of colluding with Russia or of
obstructing justice but the House doesn’t move to impeach him, we’ll have a
constitutional crisis.
I have news for you.
We’re already in a constitutional crisis. For a year and a half the president
of the United States has been carrying out a systemic attack on the
institutions of our democracy.
A constitutional
crisis does not occur suddenly like a coup that causes a government to
collapse. It occurs gradually, as a system of government is slowly weakened.
The current crisis has
been unfolding since the waning days of the 2016 campaign when Trump refused to
say whether he’d be bound by the election results if Hillary won.
It continued through
March 4, 2017 when Trump claimed, without evidence, that Obama had wiretapped
his phones in the Trump Tower during the campaign.
It deepened in May 2017 when, by his own admission, Trump was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to fire FBI Director James Comey, who had been leading the bureau’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and then admitted to Russian officials that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him “because of Russia,” according to a document summarizing the meeting.
A constitutional
crisis becomes especially dangerous when a president of the United States tells
the public it cannot trust the government of the United States.
Over the last few
weeks, Trump has done just this.
First he accused the
FBI of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political
purposes.” Then he issued a “demand” that the FBI investigate the spying –
resulting in the Justice Department sharing portions of the FBI investigation
with Trump’s allies in Congress.
Trump blamed the
entire Mueller investigation on a conspiratorial “deep state” intent on removing
him from office.
He used pardons to
demonstrate to those already being investigated that they shouldn’t cooperate
because he can pardon them, too, and then bragged to reporters that he is
considering 3,000 more pardons —thereby anointing himself the judge of what is
fair, rather than the judicial branch.
He claimed he has the
absolute right to pardon himself and can thereby immunize himself from any
outcome; and asserted he has the power under the Constitution to end the
investigation whenever he wants.
The crux of America’s
current constitutional crisis is this: Our system of government was
designed to constrain power, but Trump doesn’t want to be constrained.
Our system was
conceived as a means of promoting the public interest, but Trump wants to
promote only his own interest.
Our system was
organized to bind presidents to the Constitution, but Trump doesn’t want to be
bound by anything.
The crisis will
therefore worsen as long as Trump can get away with it. An unconstrained
megalomaniac becomes only more maniacal. He will fill whatever political void
exists with his unbridled ego.
The only legal way to
constrain Trump is to vote for a Congress, this November, that will stand up to
him. And then, in November 2020, vote him and his regime out of office.
If he refuses to
accept the results of that election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016
election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office.
Friends, we are no
longer trying to avert a constitutional crisis. We are living one. The question
is how to stop it from destroying what’s left of our democracy.
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in
the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten
most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written
fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The
Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a
founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of
the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is
streaming now.