President Trump Threatens Violence--Congress Lets Him
President Donald Trump says a lot of things. He tweets a lot of things. He says and tweets so many things, that by this time, we have all developed something of an immunity to his words. He has become a bit like everyone's crazy uncle. When the little kids at the family Thanksgiving gathering become alarmed at what "Uncle Frank" just ranted about, and tell their parents, the parents blow it off. "Oh, buddy, don't worry, that's just Uncle Frank. He says a lot of stuff he doesn't mean." Of course, the problem is that nobody really knows what Uncle Frank means and doesn't mean. They just hope that he doesn't mean much of it, and since he has been relatively harmless for the past 78 years, they figure he will remain so.
So when Donald Trump says what he said to Brietbart News Network this week, many people (probably his supporters) say that this is just Trump being Trump. Those who oppose him (full disclosure: I am part of this latter group) are alarmed, but even many of his opponents by now dismiss what he says as the ranting of a nut, albeit a nut with a briefcase of nuclear launch codes a few feet away from him. For context, this is what he said:
"I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/15/trump-deletes-breitbart-post-how-tough-his-supporters-can-get/3172413002/)
What did Trump mean by this? To me, the unmistakable meaning is that he believes that if, at some point in the future, he does not get his way, he will unleash angry mobs of soldiers, cops, and bikers against those who oppose him. Now, Brietbart says that in context, he was discussing the violent actions of those on the left. I suppose that means people like "Antifa" and others. But what if it doesn't? What if it means people who stand at the fence of the White House holding protest signs? What if he means women who participate in Women's Marches? What if it means Members of Congress whom he despises?
Here is the problem. This is exactly the kind of talk that the writers of the Constitution were afraid of. Lots of people invoke the word "Constitution" as if it is supposed to end all discussion. That is not what I want to do here. The Constitution was one part of what we should rightly call a "founding era." That era includes other important documents, like the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the series of newspaper editorials written by advocates and opponents of the new Constitution, editorials we now call the Federalist Papers and the Antifederalist Papers. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights is full of compromises that tried to answer a lot of the fears held by people comprising those two groups.
One of the most prevalent fears of the Antifederalists was of a "standing army." In fact, Federalists shared that fear. What they knew from the European experience was that monarchs and other tyrants had often raised armies to oppress their own people. In fact, even when patriots raised armies to fight tyranny, these same patriots often kept their armies intact and used them to become oppressors themselves. That was the experience of England and Oliver Cromwell, as related by Antifederalist #25, when Cromwell overthrew the monarchy, then used his army to become a different kind of dictator.
Madison was very attuned to human nature. Federalist #51, perhaps one of the most quoted, tells us that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition." Human are given to the pursuit of power, and accordingly to Madison, power seeking in itself is not the worst problem. More of a problem would be failing to recognize that ambition and figuring out ways to mitigate power-seeking. The notion of separation of powers was that mitigation. Of course presidents would seek to enhance the power of their office, and of course legislatures would seek the same. But if they could both check one another, then ambition is counteracted.
Both Federalists and Antifederalists feared the power of an army in the hands of an ambitious executive, and wanted to build in checks on that power, as well. In spite of our modern overuse of the term "commander in chief," the framers of the Constitution thought this role was an only occasional one. In fact, the Constitution makes civilian control of the military not only the rule, but established a civilian control mechanism that was so clunky, it would have a difficult time working in practice. The military was to be comprised of a small full time force, augmented by the militias of the states. States commissioned their own militia officers, they kept their own arms (yes, that is actually part of the Second Amendment), and they provided their own training. As importantly, control of the national military forces was split between the president and Congress.
Article II said the president was commander in chief when the military was "called into actual service." Instead, the real power behind the military was in Congress, if Article I is to be believed. It was Congress that declared war. It was Congress that was empowered to raise armies. It was Congress that was empowered to call the militia into national service. It was Congress that wrote the rules for the army and navy. Most importantly, it was Congress that funded the military, and appropriations for the military would be for a maximum of two years.
"The legislature of the United States will be obliged, by this provision, once at least every two years, to deliberate upon he propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare the sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents" (Federalist #26).
In other words, if Congress did not like the direction of the military under the current president, they were obliged to cut off funding. Interestingly, this clause of the Constitution has never been repealed, but it is certainly not practiced. Congress is not about to limit military funding, or probably much funding for anything, to two years at a time. Be that as it may, there are sound reasons for Congress to retain the power of the purse, and one of those is to provide a check on whoever occupies the White House. A president, any president, using the military for his own purposes was a very real fear of the Founders, and it should be a very real fear today.
When a president asserts that it would be in his power to, at a whim, order the military (that works for him), police (who do not work for him) and bikers (who work for who knows who), to use violence and force against the populace, he is threatening tyranny. There really is no other way to say that. He is acting like the European monarchs familiar to the founding generation. Words like Trump's fly in the face of what the men who argued about the Constitution were trying to say. They meant to say that if this ever happened, if a president acted like a monarch, then Congress should actually have the courage and ambition, along with the Constitutional means, to counteract that president. They certainly did not mean that Congress would support a president who says that kind of thing. They surely did not mean that Congress would sit on their hands doing absolutely nothing.
So maybe it is time that Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives actually read the Constitution. If they don't, the current president will take as much as they let him.
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