I’ve long said that we’ve allowed the office of the President to have too much power with too little restraint on that power, and now we’re going to find out what the consequences are when someone decides to find out just how much they can do with that power.
We were always taught in school about the numerous checks and balances in our government that kept any one branch from getting out of control – yet we all seemed to ignore the fact that the Executive branch had precious few checks on its power. There was the big gun of impeachment, sure, but as we’ve seen over the years that is a hard trigger to actually pull – and even harder to make it stick.
Beyond that, all we had was the ability to override Presidential vetoes (which assumes Congress can get its act together on something, which is again increasingly unlikely) and the Supreme Court… which again isn’t really much of a check anymore started staffing it with loyalists rather than justices.
The only remaining check on Presidential power was an unofficial one: basically, that we did not elect people who were power-hungry, narcissistic psychopaths who would abuse the privilege of the office they now occupied.
When the Supreme Court ruled to expand the scope of Executive privilege to cover basically everything that a President does, we should have seen that as the last straw and a huge, huge red flag that the office of the President had gone beyond the limits of what was safe and sane. Between Presidential Pardons and Executive Orders it was clear that
I really hoped that Biden would’ve been the one to do the honorable thing and willingly give up that power – to re-define the office to have less power, to restrict the authority of the President to act, and to have Congress back that up by statute, so that there would be less risk of future Presidents abusing that power.
But so few people in history have ever willingly given up power – so although I am terribly disappointed, I’m not exactly surprised.
Still, at this point Executive Privilege has morphed into Executive Fiat, and with the carrot of a Presidential Pardon being held out to “encourage” people to do anything, regardless of legality, it really does feel more like a King and his Court, along with nobles buying indulgences to get out of punishment for sin.
Clearly, the scales of power have tilted dangerously towards the Executive, and it remains to be seen whether the “checks and balances” that remain are enough to tilt things back, or if we are too far gone to recover from this disaster of our own making.
