“I think it is true that the president can’t be prosecuted for doing something that he has the constitutional power to do,”-like fire James Comey, for instance-“but his constitutional powers are limited by his obligation to take care that the law is faithfully executed.” Firing Comey over “this Russia thing,” then, as Trump has said was his reasoning, could be evidence of corrupt intent. “What he seems to be saying is that he is justice and that is not the way the law works,” Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, told me. Legal experts almost uniformly dismiss Trump’s reading of his Constitutional powers.
The conclusion of Trump’s argument, distilled in an earlier letter to the special counsel, is even more radical: “Put simply, the Constitution leaves no question that the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.” Trump is not only above the law, his lawyers claim-he is the law. “It remains our position that the President’s actions here, by virtue of his position as the chief law enforcement officer, could neither constitutionally nor legally constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself, and that he could, if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired,” the letter reads. In January, as we now know, Trump’s lawyers sent the special counsel, Robert Mueller, a confidential, 20-page letter arguing that the president is not required to to speak to Mueller, asserting his limitless power to shut down the Russia investigation or to pardon anyone involved. Of course, President Donald Trump has almost certainly never read the Constitution, and seems eager to test it for weaknesses. It is precisely that sort of imperial power that America’s founders sought to prevent when they created the presidency, an office of limited powers and term limits, beholden to voters and to the legislature. The remark is almost certainly apocryphal, but lives on in the Western imagination as a reminder of how authoritarianism erases the boundaries between the head of state and the state itself. In 1655, a teenaged Louis XIV, drunk on his power as king of France, is said to have admonished a parliamentarian who dared to check his authority, “ l’etat, c’est moi”: I am the state.
0 kommentar(er)
