Controlling presidents with in-house watchdogs

They’ve got to watch him every minute, deceive him, disobey him, control him through hook and crook, whatever it takes, and you know what I am talking about. Top people in the administration are busily thwarting what they see as the ignorant, narcissistic impulses of President Donald Trump. As much has been asserted in a Bob Woodward book and an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times.

The thing is, there are lots of Democrats, including past presidents, whose need for surrounding watchdogs at least equal his, and look, in the meantime, at the good he has done. He is giving us judges who think the Constitution is not that bad after all. He is wiping out the Islamic State. He has also done an enormous favor for the country through a tax reform plan that has wondrously excited the economy.

New jobs are opening up all over, and unemployment is way, way down. Stagnant wages? They are getting out of bed. Small-business confidence is the highest ever measured and consumer confidence is way up there, too. Manufacturers are suddenly manufacturing like crazy, but they’re desperate for more skilled workers and Trump has a training plan. Median family income is starting to look American again, and former President Barack Obama says excuse me as he takes the credit for all of this. Keep the laughter down, please.

What he did with higher taxes and a record number of major regulations was to put handcuffs and a chain and ball on the economy, giving us the slowest recovery since World War II, and what Trump did was unlock those handcuffs and hack that chain in half. Of course, he would not have had to if Obama had been more carefully kept in check by prideful, nervously alert aides and top officials.

Maybe, if shrewd and sufficiently dishonest, they could also have kept him from a unilaterally executed Clean Power Plan that would have unconstitutionally wiped out state laws. Perhaps they would have prevented his spying on reporters and threatening them with jail while his administration also set a record for denying complete access to requested government material under the Freedom of Information Act. Possibly they could have waltzed him away from rotten international deals that should have been treaties requiring congressional approval.

Obama is smart, charming and sophisticated, but also the kind of New Age thinker believing you can trust evil not to be evil and then open doors for the Islamic State, for instance, or make a reckless bargain on nuclear weapons with Iran.

But wait, I do not really believe it’s OK to unconstitutionally and regularly undermine presidential decisions. Talk back, fight back, but do it to his face. If all of that does not work and you think Trump is unfit for office, resign and say so publicly, or get together with others to try the 25th Amendment that would still require a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to keep Trump out of power

You might also consider that, while Trump’s semi-literate tweets, blather and low-life past are frightening, it hardly means no other president ever made worse mistakes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for instance, put American citizens in internment camps because of their national origins and turned his back on Jews seeking asylum from Hitler. You could also research Woodrow Wilson’s assaults on free speech. Moving to the present, you might want to look at the Democrats and their childish, rude play during Senate hearings on a new Supreme Court justice.

Of course, in addition to possible cheaters in Trump’s inner circle, we have other officials in the Justice Department and intelligence agencies who seem to have skirted the law in their efforts to get him impeached. This could be worse for the nation than Russian collusion.

Jay Ambrose
(TNS)

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Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.