Jim Walsh
Perhaps the most basic and fundamental idea of our democratic republic is the notion of “checks and balances.” That is, no one person, no one institution, has unchecked power.
To say, today, that our form of government is under threat is an understatement. The coming months and years may be the most important and consequential since the eras of Civil War or the Great Depression. And the lack of a Lincoln or an FDR is glaringly apparent.
In their hearts, the Founders distrusted the notion of political parties. Yet, early on, parties emerged. The Founders feared that if and when parties emerged, they would let their own limited interests, and the interests of their leaders, override the long term interests of the nation. Consequently, the Constitution they created holds that we don’t elect a king, a tsar or an emperor. We elect a President…and every time we do so, we also elect 435 members of Congress and about one third of the Senate. It is from those institutions that come the laws of the land, not from a palace, not from the White House.
In the mid-1930s, with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and feeling the consequences of the Great Depression, the American writer, Sinclair Lewis, wrote the novel It Can’t Happen Here. The novel described the emergence of a dictator in the United States. The premis was that it could happen here. Those that sought to overthrow our democratic republic came from all over the country and, using the forms of democracy, took advantage of the chaos that a certain leader intentionally created. Fundamental to the idea of the novel was that a dictator might emerge but that resistance to that dictator would not cease. Written in 1935, it became a best seller in 2016. Amazon ran out of copies. In 2024, copies are available.
A wannabe dictator is about to enter the White House. He is not a figment of a novelist’s imagination. He is a figment of his own imagination. Is that an exaggeration? Would that it were. The campaign is over. He received a majority in the Electoral College. He will become the President. Now what?
That’s where “checks and balances come it.
The Founders anticipated that such an unfortunate thing could happen and created guardrails against it. Now we are seeing the concrete beginnings of Trump’s challenge to those guardrails.
For instance, our system requires that the President appoint his leadership team with “the advice and consent of the Senate” but Mr. Trump is insisting that he be allowed to get around that process using “recess appointments.”
The Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and others are given immense power over hundreds of thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Yes, they are part of the Executive Branch and serve at the pleasure of the President, BUT, for good reason, they are given all that power only with “the advice and consent” of the Senate. And that process involves public hearings, public debate, and votes that can be seen, heard and remembered in the next election.
Mr. Trump does not like that process. He sees his appointees as underlings, as “apprentices,” to be fired at will, without checks, without balances, with only the power of his will in play.
The idea of a “recess appointment” was put into the Constitution to deal with emergency situations where it made sense for a President to make a needed appointment even if the Senate and Congress happened to be out of town. It was created at a time when it could take weeks to get back to Washington by horseback or sail. But now Mr. Trump now wants to turn that reasonable idea on its head, using it to undermine the basic legal and constitutional requirements created by The Founders and adhered to since 1787.
No President has ever announced that he wanted only recess appointments…until now.
Mr. Trump has embarked on a mission that many of us consider to be “unamerican.”
He does not want his will thwarted by anything or anyone. He wants to do away with the very idea that laws apply to him much less traditional norms. What responsible person would appoint deeply flawed people like Matt Gaetz and RFKJr. as well as fundamentally unqualified persons to head the Department of Defense and the CIA? Who would have thought that a person whose primary experience was as a wrestling mogul would be nominated as Secretary of Education! It’s almost unbelievable.
As I emerged into young adulthood in a decade long ago, it was the successful fight for civil and voting rights that took center stage. LBJ signed Medicare and Medicaid into law. But it was Vietnam that came to dominate my political consciousness and after the refusal of Hubert Humphrey to mount the barricades against the Vietnam War and the disaster of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, I just walked away from voting that year. I couldn’t do it. I was the ONLY time I have ever done so, and I regret it still.
These days I find Benjamin Franklin’s final observations at the Constitutional Convention to be even more wise and deeply meaningful. He said, “when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” Franklin asks if perfection be expected from ourselves or from every joint decision we make with others? Of course not. But the fact that we have replaced “men” in that sentence with a far broader concept only goes to show that we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress since then. And we’ve also prevented disasters. It’s time to step up.
When David Frost asked Richard Nixon his views on the powers of a President, Nixon said, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
In America beneficial change must come from persuasion, dialogue and organized democratic political action. Not from the self-centered will of a dangerous man who had the temerity to say “Only I can fix it!”
We need neither Nixon nor Trump but, for the moment, we’re stuck with the latter.
We can survive Trump using the means provided to us by the Founders…and many of us mean to work on that project in the coming months and years.
Jim Walsh lives in Nahant.
