The frantic efforts of some Democrats and leftist activists to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election – which included, among other things, several attempts to undermine the workings of the Electoral College – has morphed into a pattern of declaring most of President Trump’s actions presumptively illegitimate. It’s all part of “The Resistance.”
Sadly, despite signal achievements by the Trump administration, this unprecedented scorched-earth approach continues, as witness a) the controversies surrounding the president’s declaration of emergency to secure funding for a border wall, b) House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s fulminations about what he will do if he is dissatisfied with how much of the Mueller Report is released by the Attorney General, and c) the decided lack of interest these same folks have in pursuing the startling McCabe revelations about high-level discussions to oust the president from office.
Following Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, The New York Times, which has emerged as the Resistance’s newsletter of sorts, promptly ran with an online story headlined, “Trump Declares a National Emergency, and Provokes a Constitutional Clash.” Seizing on the fact that the president acted after Congress refused to give him the funds he requested, The Times quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying, “This is a power grab by a disappointed president, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process.”
Trouble is, the Trump declaration was well within a law enacted by Congress that allows a president to declare a state of emergency (although Congress can ultimately overrule him). Thus, not only was there no constitutional conflict occasioned by the president’s declaration, one hardly seems to be in the making. At the very least, any concern would seem to be extremely premature. Indeed, Congress is now in the process of deliberating over the relevant resolutions that would allow it to overrule the president.
As for the Mueller Report: Congressman Schiff is a Harvard Law School-trained lawyer. So his talk about subpoenaing the report, and Mueller, if the full report is not released to his satisfaction is rather remarkable.
Finally, no Democrats we have heard from seems interested in getting to the bottom of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “raised the issue” with him of using the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office, “and discussed it with [him] in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort.”
One would have to engage in logical somersaults to connect the 25th Amendment to President Trump. The amendment concerns a president who is physically incapacitated and cannot function as president. Its designers had Woodrow Wilson in mind; Wilson had suffered a stroke while president and couldn’t perform his duties.
It all sounds very ominous, and we can think of several conspiracy laws that would make such Rosenstein-McCabe talk illegal. But nary a word from any of those otherwise loquacious Democrats.