“Our justice system is broken!” whined the giant man-baby currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. after a federal Appeals Court panel upheld a lower court’s stay on the president’s unfortunate and unconstitutional foray into lawmaking that banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries to the United States.
And that was after he, like a schoolyard bully, had already slagged the original judge on Twitter immediately triggering death threats from Trumpian zealots.
While Americans should be appalled, and many are, by the childish, reckless and disrespectful behaviour toward the courts, perhaps of greater concern is what it suggests about the Trump adminstration’s basic understanding of and/or regard for American governance.
By design, the three branches of government in the United States form a system of checks and balances to thwart the kind of abuse of power the 45th president seems intent on attempting to exercise. When he says the system is broken because he didn’t get his way, aside from being unpresidential, it is a demonstration of ignorance of the history of the country he is ostensibly leading. On the contrary, the system is doing precisely what it was intended to do.
And the blustering is so unnecessary, unless it is simply to appeal to the basest instincts of his hardcore supporters. It is not like the court’s ruling is absolute and for all time. In fact, in the decision, the justices basically gave the administration a roadmap to draft a new law that does pass constitutional muster.
Pushing the judicial branch is nothing new, of course. Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have been tested by the checks and balances of the system.
And that is not to say they should not challenge it. After all, government is supposed to be “for the people and by the people.”
Thomas Jefferson said: “Each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action.”
The judicial branch does have the final word, however, according to the Founders.
“As the courts are generally the last in making the decision, it results to them, by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character,” said James Madison. “This makes the Judiciary department paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended, and can never be proper.”
It is a two-way street, however, but there is a lot to be said for tone. Even Trump’s own nominee for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court questioned his prospective boss’s approach calling it “demoralizing” and “disheartening.”
Nevertheless, at a press conference with Justin Trudeau during our prime minister’s visit to Washington Monday, Trump continued to unnecessarily double down on his Muslim ban saying it is what the people want, completely ignoring the courts as well as poll evidence that the majority of Americans oppose it and that his own approval rating after just three weeks is a dismal 44 per cent, the lowest of any president in modern times.
As an aside, whatever Canadians may think of the current government in Ottawa domestically, Trudeau and his cabinet are handling the emergent threat of the incoming American administration with a diplomatic aplomb we can all be proud of.
The fiasco of the Muslim ban should also give the president’s sycophant enablers great pause because he was not long throwing them under the bus saying he had wanted to wait but was advised against it lest hordes of terrorists flood into the country in the interim, a baseless claim bereft of any supporting intelligence or evidence.
Whether it is true or not that his advisors pushed him into doing something he didn’t want to do, it is hard to say as we have all become accustomed to the fact you can’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth.
Either way, it is a scary prospect that the world could be stuck with this style of “leadership” in Washington for some time to come.
The good news is that the system is working so far. It may be pushed further than it ever has been and we are likely to find out just how robust it is with Republicans in control of the House and Senate, but the Founders may well have saved us from the worst of Trump’s intentions 241 years ago.
