gracchusdixit

Our nation faces an unprecedented constitutional crisis that Republicans in Congress have thus far chosen to enable, ignore or wish away.   Their presidential candidate, the man who now occupies the White House, is neck deep in conflicts of interest, the likes of which we have never seen before.  He owes several hundred million dollars to a government-owned Chinese bank.  Russian oligarchs have poured millions into his businesses.  He has refused to divest himself of his financial and business interests and continues to profit from them, all the while he is dealing with, and sometimes browbeating, foreign leaders who can benefit those interests.  He  is openly using his high office to benefit the money-making schemes of his wife and children or to punish anyone who stands in their way.  All of this violates anti-corruption laws and the “emoluments clause” of the Constitution.

Apart from these blatant conflicts of interest, Trump demonstrated within weeks of his inauguration that he has complete contempt for the Constitution itself.  He is trying to intimidate the judicial branch of government, the independence of which is essential to reining in the power of the executive.  He is threatening the freedom of the press, which is the only private institution to which the Constitution gives explicit protection.  He seems to think that he, and he alone, is entitled to exercise power and that his power must be unchallenged and absolute.

It gets worse.  To anyone who isn’t on intellectual life-support, it should by now be evident that Donald Trump is under the thumb of the Russians, either because he owes them money or because he is being blackmailed.  During the presidential campaign, it was possible to attribute Trump’s unwavering defense of Vladimir Putin to mere vanity, the adoration of one aspiring “tough guy” for another.  That explanation is no longer plausible.  Trump is now the president.  Against all reason, against sober advice, against the nation’s fundamental interests, he continues to excuse, defend, and praise a murderous autocrat who  is our most determined enemy.  If it turns out that Trump’s campaign colluded with a Russian effort to get him elected, it will be treason.

Worse still—if anything can be worse than treason—it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump is mentally unstable, an extreme and dangerous narcissist who cannot be reasoned with, who refuses to acknowledge reality, who will never learn or change.  The 25th Amendment to the Constitution provides a mechanism for removing a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”  This provision has never been invoked.  The time is fast approaching when it must be.

Trump himself is not the only cause of the constitutional crisis we face.  His cabinet nominations amount to a cabinet of horrors.

Betsy DeVos, who was just sworn in as Secretary of Education, is a ideologue whose only qualification for office is the fact she and her family have given $200 million to the  Republican Party and Republican politicians, including many of the senators who voted for her.  She is routinely called a “billionaire philanthropist.”  While she is no doubt a billionaire, she is no “philanthropist.”  DeVos is, instead, an ideological lobbyist, determined to advance a right-wing, evangelical agenda that aims to destroy public education, as she has very nearly done in her home state of Michigan.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s new Attorney General, has a long history of prejudice and discrimination against the civil and voting rights of African-Americans, women, and gays.  He refuses to condemn the use of torture, which is a crime under both domestic and international law.  His only qualification to be Attorney General, for which he is manifestly unsuited, is that he was the first member of the Senate to endorse Donald Trump and has enthusiastically backed the worst of Trump’s policy proposals, some of which Sessions helped to craft.

Tom Price, who has yet to be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is blatantly corrupt.  He and his wife, a member of the Georgia legislature, have invested in or received campaign contributions from a variety of medical and pharmaceutical companies, whose stock valuations were boosted by legislation that Price, as a member of Congress, introduced or supported.  Even while his nomination hearings were underway, his wife continued to take campaign contributions from those companies, an act of shameless self-interest that beggars the imagination.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a climate change denier, who, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, has taken every opportunity to sue the EPA and oppose even the most modest of its fossil fuel regulations.  That’s because Pruitt is in the pocket of Charles and David Koch, and for much of his career, has shown himself to be their faithful servant.  If he has his way, he will gut the agency he has been nominated to lead.

Trump’s nominee to become the next Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, is  a former Goldman Sachs banker and a predatory investor who made millions by ruthlessly foreclosing on homeowners in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.  After scooping up a failed California-based bank for pennies on the dollar in a federal auction, Mnuchin exploited a variety of government guarantees and subsidies to put that bank back on its feet.  Then, he began to turn the screws, extracting profit from the bank’s mortgage portfolio by skirting lending regulations, lying to thousands of borrowers, and falsifying documents.  Add to that his failure to disclose $100 million in personal assets in the paperwork he was required to submit before his nomination could be considered.  Having promised to “drain the swamp,” it now appears that Donald Trump wants to install the Creature from the Black Lagoon as our next Secretary of the Treasury.

In short, we have a man in the White House who deserves to be impeached and an executive branch of government in the making that deserves nothing but repudiation.  Yet all but a handful of Republicans say and do nothing.

In 1957, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, while still the junior Senator from Massachusetts,  wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called Profiles in Courage.  It told the stories of eight senators in the long history of our republic, several of them Republicans, who defied public opinion and political pressure to stand up for the causes or principles they believed in.  If today’s Republican senators do not soon do the same, JFK’s book will deserve a sequel:  Profiles in Cowardice.  Who will write it?  When will it be written?