Electing Donald Trump to the White House may be the only chance we have to return the country to anything resembling true Constitutional governance. Not that Trump would cooperate, but he would face so much bipartisan opposition that he'd have no choice. And what a vast improvement over Obama that would be.
That's a summary of Rand Simberg's column on why electing Trump is actually a Constitutional imperative for voters. I had never thought of this angle before and I have to admit that it does make some sense.
My quick synopsis: If Hillary is elected, it will be the Political Class come in more power than ever before, and Jill Stein will be right: voting for Hillary is voting to continue the status quo, which is a really, really bad choice.
And what will be the most deleterious effect? The Imperial Presidency will be locked in concrete. The law means nothing to Obama now because neither party in Congress thinks it should.
The result is elegantly explained by Andrew Codevilla:
... the primordial fact [is] that, in today’s America, those in power basically do what they please. Executive orders, phone calls, and the right judge mean a lot more than laws. They even trump state referenda. Over the past half-century, presidents have ruled not by enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state. As for the Supreme Court, the American people have seen it invent rights where there were none—e.g., abortion—while trammeling ones that had been the republic’s spine, such as the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. The Court taught Americans that the word “public” can mean “private” (Kelo v. City of New London), that “penalty” can mean “tax” (King v. Burwell), and that holding an opinion contrary to its own can only be due to an “irrational animus” (Obergefell v. Hodges).What goes by the name “constitutional law” has been eclipsing the U.S. Constitution for a long time. So, says Rand,
[A] President Trump will have likely come into office with the lowest share of the popular vote since Abraham Lincoln, and will have alienated not only the Democrats (despite the fact that he’s been one for decades), but large segments of his “own” party, and will have minority support within it. And the man who would be his Vice President, Mike Pence, is hugely popular in his own party, and would be seen as a preferable President by most (many of whom currently think the ticket upside down, at best, if Trump should be on it at all).I must say, though, the Rand's brief comparison of a potential Trump win with Lincoln's does not fill me with confidence. Lincoln was, after all, even more a racist bigot in fact than Trump is in accusation, and in factual, rather than mythological history, Abraham Lincoln did more to destroy Constitutional government than any president between Washington and Wilson. Many people are justly reconsidering Lincoln's presidency and concluding that he alone initiated what a hundred years later Arthur Schlesinger would call "The Imperial Presidency." His hands are drenched with the blood of three-quarter million Americans, and yet for some reason we consider him one of the top three or four presidents.
In other words, a President Trump will be on probation with both parties from the moment he takes the oath of office. He is not a black man, or a woman of any color, so the Republicans won’t have to worry about going after one of the victim classes, other than septuagenarian orange people, a class for whom, when also considering John Boehner, Democrats feel few social-justice pangs. He will operate within the Constitution, or there will be bipartisan desire to stop him, and few on either side of the aisle will have any qualms in doing so.
Regardless of the electoral outcome, we are about to elect one of the worst presidents in American history. But only one choice will offer us a potential opportunity to rectify that situation.
Update: Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy piles on.
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