Commentary
Former President Trump is in the news and again charging fake news with reporting what he said with “more disinformation and lies.” Writing in Truth Social last Saturday, he suggested “the termination of all rules … even those found in the Constitution,” as he again returned to voter fraud.
It comes less than a month after his announced plan to again run for the presidency in 2024.
Initially disturbed, I thought, ‘why can’t he put 2020 behind him and concentrate on policy issues he would pursue if nominated.’ Instead, it seems as though he’s just toying with us. If he’s serious, he certainly isn’t acting like it.
However, I got to thinking about Paul Harvey, who took pride in giving us the rest of the story.
After all, former President Obama had some choice words about the Constitution, too. He disparaged the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
Undermining the American idea of our founding fathers, Obama had the idea that government can create new “rights.” If that were so, government could just as easily take others away.
Recalling that Obama had once said, “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress,” I decided a bit of research on Obama and the Constitution was in order.
Two headlines provided more insight than I had recalled about the Obama presidency:
“Obama’s Disdain for the Constitution Means We Risk Losing Our Republic”
“Top 10 Ways Obama Violated the Constitution during His Presidency.”
The transcript from the September 12, 2012 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, centered on the Obama Administration’s Abuse of Power, was enlightening after ten years.
While the committee charged that the administration had abused its power, ignored its duties, evaded responsibility, and overstepped the limits on the president, the focus of the hearing was the pattern of ignoring constitutional limits created by all of the abuses.
Ironically, as we face the Biden administration’s failure in securing the border, Obama was cited in the hearing for not enforcing immigration laws, recalling that he said he would ignore them simply through executive order.
Returning to former President Trump
Expanding my research from Obama’s views of the Constitution, I discovered a 2020 book review of John Yoo’s “Defender in Chief,” by Andrew McCarthy for the Federalist Society Review.
Having written in my November 21, 2022, blog how I thought Trump’s tenure would be viewed by presidential historians, who are known to lean left, I was struck by McCarthy’s opening paragraph:
“Decades from now, when historians assess Donald Trump’s presidency with sobriety and dispassion, the ironies are apt to stand out most. Donald Trump is the populist who lost the popular vote, owing his ascendancy to the Electoral College, an institution designed to temper popular excesses and which Trump himself, while pondering a presidential bid in 2012, rebuked as “a disaster for democracy.”
“Trump has been condemned as the Constitution’s scourge by progressives for whom the Constitution is most a nuisance to evolve beyond, framed by white racists in a time before Wokeness. Trump is the president who upheld the rule of law by firing the FBI director. He submitted to investigation by a special counsel whom he reviled but who nevertheless cleared him.”
I was familiar with John Yoo’s role in national security policy development in the post 9/11 era under President George W. Bush but wasn’t familiar with his position on Trump until I read McCarthy’s review of Yoo’s book.
“If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity,” Yoo said in his opening.
“Impeachment is not the only reason Donald Trump has had to fight for the right to wield the presidential power he won in 2016,” McCarthy notes. “He has had to fight for it against an opposition party that has labored to cast doubt on his legitimacy; against a judiciary teeming with progressive activists who have portrayed him as sui generis (of its own kind) and thus without entitlement to the comity and presumption of regularity accorded to other presidents; and against the sprawling administrative state, including executive branch agencies he nominally controls.”
Yoo believes that, by waging these battles, Trump has safeguarded the presidency as the Framers envisioned it when they crafted our founding law.
Without the Constitution, President Trump could not have pursued his agenda,” McCarthy concludes, “Without defending the Constitution, the Trump presidency could not have survived.”
Due to space limitations for this blog, I cannot begin to go into the depth that McCarthy does in his review of Yoo’s book, or the book itself, but I felt compelled to provide my readers with background the lazy individuals who call themselves journalists fail to do when all they want to do is report that ‘Trump slams the Constitution.’
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
