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Trump's lawyers claim the president is an elected king
trump is claiming to be above the law. I hope that the Second Circuit rejects this claim
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/23/trumps-lawyers-claim-president-is-an-elected-king/
So the president’s position, as described by his and his administration’s lawyers, is that law enforcement at all levels of government may not investigate or prosecute him and that the president gets to decide when impeachment proceedings against him are constitutional. In other words, there are no checks on presidential behavior between elections every four years.
Then again, Trump has also joked about seeking an illegal third term. So who knows what he would say if he lost the 2020 election. He has effectively declared that the United States has an elected king. He is not far off from claiming that he gets to decide whether an election result is legitimate — or the product of “fake news” and massive, invisible voter fraud.
On the bright side, there are still some in government — those the president’s shameless press secretary Stephanie Grisham denigrated as “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution” — who see the conduct of national affairs as more than a partisan battle, a personality cult or a vanity project. Key executive branch witnesses, decorated and devoted civil servants, in the last two weeks defied Trump’s insistence that no one testify before congressional investigators. Their accounts depicted a president who used the leverage of U.S. foreign policy to pressure a desperate allied country to fabricate a scandal about former vice president Joe Biden, one of the president’s political rivals.
Assuming that Trump does not, in fact, destroy the Republic, when he is gone and his toadies are swept from power, these “radical unelected bureaucrats,” such as former Ukraine envoy William B. Taylor Jr., will be remembered as heroes — and the lawyers who tried to assign dictatorial powers to a vile man will be remembered for what they are: collaborators.
Then again, Trump has also joked about seeking an illegal third term. So who knows what he would say if he lost the 2020 election. He has effectively declared that the United States has an elected king. He is not far off from claiming that he gets to decide whether an election result is legitimate — or the product of “fake news” and massive, invisible voter fraud.
On the bright side, there are still some in government — those the president’s shameless press secretary Stephanie Grisham denigrated as “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution” — who see the conduct of national affairs as more than a partisan battle, a personality cult or a vanity project. Key executive branch witnesses, decorated and devoted civil servants, in the last two weeks defied Trump’s insistence that no one testify before congressional investigators. Their accounts depicted a president who used the leverage of U.S. foreign policy to pressure a desperate allied country to fabricate a scandal about former vice president Joe Biden, one of the president’s political rivals.
Assuming that Trump does not, in fact, destroy the Republic, when he is gone and his toadies are swept from power, these “radical unelected bureaucrats,” such as former Ukraine envoy William B. Taylor Jr., will be remembered as heroes — and the lawyers who tried to assign dictatorial powers to a vile man will be remembered for what they are: collaborators.
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