Trump is demonstrating one of the Glaring Weaknesses in our Constitution [View all]

[kennetha]

There are many weakness. But Trump is showing that the executive in our system is too unconstrained.

First, there is no way except impeachment or the 25th Amendment to remove a president. There are no recall elections of the executive -- as there is in many states. There is no possibility of votes of no confidence -- as in all Parliamentary Systems. There is no possibility of Early Elections, as in Parliamentary Systems -- where these are designed to test the continuing mandate of the governing party.

And the process of Impeachment or the application of the 25th Amendment are both extremely difficult and cumbersome to initiate and carry through.

There reason for all this is that Founding fathers seemed to have had far too much confidence in the Separation of Powers and with it the power of institutional jealousy.

In particular, they thought that the Congress would be too jealous of its institutional prerogatives to ever allow the Executive to run roughshod over the legislature.

But they did not foresee the consequences of the rise of the Charismatic Presidency and a highly Partisan Legislature that was more jealous of party prerogatives than institutional ones.

Moreover, they put the presidency almost entirely beyond the reach of the people (through mechanisms like recall elections). Since they did not think of the President as elected by the people, this is perhaps understandable.

But they also did not endow the electoral college as a standing deliberative body that could exercise power over the president once it had elected that president.

The result is that designed the presidency to be quasi-kinglike, in the sense that though the presidency is subject to the weakly limiting constraint of occasional and recurring election and the checks and balance of institutional competition among the branches, he is otherwise nearly impossible to remove from office. That is a very bad thing, when the presidency is a mendacious, evil, traitorous, incompetent fool, and the people at large despise him, and the Congress, is controlled by a party subservient to him.

Our current situation proves that the Founders were not prescient and did not really think through all the ways in which this system could go wrong.

Unfortunately, they made their constitution extraordinarily to amend. So we are stuck with their somewhat archaic design.