Great article, as usual. I have one big concern, though. I’m pretty sure George Washington and many other Founders were extremely concerned about the office of the President gaining so much influence that it could subvert the Constitution. He repeatedly pushed back on the idea of being put on a pedestal as “Your Majesty”. I’ve only skimmed a few pages, but there’s a detailed book on how the office of the Presidency was created. Here’s a handy summary in a Washington Post article.
I’ve been telling my friends for years, that we need to start getting ready for a Constitutional convention. I think it will be desperately needed in about 15 years, and that deliberating on good reforms NOW will make it easier for us to get the job done right when we it’s needed. There’s an analogy here between preparing for a Constitutional convention and the seven years Congressional Republicans had to write a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, but I’m sure different folks see that analogy in very different ways.
As a long time Federal Employee, I want to point out one major stop-gap for maintaining the authority of the Constitution. Without any functioning political appointees, most agencies are being directed by career civil servants. They understand the Constitution and the limits of Executive power better than any elected official. They’ve had seminars on how to comply with the Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act, etc. etc., for DECADES. And they understand that they are personally liable for law-breaking done by those reporting to them. This is a big part of why the Federal bureaucracy is so slow to act.
TSA and the branches of Homeland Security are one of the few exceptions, actually. TSA has a large percentage of employees who have been there less than a decade, because they were a much smaller agency before 9/11/2001. Also, the DHS re-organization that followed disrupted a lot of the regular training and promotion processes. To my mind there’s no doubt that the US Marshall’s would have deployed to enforce the court orders, and that cooler heads would have prevailed among TSA officials. But that doesn’t change your central point.
We need a better way to check the power of the Executive Branch, and we need to add it into the Constitution.
