Rep.Trey Gowdy, “…I think what the President is doing is expressing frustration that Attorney General Sessions should have shared these reasons for recusal before he took the job, not afterward. If I were the President and I picked someone to be the country’s…. chief law enforcement officer, and they told me later, ‘oh by the way I’m not going to be able to participate in the most important case in the office, I would be frustrated too…and that’s how I read that – Senator Sessions, why didn’t you tell me before I picked you…..There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!”
“And I wish I [sic] did [had]! A series of Tweets in which Pres. Trump quoted a Fox News Interview with House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C. 4th Distr.)
President Donald Trump is the inheritor of a forty-plus year legacy of attacks on the Presidency not just by the Media and Hollywood, but by Congress itself. Contemporary presidents no longer believe they are co-equals with the other two branches, but adversaries. The Congress has done everything possible to usurp executive power.
President Reagan seemed pretty tough in the 1980s. He dared to call the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” in a 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Fla.
Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world …. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
Reagan was making the case for deploying NATO nuclear-armed missiles in Western Europe as a response to the Soviets installing new nuclear-armed missiles in Eastern Europe. The American media went ballistic. But Reagan never retracted his word and followed up with,
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” referring to the Berlin Wall – and the German people did just that.
Reagan was able to take on the external communists, but not the Marxists within the U.S. Congress as they gleefully tore apart the U.S. Constitution.
The editors and authors of “The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers” ed. Jones, Gordon S. and John A. Marini, 1988: Pharos Books (The Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute) began their book with a summary of the problems and ended it with some recommendations for future Presidents of the United States (Pres. Trump, please take note and take time to read the book!).
Author and editor Gordon S. Jones, in Chapter 12, “Overthrowing Oligarchy”, cites five defining issues which once enjoyed consensus in America and permitted self-government. They needed to be settled or self-government would become increasingly problematic.
“Five political dichotomies divide the center-right majority and the [then] liberal minority in America,” he wrote.
- 1) The individual (usually in his family setting) is important, competent, and powerful; or the individual is weak, powerless, and in need of help from the government. On the policy level, this dichotomy is clear in conservative proposals that view the individual as citizen, versus liberals’ proposals that view the interview as [the] client.
- 2) National weakness threatens freedom; or national strength threatens peace.
- 3) The traditional family is essential to the health of the society; or “family” is an illusive and malleable concept, and no particular configuration is better for society than any other.
- 4) The United States is morally superior to the Soviet Union; or the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are morally equivalent.
- 5) Private property is essential to political liberty and the private sector is superior to the public sector; or the private sector is a necessary evil, to be controlled by the government, and private property is only tolerated.
“The function of the issueless politics of the last 20 years [since 1960] has been to obscure these great dichotomies. Politics has camouflaged the fact that specific policies being put into place through congressional and judicial usurpation of the prerogatives of the executive are in fact moving our society from one pole of the dichotomies to the other. Decisions between these pairings are being made on the basis of mechanics and dry legalisms.”
“To recast the political consensus,” Jones continues, “a popular president will have to reach beyond the existing elites, to ordinary Americans, grass-roots members of America’s social and religious organizations, and communicate directly with them…There is some evidence that the 1988 presidential campaign will be fought on the issue of ‘leadership’ [read our lips: it didn’t happen at all] and indeed, leadership is required if the body politic is to be restored to health.
“But real leadership goes beyond assertion. It involves the courage to tell the truth about what divides us and where the divisions will take us.”
Thomas G. West, in Chapter 13, asserts, “The heart of today’s federal government is Congress. Power in Congress is exercised primarily by an aggregation of individual committee and subcommittee chairmen. Each chairman is responsible for a particular subject area….Congress as a body deliberates infrequently over policy. Instead, it prefers to establish sweeping but vague mandates for a multitude of agencies. The various devices by which Congress sustains this system of control, including the abuse of criminal law to punish executive branch officials who resist the will of members of Congress have been described throughout this book.”
But, West reassures the readers, “There is nothing inevitable about the current state of affairs. On the contrary, as long as we live under the Constitution, the remedy for its abuse is always within reach. The Constitution’s authors anticipated its abuse [although Alexander Hamilton had a tendency to wave off the concerns of the Anti-Federalists rather too cavalierly; we should have paid more attention to the Anti-Federalists], and they anticipated the quarter from which the encroachment would likely come: Congress.”
Jones asserted that the effort begins with a strong presidency and cites the weaknesses in Reagan’s presidency which further encouraged Congress’ encroachment upon the executive’s power:
“The congressional losses in the 1980 campaign made possible the unusual legislative year of 1981, when Congress was willing to follow the president’s lead for the only time in his eight-year tenure. Pundits like to attribute this to vague notions like “the honeymoon period” or “the mandate,” but the dramatic defeats of prominent liberal legislators are a much more obvious and likely explanation. Congressional Republicans voted in 1981 with a much higher degree of party unity than they have for many years before or since, while Democrats deserted their party’s leadership in crucial 1981 votes.
“Never again,” he continued, “in Reagan’s presidency did the Republicans run against Congress. And never again did Congress cooperate with him. Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike routinely sneered that the president’s budget was ‘dead on arrival’ – an unmistakable sign of their contempt for him. The 1982 tax increase, put through at Congress’s insistence with Reagan’s reluctant support, undercut in advance any effort the president might have made to continue the 1980 assault on congressional excess.
“When the Democrats recaptured their Senate majority in 1986, Reagan was weakened still further. Prominent congressmen used the first opportunity that came their way – the Iran-Contra affair – to attempt to destroy the administration’s foreign policy and if possible the administration itself. Some in Congress were even beginning to speak of impeachment right up to the moment that Oliver North’s testimony dissolved the lynch-mob atmosphere. Even so, Congress came out ahead. After Iran-Contra, many of Reagan’s top-level executive appointments were made in deference to Congress’s will. Among the friends of Congress appointed during that period were Howard Baker, the chief of staff of the White House; the directors of the National Security Council and the CIA; and Frank Carlucci, the Secretary of Defense.”
Congress was riding high by the end of the Reagan Administration. But Jones assures us that thanks to North’s testimony and the 1981 success mean that future presidents do not have to think of Congress as the imperial body it likes to think of itself as, “an immovable object that has to be accommodated.”
Good news, indeed, for besieged presidents like Donald J. Trump, who has been under Congressional scrutiny since he announced his candidacy for president. Now that it has been revealed that he was under surveillance by the then-sitting president, Barack Obama (can anyone say “Watergate”?).
“If the American people still have the mettle Madison attributed to them, they will turn against congressional imperialism once they are enlightened about what Congress is doing and led by those they respect,” Jones wrote. “However, little can be done by private means alone. Those in the best position to enlighten the people usually favor congressional dominance,” claiming that it is Congress that represents “the people” even though any single congressman or senator only represents a fraction, not the whole, of the American people.
Jones wrote that, “There are many things that a president can do to challenge [the current] system. In general, he must reassert executive authority by carefully selecting confrontations with Congress over its habit of running the executive branch.” Here are some of his suggestions:
Take Charge of the Executive Branch
The president can constantly expose the behind-the-scenes administrative activity of committee chairmen. He could select the most egregious examples every day for public exposure [who attack the president’s appointees]…The president’s appointed officials would be more likely to resist Congress and support the president if they knew he would back them in such a conflict. Their loyalty would be stronger still if they feared removal from office for defying the president and deferring to Congress.
Challenge Congressional Ethics
Congress’ practice of exempting itself from the laws it passes, including civil rights and independent counsel statutes, has become a [widely discussed scandal]. The president could announce that he will refused to sign any law that contains such exemptions. He could also announce the he will submit legislation, to be drafted by his Justice Department, to repeal existing congressional exemptions, and that he will not sign the appropriations bill for congressional operation until this repeal was voted on by Congress. which
Refuse Continuing Resolutions
The president also could refuse to sign Continuing Resolutions. These massive end-of-the-year appropriations contain many thousands of pages, far more than any one individual can read. He should return these to Congress with the message, “an appropriation or a law, being general in its application, should be short enough to read. Any bill this long is going into administrative details properly executive in action.
Further, he could declare that committee-prepared Conference Reports which accompany appropriations, which go into even greater detail than the appropriations themselves, do not have the force of law since they have not been adopted by the vote of Congress.
Let the People Decide
No doubt Congress, or some members of it, might wish to impeach a president who attempts to restore constitutional government by challenging congressional usurpations. Anticipating this, perhaps even welcoming it, the president’s job is to win enough popular support to defeat – or forestall – any impeachment move. This means he will have to act with the right combination of boldness and caution. But he must first reassert the presidency’s historic constitutional powers and articulate the reasons for doing so. When the issue is framed properly, and the occasions for confrontation well chosen, the people will side with the president, and the rule of law – secured through the constitutional separation of powers – will prevail.
“A president who would lead a renaissance of constitutional government will have to campaign on the issue, as Reagan did to some extent in 1980. He will have to undertake a partisan appeal and organize a group that can both carry the appeal to the people and become an effective force within the government. That group he must organize is a political party of constitutional government.
“Such a political party must be, at least, the anti-Congress party. Limited government means a limited Congress, a Congress that goes back to its main constitutional job, law-making, and ends its…foray into administration.
Jones wrote, “As things stand today, the Democratic Party, with its bastion in the House of Representatives, tends to be…the party of centralized administration. Democrats tend to favor a weak president [even from their own party] and an assertive Congress. The party’s main constituencies are government itself and groups dependent on government.”
Jones wrote of a Republican party that was stronger back in 1988. George H.W. Bush’s election that year demolished that myth. With each successive election, the Republicans became weaker until voters could hardly distinguish between the two parties.
No president organized “a political party of constitutional government,” although one certainly caused one to rise up out of the grassy town centers across Middle America back in 2009. We sort of organized ourselves. We took to our town greens, our sidewalks, and whatever organization halls or municipal libraries would allow us to convene.
The Tea Parties were derided, denounced and besmirched by the mainstream media. Millennials would have nothing to do with us, and in fact, thanks to pro-marijuana and drug legalization activists, floated farther off to the Left, becoming Snowflakes.
But Middle Americans with families, who ordinarily would not involve themselves in politics – the poor blighters still believed in representative government and thought they were being represented by the Republicans for whom they voted – leant an ear to our cries. They did attend our rallies, at least until Obama was re-elected. They were just waiting for a strong enough leader.
And then along came Donald J. Trump, possibly the most unlikely candidate for President of the United States since Ronald Reagan, “The B-Actor”, himself (he at least had been governor of California).
Ever since he announced his candidacy, he’s been under attack for what was claimed to be “collusion with the Russians” to turn the 2016 election in his favor. It turns out that the real criminal activity has been that of Barack Obama himself, electronically monitoring offices in Trump Tower, fishing for negative information on Trump, while ignoring Hillary’s own notorious “collusion” with the Russians.
This tactic isn’t working out too well for the Democrats. Hillary was her own worst enemy, as it happens. Still, right up to Election Day, the Democrats thought they had the election in the bag. But in case they had to cancel the fireworks, they had the accusation of collusion in their back pocket.
And if that didn’t work – and it won’t – they also began a movement right after the election to make an amendment to the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College (state legislatures are just as corrupt as the federal Big Brother congress).
Read this book, everyone. And then we’ll get down to the Electoral College attack. Let’s finally close the book on Congressional Imperialism.
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