Tornado Alley (PROG)

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[...] An Exit Survey of Trump’s Constitutional Misdeeds
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1. Acting Officials
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Take the Department of Homeland Security, where until his recent resignation, Chad Wolf had served as acting secretary since November 2019 — well more than 210 days since the last permanent secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, resigned. Several courts have ruled that Wolf's actions as acting secretary are void because he wasn't eligible for the role, without even broaching the timing issue. The authority of the man serving as acting deputy secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, was even more clouded. With little chance of confirmation as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Cuccinelli was instead appointed by Trump to the newly created position of principal deputy director, which would supposedly allow him to then be named acting director, which in turn would allow him eventually to be named acting deputy secretary. Cuccinelli's directives have likewise run into legal trouble.

2. Steel Tariffs

The Trump administration also violated the separation of powers in March 2018, when it issued a 25 percent steel tariff under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act (TEA). The purpose of the TEA is to grow foreign commerce by opening trade up, but it effectively allows the president to unilaterally restrict imports in the name of national security. The president's security justification was undermined by the fact that military requirements for steel represent only 3 percent of the commodity's domestic production. It's also unclear how the round 25 percent figure was calculated or how it relates to national security. Courts were unwilling to question executive discretion, or congressional delegation of the power to regulate international commerce, though one judge asked and failed to receive an answer to the question of whether the president's authority would extend to tariffs on peanut butter.

3. Border-Wall Funding

Trump once again violated the separation of powers when in February 2019 he repurposed funds from the military budget to build his border wall without congressional approval. The Constitution's appropriations clause states that no money may be drawn from the treasury unless appropriated by law, which means that the executive can't spend money that Congress hasn't authorized it to spend.
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In early 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he would be punishing states and local governments for refusing to help the federal government enforce its immigration laws. This denial of a slew of federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities violated the “anti-commandeering doctrine,” among other principles of federalism.
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5. Bump-Stock Ban
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...President Trump told members of Congress not to address the issue. Instead, the president directed his administration to ban bump stocks by reinterpreting existing laws that ban fully automatic guns. Thus, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms reinterpreted the word “machinegun” to include bump-?stock devices, despite a longstanding determination under both the Bush and Obama administrations that bump stocks did not fit within the legal meaning of “machinegun.”

As a result, possession of a bump stock is now a crime, even though Congress has never passed a law criminalizing the devices. Before the ban was enacted, members of the president’s own administration had expressed concerns about this approach, saying that only Congress has the power to ban bump stocks.

Litigation in the matter is ongoing.

6. Bombing Syria

Another instance of Trump’s ignoring the separation-of-powers doctrine...
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7. Blocking Twitter Users

... it subsequently became apparent that Trump had turned his Twitter feed into a public forum by announcing executive actions and policies there ... The White House also designated Trump’s tweets as official statements to be maintained by the National Archives, making his account far from a personal one. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that Trump’s blocking of unfriendly followers thus constituted viewpoint discrimination, in violation of the First Amendment, ...

8. COVID-19 Executive Orders

Trump built on Obama’s pen-and-phone governance to bypass the constitutional structure when he short-circuited congressional negotiations over COVID relief in August 2020 by issuing four pandemic-related executive orders. These orders extended unemployment benefits and placed the onus on states to top them up, suspended the payroll tax for many workers, facilitated an eviction moratorium later declared by the Centers for Disease Control (the extension of which President Biden is now pursuing), and suspended student-loan repayments. While these may or may not be sensible policies to provide relief to low-income people economically hurt by the global pandemic, even leading progressive legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky found them unconstitutional.

Dishonorable Mentions

There are two other types of constitutional dubiousness indulged by Trump that merit a dishonorable mention: corruption and unethical behavior, and the abuses that would’ve been perpetrated had his aides not disregarded his instructions.

The first category encompasses both official actions such as undermining and pushing out federal inspectors general to unofficial actions such as calling his political opponents “human scum” and journalists “the enemy of the people” (even if it’s true that the mainstream media is biased against Republicans and conservatives). The two actions for which he was impeached — pressuring a foreign leader to investigate a political rival and fomenting an assault on the Capitol — can also be included here. And although neither the foreign-emoluments clause nor the domestic-emoluments clause quite covers the benefits Trump got from owning a hotel in central Washington or China’s fast-tracking his daughter’s trademark applications, the Constitution’s framers did mean to preclude that sort of personal corruption and influence-peddling.

As to the would-be violations, although it was fun to read about Gary Cohn’s snatching away an executive order that would’ve started a trade war with South Korea or Don McGahn’s acting like a “real lawyer” and refusing to fire Bob Mueller, it was also unsettling. Nobody elected Cohn or McGahn, but it turns out we all depended on them to avoid disasters, including constitutional crises, many of which we won’t ever know about.

* * *

The Trump Administration is not unique in having violated the Constitution. Presidents of both parties have betrayed the document they swore to protect, from Barack Obama’s unilateral rewriting of immigration law to George W. Bush’s expansive interpretation of antiterrorism powers. Trump’s norm-breaking and his coarsening of American political culture have been extreme, but from a constitutional standpoint, the bulk of his abuses involved phone-and-pen policymaking of a sort we’ve come to expect from the imperial presidency. And we shouldn’t forget that his administration did certain things to help rebalance our constitutional order, such as putting greater constraints on regulatory actions — including one this week — adding due-process protections to campus-disciplinary investigations, and, of course, appointing three superb Supreme Court justices and 231 other federal judges committed to interpreting constitutional text according to its original public meaning. Those positives will get overshadowed by the chaos he’s created, but they are substantial.

Trump could’ve been truly dangerous if he’d had a greater understanding of the law and the powers of his office. It’s frightening to think of a world in which he’d enforced half the notions behind his tweets and used the levers of government rather than just lashing out. But he didn’t, and now he’s been succeeded by a president whose constitutional violations and policy errors both will likely fall within more “normal” parameters. That’s not exactly a cause for celebration — but then, those are few and far between for we who seek to preserve the Constitution and hold government officials responsible for adhering to it.

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Trump's incitement of insurrection to overturn the people's vote has to be violation of the spirit of the constitution and his pardoning of those guilty
of insurrection criminality must be more of the same. Trump's consistent lying to the people is certainly a violation of the spirit of the constitution.



A "treasonous piece of shit Trump is.