Checks and Balances

My annual habit of writing letters to Congress took a detour last year, when I wrote a post about Congress, which you can find here.  Fast forward to today, and I am similarly blah about writing a letter to my electeds in the traditional sense of advocating on a particular issue.  What I have been mulling over is what to do with our current president, which is a subject I do want to address my representatives in Washington on.

Even though I am a registered Republican, I did not vote for Donald Trump, I do not plan to vote for him next November, and I do not agree with almost all of his policy positions.  Indeed, I find many of his policies so abhorrent that they are worthy of the protest, resistance, and legal challenges they have provoked.


But I believe in a very high burden of proof when it comes to ejecting someone from the office of presidency.  Not liking the guy, not liking his policies, and not liking his thought process in arriving at those policies, to me, doesn't cut it for circumventing that most hallowed of democratic characteristics, which is that we elected people into office and we elect people out of office.

You might argue that the specific things being argued in the current impeachment inquiry sufficiently warrant impeachment, and you might be right.  The other, what I consider more likely, outcome is that there are insufficient votes, and that the whole process merely causes both sides to dig in even more, one side wanting the bum out and the other side crying foul about it.

That said, while I consider an important part of a democracy to be the upholding of elections as the mechanism of voting people in and out of office, I also consider it an important characteristic of healthy democratic institutions to have self-protecting mechanisms to respond to extraordinary perversions of the administration of an elected office.  And President Trump's behavior while in office, I feel, has tripped those wires.  Well beyond proposing and enacting policies that I vehemently disagree with, he has degraded the authority of the office itself with his behavior.

Again, you'll not hardly find a more tolerant person in terms of allowing policy disagreements to peacefully coexist.  But here I'm not talking about "I don't like his positions" or "I don't like him" and therefore we want him out now.  I'm talking about the importance of mechanisms to protect the very sanctity of the office from being irreparably eroded.

And so for so few members of his own party to stand up and say this while they have some legitimacy left to do something about it, that is disappointing and disturbing.  Checks and balances are not just about the party out of office checking the party in office, or legislative/executive/judicial balance.  Call me a romantic, but I believe it is important to believe that checks and balances are also about hallowed principles over partisan gains, about calling someone out when they are behaving in a manner that is not worthy of the office.

So that's my letter to Congress this year, or more directly to Republican members of Congress.  Do your job.  Which is not to protect your job at all costs.  But rather to protect and uphold the sanctity of the office, and of government of and by and for the people.