Back on the impeachment thing, all I'll say is that Impeachment is not like other forms of checks & balances. In theory Congress should impeach for one reason or another; in practice, Congress can impeach for any reason, including no reason at all. It's extremely easy to make up a reason, as two of the three attempted impeachments in history should make clear. And there exists no check on Congress's power to impeach. And as the word of one of the Republican Senators who crossed party lines to pardon Johnson:
Once set the example of impeaching a President for what, when the excitement of the hour shall have subsided, will be regarded as insufficient causes, as several of those now alleged against the President were decided to be by the House of Representatives only a few months since, and no future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two thirds of the Senate on any measure deemed by them important, particularly if of a political character. Blinded by partisan zeal, with such an example before them, they will not scruple to remove out of the way any obstacle to the accomplishment of their purposes, and what then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution, so carefully devised and so vital to its perpetuity? They are all gone.
Let me rephrase my argument. The question about whether Trump deserves to be impeached is irrelevant, and I strongly regret my choice of word there. The question of whether he
should be is paramount, and my essential argument is that unless you really tar him in scandal in a way that he has as yet resisted, to impeach him (or to attempt it) would be deeply foolish, and until then talk of impeachment is premature.
Ethics are, fundamentally, relative to the individual. His actions are ethically wrong for you, but for them, they're good and just. Republican ethics are radically different than the Democrat's one. I don't know why did you think otherwise, they don't really hide it all that much.
No? Even if you were a hardcore moral relativist, morals and ethics are distinct concepts. Ethics are agreed upon norms, by definition. You might say that there are different ethical standards in the Republican
Party but the ethics of an individual are just the sum of the ethics imposed on them by who they are: lawyers must follow certain ethics, journalists another, etc. The Presidency has a certain set of ethics that apply to it and no one else, and those do not disappear just because one person ceases to follow them.
Another difference is that, in America, no one can punish you for a violation of your morals, but punishment is expected for violation of ethics.
After the backlash they stopped releasing EOs. A week ago when the anger about this was fresh (I can't believe I'm talking about that like it was another time), Trump had issued I believe 20 EOs in 9 days.
That's interesting; I had sorta noticed this (I kept checking the news to see what executive orders had happened that day), but I hadn't realized that he had stopped.
NYTimes has an
interesting article on the inner workings of the Trump Administration, their strains, and the jobs strains on Trump himself. It's an extremely interesting article, and shows the other side of the Trump Whitehouse. Highlights include:
Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander around, testing doorknobs until finding one that leads to an exit. In a darkened, mostly empty West Wing, Mr. Trump’s provocative chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, finishes another 16-hour day planning new lines of attack.
Usually around 6:30 p.m., or sometimes later, Mr. Trump retires upstairs to the residence to recharge, vent and intermittently use Twitter. With his wife, Melania, and young son, Barron, staying in New York, he is almost always by himself, sometimes in the protective presence of his imposing longtime aide and former security chief, Keith Schiller. When Mr. Trump is not watching television in his bathrobe or on his phone reaching out to old campaign hands and advisers, he will sometimes set off to explore the unfamiliar surroundings of his new home.
By then, the president, for whom chains of command and policy minutiae rarely meant much, was demanding that Mr. Priebus begin to put in effect a much more conventional White House protocol that had been taken for granted in previous administrations: From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process.
Another change will be a new set of checks on the previously unfettered power enjoyed by Mr. Bannon and the White House policy director, Stephen Miller, who oversees the implementation of the orders and who received the brunt of the internal and public criticism for the rollout of the travel ban.
Before he was ousted in November as transition chief, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the Trump adviser with the most government experience, helped prepare a detailed staffing and implementation plan in line with the kickoff strategies of previous Republican presidents.
It was discarded — a senior Trump aide made a show of tossing it into a garbage can — for a strategy that prioritized the daily release of dramatic executive orders to put opponents on the defensive.
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