Is Donald Trump looking for a backdoor way to invalidate laws Joe Biden signed and judges he appointed? We fear that might be the case. Here is how it would work.
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Whether it’s ignoring court orders, declaring faux emergencies to claim additional powers, or refusing to spend money in the way Congress has appropriated it, many actions of the Trump administration have frequently (and correctly) led experts to say that the country is either in or headed toward various constitutional crises.
Such crises can take different forms.
Our three examples from above show that Donald Trump seems determined to run roughshod over the system of checks and balances between co-equal branches of government that has served the nation so well for more than two centuries, and that he seeks to grant himself powers that are not his to take.
In these cases, the Constitution lays out what should happen, i.e., that a president should abide by a court’s rulings or the nation’s laws, but Trump chooses to ignore it.
However, there is also another type of constitutional crisis.
Because the Founding Fathers could not envision every circumstance and eventuality, the Constitution does not address every issue or problem that might arise down the road.
And, as it turns out, a major oversight on their part was that they did not anticipate that the American people would one day elect someone as lawless, crazy, and corrupt as Trump.
Therefore, there is also no provision that stipulates what happens when one president declares the actions of his predecessor null and void.
But that is exactly what Trump may attempt to do.
Using the allegation that Joe Biden was not mentally fit to carry out his duties, Trump is directing his own counsel, David Warrington, and Attorney General Pam Bondi to carry out an investigation into whether White House staffers illegally took actions on the president’s behalf.
To Trump, an avid conspiracy theorist, it is clear that this happened.
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” Trump stated in a memo to Bondi and Warrington.
To be clear, none of this is “apparent.” In fact, there is no evidence that any of this happened.
In addition, the use of an autopen to sign documents is not something only Biden did. Many other presidents have done so as well, including Trump himself.
Most importantly, when President George W. Bush asked the Department of Justice in 2005 whether he could sign bills using an autopen, his lawyers concluded:
The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.
Case closed, right?
Not to Trump, who claims that “this conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.”
He added that the “American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”
Trump is using this pretext to direct Bondi and Warrington to investigate whether Biden was mentally fit to carry out his duties, whether his aides covered up his decline, which documents were signed using an autopen, and who directed Biden’s signature to be affixed to them.
At first glance, this seems to be just another example of Trump’s pettiness and vindictiveness.
After all, he can use the findings of this investigation to embarrass the man who defeated him in the 2020 election, a stinging defeat that Trump has never gotten over.
Predictably, Biden wasted no time to hit back.
“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,” the former president said in a statement shared with journalists. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
It seems as though Biden should know by now that “ridiculous” and “false” are right in Trump’s wheelhouse.
In fact, we believe that he, and many others, fail to realize what is really happening here.
“This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations,” Biden added.
We think that he is completely wrong and that this is about a lot more than that.
We believe that Trump will use this bogus decision to claim that the bills Biden has signed, the judges he appointed, and the pardons he signed are all invalid.
And that would set off the mother of all constitutional crises.
Just imagine Trump ordering laws he doesn’t like to be ignored or removing Senate-confirmed justices from the bench so he can replace them with loyal judges.
What happens then?
Of course, one might argue that even a Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority would ultimately rule against Trump, but if he goes this far, there is no way that he will abide by such a ruling.
In addition, he could argue that the high court itself lacks legitimacy because one of the justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was appointed by Biden.
We really hope that we are wrong about this, but reading Trump’s memorandum left us with a really ominous feeling… kind of like the one we had when we predicted the 2020 coup attempt and resulting insurrection.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
