Trump symptom of constitutional crisis

The Jan. 6 House of Representatives’ committee has provided extensive evidence of president Donald Trump’s criminal efforts to stay in office, despite losing the election. Yet, he has yet to be charged with sedition.

The only way out of our constitutional crisis is to perp walk Trump in belly chains. Failing to do so will only embolden him or one of his allies to try again. If that happens it will be game over for U.S. representative democracy.

Trump is a symptom of 233 years of accumulated unlimited power of the presidency. As I show in my new book, “We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few,” the cause of this danger is the Constitution itself. The framers concentrated power into the hands of a single person to protect the propertied elite in order to provide a minority check of the majority.

The constitution provides few enumerated powers for the executive branch, most of which can be checked by the other branches. The presidency was designed to prevent the rule “of one, a few, or many,” as Madison famously put it in “Federalist Paper #47.”

But, unlike the “powers forbidden” to Congress, they never specified which powers are forbidden to the president. By not explicitly prohibiting any power to the president they designed it to have virtually unlimited power.

The constitution’s silence on powers forbidden to the president is the cause of our constitutional crisis. Since Washington, presidents have exploited the uncertainty about what presidents may not do to assert powers they do not have. They have been making up their own powers where there is none.

With every new claim, executive power continues to accumulate and grows unchecked.

The list of manufactured powers is long. It stretches from Washington expanding the standing army for the genocidal war against Native Americans to Obama’s use of secret evidence to justify assassinating American citizens by drones.

Trump has attempted to go even further by restoring the rule of one. The open-ended power of the presidency enabled his seditious attempt to use the executive branch to steal the election. He then called out armed far right militias to attack the Congress, during which they killed and injured Capitol Police and hunted vice-president Mike Pence.

Any one of these plots should lead to the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland bringing charges that result in Trump’s arrest and criminal trial. This seems unconnected to the FBI’s seizure of 15 boxes of highly classified documents the former president took because he believed government records belong to him. This violated at least three and as many as five other federal laws, including the 1917 Espionage Act.

So far the rules of the system have yet to hold Trump, his inner circle, and Republican allies in Congress who supported his coup attempt, criminally accountable.

A sitting president who conspired with his inside circle and outside armed white nationalist groups to seize control of the government by deadly armed force is still at large and campaigning for the presidency.

The problem goes far deeper than Trump. He is only the latest in the long line of presidents who embraced, expanded, and invented presidential powers not subject to constitutional limits. He is also yet another propertied elite escaping the same accountability for his crimes the rest of us would face.

Our constitutional system, which empowers the rule by the propertied few, now seems incapable of preventing our further descent into an authoritarian system of the rule by one. Hauling Trump away to jail in belly chains is a necessary first step to preventing this from happening again.