Few took it seriously when Donald Trump vowed to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and, in fact, he barely finished his oath of office before he took a blowtorch to the thing.
Article I, Section 9, the emoluments clause? For losers.
Article 3, Section 1, Separation of Powers? He cannot respect judges who push his buttons, especially the Mexican ones.
Actually, he casts a wide net: His efforts to deport 11 million people, ban Muslims, surveil houses of worship, torture, target terrorist family members, and revise libel laws violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments.
This president is not merely a threat to the rule of law; he is a constitutional pipebomb. That preserve-protect-defend thing wasn't so much a pledge as a drunken dare.
But Trump's call to prosecute Hillary Clinton, which isn't a president's call to make, is especially insidious. By now, Americans know the motive behind it: Trump and his media sycophants need to deflect attention from the Robert Mueller investigation by having a Benghazi-level kangaroo court examine the connection between Clinton and Russia that has been debunked countless times.
The bogus charge, raised by people who edit Breitbart News, is that Clinton sold U.S. uranium to Russia in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation. Only the donations were made two years before she became Secretary of State, and Uranium One deal was approved by nine federal agencies, including two that vet how foreign purchases affect national security. It's been established that she played no role in the process.
Yet in his most desperate moments, Trump wanders the halls of the White House in the naked eye of 1 a.m., plaintive and ghostlike, calling out for justice. "There is so much GUILT by Democrats/Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out. DO SOMETHING!" read one October tweet.
And: "Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems. People are angry. The American public deserves it!"
Actually, the public deserves more than this pathetic dodge, and pressuring DOJ to investigate a political enemy is proof of how little respect Trump has for our democracy.
There is a term for countries where leaders hector law enforcement to scrutinize and prosecute their rivals. They are called banana republics.
Trump wants to be one of those countries, as evidenced by his affection for dictators and con men. It is an alarming distortion of how the judicial system works, and a reminder that this president is unencumbered by clue with regard to checks and balances.
For his part, Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn't eager to weaponize the DOJ for Trump's political attacks. When Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, suggested Tuesday that it "looks like" Clinton's behavior warrants the appointment of a special counsel, Sessions humiliated him: "I would say 'looks like' is not enough basis to appoint a special counsel," he snapped.
That argument doesn't work well with Trump, who fired James Comey because he didn't like where the FBI director was looking.
That's why Congressman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is worried: If Sessions bends to pressure to investigate Trump's rival, he says, "It could spell the end of the DOJ as an independent institution."
The question is whether the institutional heft of Justice Department can resist the pressure of a desperate and possibly unhinged president. And as we know from the first 10 months of this administration, government officials are as disposable as constitutional norms.
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