The US Constitution is a Monarchist Relic and Should be Overthrown
If the most powerful nation on Earth were a parliamentary democracy, rather than a Presidency, and its Prime Minister had posted a tweet like Trump’s, he would already be in jail.
He would certainly already be facing a revolt by his parliamentary colleagues, and would likely be deposed from the leadership within 24 hours.
Instead, we are left with Trump still in power, lacking the authority to declare a War--at least that power rests with Congress--but waging one all the same, with the US political system powerless to stop him.
Americans speak in reverent tones about enacting Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. But have you looked at the damn thing?
To activate Section 4, the Vice-President, and the majority of Cabinet, have to agree to write to Congress recommending President’s removal. These are people Trump appointed! Vance, Hesgeth, Rubio, and the rest? They’re almost as mad as Trump.
At least, if that miracle does happen, then the Vice President become Acting President.
Now, shut your eyes and have a guess what the next step in the Section 4 process is. You done? Good. Now check the quoted paragraph. Were you correct?
Unless you’re a Constitutional Lawyer, you’re likely to have guessed that the Acting President does the next thing. After all, the role has literally just been created in the first paragraph of Section 4. I certainly expected that.
But no, it’s the PRESIDENT who has the next step!:
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office...
If you’re scratching your head wondering why the President--you know, the guy who’s just been certified crazy by the underlings he appointed--is given the next step, the answer is in fact simple. As a document drafted two hundred and fifty years ago, it emulates the political structure that dominated at the time, and that was a Monarch limited by a Parliament. The only difference between the Monarch and the President is that the President was elected.
And look what a safeguard that’s turned out to be. Rather than getting congenital idiots, we get malignant narcissists.
My simple proposition here is that the almost religious reverence with which Americans venerate their Constitution is misplaced. It is a Monarchial relic, and your revolution only took you half way to a democracy. Had you not ossified your system of government on a Monarchial structure, then possibly you would have evolved something like the British system, which itself evolved as the power of the Monarch waned.
Americans, please stop letting your Constitution limit what you think you can do to overthrow a tyrant. Your Constitution is what enables a tyrant in the first place.
Professor, I concur that the US Constitution is in need of reform and revision. The list is long that requires updating from its founding as an undeveloped and rural country to an industrial power, to an urbanized superpower, a post industrial economy, an advanced technological economy that has begun its third iteration as a post industrial economy. And the aforementioned is not discussing the evolution of our cultural and demographic milieu and how Federalism has also evolved.
Your solution of a parliamentary system is antithetical to the American culture. We are a people that is distrustful of the concentration of political, social and economic power in the main. Our elected and appointed leaders, our capitalists, and our cultural elitists are of the opposite thinking since the late 19th Century through today as long as they are not on the receiving end. The respite from these so-called elitism was in the Progressive era till WW I and The Great Depression, New Deal, WW II then briefly during the post war era till approximately ‘73 with briefer respites during the Church Hearings, Watergate reforms to only return to a neoliberal economics reminiscent of the 1920s and a neocon foreign policy that is reminiscent of gunboat diplomacy but on steroids American style.
A parliamentary system in the vein of the British system or what you conveniently omitted the Zionist Knesset in Israel is not the solution whatsoever. Both of those so-called democratic systems are dysfunctional at minimum and have been so at their founding. The Brits maintained an empire created by a mixed monarchical, House of Lords aristocracy and House of Commons directly elected by the people system that transformed the Asian continent into a colonial project for vast swaths that immiserated Asia for approximately two centuries.
As for Israel it was illegitimately and illegally founded on a 19th Zionist philosophy by atheists and agnostics of Jewish “diaspora” and converts to Judaism to a homeland that wasn’t theirs and remains the captured land of the Palestinian people. Israel began as a terrorist state masquerading as a Parliamentary republic and has devolved into a fascistic genocidal state with ambitions of a Greater Israel Empire and to hell with the inhabitants of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan part of Turkey and even possibly the GCCs.
So much for improved governance of parliamentary systems as modeled on Western systems.