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Heartland Conference vote allows Southern Columbia to play Wyoming Area

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Teen pleads guilty to role in friend’s grandfather’s murder

<p>There are times in Washington when events shift into fast forward. The last two weeks have felt faster than that.</p><p>To recap the most head-snapping events: After initially denying that he had urged Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, President Trump boasted that he had done just that &#8212; and publicly asked China to investigate Biden too.</p><p>Then, after Trump denied that his demand to Ukraine was linked to his decision to withhold U.S. military aid, text messages between U.S. diplomats and an account from a Republican senator confirmed that it was.</p><p>As the evidence mounted, the president accused House Democrats of plotting a &#8220;coup&#8221; and suggested that a senior member of Congress should be arrested for treason.</p><p>On Friday, House Democrats issued a subpoena to the White House for documents about Trump&#8217;s dealings with Ukraine and his aides&#8217; alleged attempts to cover them up. That kicked the impeachment inquiry into overdrive and probably means a ferocious court battle ahead.</p><p>One thread ties these collisions together: This president doesn&#8217;t appear to know or care much about the Constitution, especially the limits it puts on his power.</p><p>&#8220;I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want,&#8221; he said last year, referring to the part of the founding document that establishes the executive branch. But that&#8217;s not what Article II does at all.</p><p>Article II is the president&#8217;s job description. Like any job description, it spells out what he should do &#8212; and, by implication, what he shouldn&#8217;t.</p><p>It says that the president is commander in chief of the armed forces; that he has the power to appoint officials once Congress authorizes their positions; and, most important, that &#8220;he shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed.&#8221;</p><p>It doesn&#8217;t give him the authority to ask foreign governments to investigate a potential opponent in the next election or block U.S. military aid to an ally to help his reelection campaign.</p><p>After trying out several explanations for his actions, Trump belatedly tried to cloak them in virtue, saying they were part of a hitherto undetected campaign against global corruption.</p><p>&#8220;I have an absolute right, perhaps even a duty&#8221; to investigate corruption, he tweeted, including asking &#8220;other countries to help us out.&#8221;</p><p>But no president&#8217;s rights are absolute. And if Trump had read the Founding Fathers, he would know they saw foreign governments meddling in American politics as a threat, not an opportunity.</p><p>&#8220;As often as elections happen, the danger of foreign influence recurs,&#8221; warned John Adams, who would become vice president under George Washington.</p><p>&#8220;This is basic stuff,&#8221; another future vice president said. &#8220;Foreign donors, and certainly foreign governments, cannot participate in the American political process.&#8221; That was Mike Pence in 2016.</p><p>Article II limits the president&#8217;s powers at home too. It doesn&#8217;t enable the president to order Congress to do his bidding, a feature that seems to have surprised Trump. &#8220;I find Congress more difficult, frankly, than many of the foreign leaders &#8230; because they have their own views,&#8221; he said in June.</p><p>He treats the judicial branch of government the same way. In Trump&#8217;s view, judges who rule in his favor are good; judges who rule against him are bad, or Democrats, or (in one case) &#8220;a Mexican.&#8221; His lawyers have argued that Article II protects a president from being investigated for any crime whatever, a superpower none of his predecessors claimed.</p><p>But the real tip-off to Trump&#8217;s autocratic view of the presidency is the way he describes his political opponents as enemies of the state.</p><p>He calls Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, guilty of &#8220;treason&#8221; for paraphrasing Trump&#8217;s conversation with the president of Ukraine in a disrespectful way. &#8220;He was lying about the president of the United States,&#8221; Trump complained.</p><p>In monarchies and dictatorships, &#8220;treason&#8221; often covers discourtesy to the head of state. In Thailand, a man was jailed in 2015 for mocking the king&#8217;s dog. North Korea&#8217;s ruler, Kim Jong Un, ordered an aide killed for dozing off during his speech.</p><p>But in the United States, even lying about the president is not treason, which is carefully defined in (you guessed it) the Constitution as: &#8220;levying war against [the United States, or] adhering to their enemies.&#8221;</p><p>The Constitution protects Schiff&#8217;s freedom not once but twice: in the 1st Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, and in the debate clause of Article I, which protects members of Congress.</p><p>Impeachment is in the Constitution too, in Trump&#8217;s favorite part, Article II. It&#8217;s a legitimate exercise of Congress&#8217; power, even if he doesn&#8217;t like it &#8212; not an extraconstitutional coup d&#8217;etat, as he claims.</p><p>As for whistleblowers, they&#8217;re not in the Constitution, but they&#8217;re protected by laws that are even older.</p><p>In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress declared it a &#8220;duty&#8221; of U.S. officials &#8220;to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors.&#8221; The law was passed after Rhode Island jailed two Navy officers for blowing the whistle on a superior.</p><p>Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution. Instead, he&#8217;s attacking it &#8212; by inflating and abusing his powers, ignoring laws he swore to protect and demanding unconstitutional reprisals against anyone who opposes him.</p><p>No matter what the president imagines Article II to contain, he doesn&#8217;t have the right, &#8220;absolute&#8221; or otherwise, to distort U.S. national security policy to damage a political rival or stonewall legitimate inquiries from Congress.</p><p>He needs to take an hour of executive time and read the Constitution.</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Doyle McManus</p><p>Guest Columnist</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Doyle McManus: Trump should read the Constitution