Trump, GOP Break The Law To Prevent Democrats From Fulfilling Their Constitutional Duties

One of the themes of my writing over the last year and a half is that the moral rot inside the Republican party is the biggest threat to our democracy and that Donald Trump is merely the apotheosis of that decay. And the excessive focus on the excesses of Trump and his administration minimizes the importance of the role of the Republicans in Congress in not only enabling Trump but also in the withering of our democracy. Matt Yglesias puts it more bluntly, stating, "Every single Republican Party member of congress wakes up every single day and decides to abrogate constitutional responsibilities and abet Trump’s corruption."

That Republican dereliction of duty goes well beyond ignoring the substantial evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It goes well beyond not only ignoring the substantial evidence of obstruction of justice by Trump himself and members of his administration but also actively engaging in that obstruction themselves. The poster boy for that effort is Devin Nunes who has seemingly spent the entire year subverting the investigation by the House Intelligence Committee.

It goes beyond ignoring Trump's violations of the Emolument's Clause. Those violations range from using the helipad at Mar-a-Lago for Trump Organization activity to actively staying involved in the Trump Organization business to selling access to the President through his hotels and clubs to seemingly accepting bribes from foreign governments through his existing businesses. All these violation are ignored every day by Congressional Republicans.

It is more than Republicans just destroying the norms of governance, from the refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing to changing Senate rules in order to ram through Neil Gorsuch's nomination with just 50 votes to ignoring Democratic "blue slips".

Today, Republicans in Congress are complicit in clearly illegal activity by the Trump administration that actively prevents Democrats in Congress from exercising and fulfilling their constitutional duties. According to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the executive branch is prohibited from filling vacancies for positions that require Senate confirmation with interim officials for more than 300 hundred days without putting forward a nominee that the Senate could consider. There are currently twelve Trump administration officials who are in violation of that statute.

There is, however, actually a potential silver lining to this illegality. Any actions taking by these officials have "no force or effect", meaning that some Trump administration actions such as rolling back the limits on methane emissions may be subject to a legal challenge.

But the important thing for our democracy in the long term is that, under existing law, Democrats should be able fulfill their constitutional duty to advise and consent on the people who would fill these administration positions. They are being prohibited from their duty not only by Trump but also by Republicans in Congress who refuse to abide by and enforce the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Trump may be interested in deconstructing the administrative state, but he can not simply eliminate positions that are required by law. That may seem like a petty thing in the scheme of Trump's continual abuses. But it is just these types of trivial erosions of the rule of law that slowly allow an autocrat to emerge. In Hungary and now Poland, dictators have emerged with the consent of their Parliaments. We are not there yet, here in America, but Trump and the Republicans have already taken us further down that road than anyone would have believed.