Our Time is Running Out

The system of government under which the United States of America has operated for well over two centuries was constructed by men who knew and feared the dangers of concentrating political power in any one person or faction. The tripartite structure they designed was intended to render that condition impossible in this nation, and for nearly our entire history it has been so. But that is no longer the case. The expectation that the three branches of our government would always restrain any one or two of them from acquiring and exerting absolute power has been and is being defeated under the current President and Congress.

In years past, the Judicial and Legislative branches have frustrated prior Presidents from overreaching their authority. There was never a Congress or Supreme Court willing to accede to whatever the erstwhile Chief Executive wanted to do. But, since 2016, President Donald Trump has arrogated to himself powers and authority never before claimed by a U. S. President, and the Congress of the United States has consistently failed to restrain him. To be sure, there have been attempts by Congressional Democrats to do that but the Republicans that have controlled either the Senate or both Houses during that period have successfully mooted those efforts, including the Senate’s refusal to convict an impeached Trump on even one of the counts of impeachment when the evidence for his guilt was clearly demonstrated, in the course of the House’s impeachment hearings, to any unbiased observer.

The Judicial branch has ruled against the president in several important cases but not one of those rulings has had any immediate restraining effect. President Trump has so effectively co-opted the Department of Justice that the Attorney General of the United States, the nation’s chief judicial officer, now behaves as Mr. Trump’s own attorney, despite protests by literally thousands of current and former federal prosecutors. In his quest for ever-greater power, Mr. Trump has single-handedly damaged the credibility of our government on the stage of world opinion by reckless decisions, affronts to our traditional allies, and by publicly rejecting the counsel of his own intelligence agencies in favor of policies and viewpoints of the leaders of nations actively opposed to the interests of the United States.

In addition to all of that, President Trump has been chiefly and personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands – soon to be hundreds of thousands – of Americans by his flagrant and outrageous mishandling of a deadly pandemic now raging in this country. The first and most important duty of any American President is to the welfare of the American people. Mr. Trump, in failing to direct efforts to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and by his deliberate and willful deceptions as to the true danger that it continues to pose to the people of this country and to the entire world, is guilty of the most serious dereliction of duty in the history of the American Presidency.

The members of Congress who have, by actions or inaction, enabled this shameless assault on the very people who elected them, are no less guilty. It was and is their sworn duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They have deliberately and persistently refused to perform that duty. We, the People of the United States of America, must do our own duty in November to recover the freedoms that we have allowed our elected representatives to steal from us. Two centuries of Americans who have striven and fought and died for those freedoms demand that we do so.

John Olsen, St. Louis, MO