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| Cannon, Smith, Getty Images |
Before he was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that preceded the opening of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump had been for years under unremitting attack from his political enemies.
Some usually over-cautious news reports referred to the most
recent attack on Trump as an “attempted assassination.” But there were some
pedants. First reports tended to avoid the term “attempted
assassination,” settling on the term “alleged assassination attempt.” This
level of prudence was unnecessary, as unfolding events made plain.
The assassination attempt failed – sort of. The victim,
Trump, was left with a torn ear, and many commentators noted that, by the grace
of God, Trump survived. As the shot was fired from a commanding height about 130
yards distant from the rally podium, Trump had turned his head slightly,
spoiling the mark of the disappointed and, later, dead assassin.
Trump was well protected at the podium and later hurriedly
whisked away, but not before raising his arm above a crowd of security agents and
shouting, “Fight, fight, fight…!”
Later, Trump wrote in a text message to his supporters, “I
will never surrender.”
Neither will President Joe Biden surrender.
Following a disastrous debate with Trump during which his
obvious frailties were vividly on display, some leading lights in the Democrat
Party have since called upon Biden to abandon the race for the presidency and
leave the spot open to a new and less frail crop of younger ambitious
Democrats. Others, U.S. Senator from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal among them, are
hungry for more data. Why not, in the ringing words of President John F.
Kennedy, “pass the torch to a new generation,” as Biden had promised to do
when, during his first successful presidential campaign, he had identified
himself as a one-term, caretaker president?
The short answer to this question among Biden and his supporters
appears to be 1) Biden has left things undone during his first term in office
and who is better able than he to complete the necessary work that lies before
the nation? 2) It would be dreadfully inconvenient at this point to choose
someone else to spearhead Biden’s neo-progressive attempt to refashion the future
face of the nation. And, of course, the Democrat Party would surrender money
and delegate votes by so doing.
Democrats, some critics have noticed, have become visionary
because they find it counterintuitive to defend Biden’s failed policies,
domestic and foreign. In American politics, if you cannot defend current
policies, you talk in glittering terms of the future, and you paint your
political opponent with a broad, tar-filled, Senator Joe McCarthy brush as “an
enemy of the people” and “a threat to democracy.” All such claims should be taken,
in Mark Twain’s formulation, “with a ton of salt.”
Democrat attempts to jail the felonious Trump have encountered
some speed bumps, the latest being a decision rendered by United States
District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon who tossed
in the ashcan of history the case against Trump brought by fantasist Special Counsel
Jack Smith.
"Upon careful study of the foundational challenges
raised in the Motion, the Court is convinced that Special Counsel Smith’s
prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our
constitutional scheme – the role of Congress in the appointment of
constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures
by law," Cannon wrote in her lucid, carefully crafted decision.
"The Framers gave Congress a pivotal role in the
appointment of principal and inferior officers.
That role cannot be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused
elsewhere – whether in this case or in another case, whether in times of
heightened national need or not," she noted. "In the case of inferior officers, that
means that Congress is empowered to decide if it wishes to vest appointment
power in a Head of Department, and indeed, Congress has proven itself quite
capable of doing so in many other statutory contexts. But it plainly did not do so here, despite
the Special Counsel’s strained statutory readings." Cannon added.
"In the end, it seems the Executive’s growing comfort
in appointing ‘regulatory’ special counsels in the more recent era has followed
an ad hoc pattern with little
judicial scrutiny," she concluded.
The wheels of justice – which hold that no one is either
above or below the law – grind exceedingly slowly. The most we can
expect of judicial decisions is that they are deliberative and just. Cannon’s
decision is both. Any decision upholding Smith’s unconstitutional case against
Trump would have resulted in future judicial anarchy.
It’s always best to stop the Titanic before it hits the
iceberg.
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