In one regard, President Donald Trump’s elevation to the presidency has done us a favor. It’s made crystal clear the fact that the U.S. Constitution is grossly inadequate in defining the powers of the presidency and in establishing penalties for abuses of those powers. The framers of the Constitution couldn’t have foreseen that a president would willfully exploit these inadequacies, so the onus is on us to fix them.
It shouldn’t be possible for a sitting president to profit financially from his position. It shouldn’t be possible for a president to appoint family members to high administration positions. It shouldn’t be possible for a president to shield his financial dealings, both prior to and during his time in office, from public view.
Those are things we knew when his administration began. Since then, we’ve witnessed him conspiring with a hostile foreign government and getting away with it because his party controls Congress, firing people who are investigating him and attacking members of a Constitutionally-protected group of Americans doing their jobs.
We wouldn’t be in this position except for an outmoded constitutional provision that assigns more than one vote per person to some, and less than one to others. This needs to be fixed.
