A Republic, Not A Swamp
By I&I Editorial
IsuuesInsights.com
The acrimonious departure of Richard V. Spencer as secretary of the Navy over the issue of President Donald Trump stepping in on behalf of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher is a model case of a duly elected commander in chief exercising the fullness of his prerogatives under the Constitution. This is exactly the kind of aggressive decision-making Trump was sent to the White House by voters to undertake.
It may take a long time for the lesson to be learned, but this president is determined to teach the multitude of underlings in the executive branch that they weren’t elected to anything; they work for him, not vice versa, and their job is to follow their boss’ orders. (You know, like all those millions of stiffs in the private sector at whom government employees like to sneer.)
A court martial this year cleared Gallagher of murder but convicted him on the far-lesser offense of posing with an enemy corpse for a photograph. In addition to a punishment of time served, Gallagher was demoted in rank. Trump countermanded that measure and returned Gallagher to his previous rank of chief petty officer, ruffling the feathers of those within official channels.
There can be no question Trump is the only president in memory who would have done this, Republican or Democrat. One has to go back generations to imagine another willing to defy the Pentagon bureaucracy and its patrons in Congress. And whoever such a past president might have been, a brash iconoclast such as Teddy Roosevelt perhaps, would not have been pitting himself against an establishment leviathan anywhere near as formidable as today’s.
“I no longer share the same understanding with the commander in chief who appointed me, in regards to the key principle of good order and discipline,” Spencer claimed in a sour departure letter. The naval chief had tried to make a deal with the president himself – going over Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s head – to persuade Trump to allow the Navy to undertake usual protocols regarding Gallagher, including a review board. Oddly enough, in doing so it was Spencer who was defying the much more fundamental protocol of dealing with your own immediate superior. Esper described himself as “flabbergasted.”
Official Washington may be enraged with Trump for bypassing accepted procedure, but Trump’s unorthodox use of his commander-in-chief powers is common sense to millions of Joe Sixpacks who see in Gallagher nothing but a hero who let his commitment to dispatching terrorists to their final reward become overly exuberant in the course of doing a very dangerous job.
In the same vein, until Trump it was a given for presidents to wait until days before they handed the baton to their successor before issuing pardons; pardons were thus a shameful, indefensible way for a president to cheat on behalf of an ally or interest – the quintessential example being Bill Clinton’s pardon of financier and tax evader Marc Rich on his final day in office in January 2001. Among Rich’s offenses was doing business with Iranian oil interests while 52 Americans were being held hostage in Tehran in 1979-81.
Trump threw out the book on pardons and commuted sentences, stepping in on behalf of the famous immigration hardliner Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt of court, for one, and unknown offenders such as non-violent Florida drug dealer Ronen Nahmani, who had no criminal history and yet was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
That’s exactly the kind of travesty that inspired the Framers of the Constitution to bestow the president with pardon powers. What’s more, Trump doesn’t seem to time pardons; he apparently carries them out when analysis confirms that the recipients are worthy – again, far more in line with the Framers’ vision than with modern Washington’s sneaky, petty ways.