I don’t know quite when I started using that word, but it was around the time that I saw that there was this systematic effort to free the president from the limitations upon his use of power that have always been sort of in the water we drank and the air we breathe. And one of the very first things that started down that road with Bill Barr was when the president, not liking the fact that Congress had declined to appropriate money for his border wall, declared an emergency, and then immediately said, This isn’t really an emergency. I just want to do it quicker. And Barr’s Justice Department went to court to defend his ability to do that. So what is that? That’s the appropriations clause. The Constitution says that the Congress appropriates money. Congress repeatedly, explicitly refused to appropriate that money. And the president says, Forget it. I’m just going to go ahead and do it anyway. So that’s one example of a power being overridden. Then, throughout 2019, there’s this vast array of acts to stonewall efforts by the Congress to do oversight, to get information, to get documents, to talk to witnesses, even in connection with the impeachment. And they basically just said, Nah, we’re not going to give it to you. Of course, another element of it is, well, we don’t like the Mueller report, so we’ll just override it. So the list goes on and on and on. And what it amounts to is a systematic effort by this administration, under the direction of Bill Barr, to dismantle the checks and balances on the system. When you eliminate virtually all the checks and balances on the president’s power, what do you have left? You have an autocrat.
Donald Ayer
