Laws: What are they good for? Absolutely everything!

Without the creative genius of our Founding Fathers, we might not be celebrating July 4 this year as the world’s strongest ongoing republic and leading sponsor of fledgling democracies wherever the spark of freedom struggles to take hold against authoritarian rule.

Since 2016, the American experiment in democracy has battled Republican Party forces — led by twice indicted, twice-impeached ex-President Donald J. Trump — intent on deconstructing the checks-and-balances form of government detailed in the Constitution.

Had domestic terrorists responding to a call for action from the former and widely disgraced leader of the executive branch of government succeeded on Jan. 6, 2021 in overturning the 2020 presidential election results, America would most likely now be governed by a president-for-life in the form of the criminally minded Trump.

Fortunately for a majority of Americans, the Founding Fathers sought to prevent tyranny by crafting the Constitution, realizing at that crucial point in American history that laws were more important than men, and that government was a necessary evil to allow for a peaceful society to survive for decades, if not centuries.

A Constitution that calls for the peaceful transfer of executive power from one election cycle to the next is a process that Trump and his minions attempted to destroy during their violent attack on the Capitol as Congress gathered to ratify election results that confirmed Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.

Lawmakers were carrying out their constitutional duties that day, and they were successful even with the threat of violence by Trump’s rampaging storm troopers just a few hallways away.

This is just one reason why the Constitution is important today: It continues to serve as the main structure for keeping the nation together. The president, any person in Congress, or the Supreme Court is accountable to it, not above it. The states still reserve certain powers to themselves. Individuals are still protected from both federal and state governments.

Founding Father George Washington, the nation’s first president, put it this way:

“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution, which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.

“But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”

In contrast, Trump as part of his ongoing futile and illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results — including finding dirt on the son of the man who roundly defeated him at the ballot box — in effect called for termination of parts of the Constitution.

Trump claimed that conversations between Twitter and officials charged with investigating the personal activities of Hunter Biden revealed “a massive fraud” so serious that it “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

George Washington and his fellow Founding Fathers must have seen Donald coming more than two hundred years ago. Sorry, Donald, you can’t usurp the legal powers of that crucial document.

Still, Trump, through a series of “informal amendments” to the Constitution, has potentially planted legal time bombs that could blow apart our country depending who occupies the White House in years to come.

Back in February 2021, shortly after Trump skipped Biden’s inauguration and escaped Washington, D.C. for the friendly — and exceedingly garish — confines of his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, Jonathan Rauch detailed five Trump ‘amendments’ to the Constitution for The Atlantic, that he said “profoundly altered our system of government.”

Here they are:

• Amendment 1. No president shall be removed from office for treason, bribery, or any other crime or misdemeanor, no matter how high, should a partisan minority of the Senate choose to protect him.
• Amendment 2. Congressional oversight shall be optional. No congressional subpoena or demand for testimony or documents shall bind a president who chooses to ignore it.
• Amendment 3. Congressional appropriations shall be suggestions. The president may choose whether or not to comply with congressional spending laws, and Congress shall have no recourse should a president declare that his own priorities supersede Congress’s instructions.
• Amendment 4. The president shall have authority to make appointments as he sees fit, without the advice and consent of the Senate, provided he deems his appointees to be acting, temporary, or otherwise exempt from the ordinary confirmation process.
• Amendment 5. The president shall have unconstrained authority to dangle and issue pardons for the purpose of obstructing justice, tampering with witnesses, and forestalling investigations.

Rauch prefaced this list of Trump’s informal amendments by noting, “. . . No one of them is epochal or entirely unprecedented, but together they add up to something new, large, and dangerous.”

Rauch concluded his article by pointing out that Trump losing the presidential contest in 2020 was unable to put in place a proposed sixth amendment: Amendment 6 (not adopted): The president may ignore or violate court orders.

“Still,” Rauch wrote, “the successful Trump amendments are destabilizing enough. They give the presidency a degree of unilateral discretion and impunity that the Founders took great pains to preclude. Together, they make it obvious and undeniable that Congress is no longer the first among equals in the constitutional hierarchy, or even a coequal branch. The presidency is supreme.”

The Founding Fathers shaped a republic, a democracy, based on a living document — the Constitution — that provided laws to protect and defend us from external and internal enemies, including Trump.

Federal, state and local lawmakers who fancy themselves smarter than the folks who legally forged a country for “We the people” — elected officials who are now calling for a “new Constitution,” need to spend time getting familiar with just how this historic document keeps America great.

Thomas Jefferson, who had a hand in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, offered this thought once the war was won and America was launched as a democratic force on the world stage:

“In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from the mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Trump and his enablers, especially his legal counselors who pretend to know and understand the Constitution, need to end their attempt to deconstruct the country and rewrite the Constitution to reflect an authoritarian America led by criminals intent on lining their pockets at the expense of the citizenry.

With July 4 just a couple of days away, let’s all find a way to send a message to those who would tear down our country. Let’s find a way to love America again, as our Founding Fathers created it.