Adam Schiff: Trump left behind an autocrats' road map. We're going to destroy it.
Not long into former President Donald Trump’s tenure in office, it became increasingly apparent that the greatest threat to our democracy came not from a Kremlin intent on subverting our elections but from within, from an executive willing to use his power maximally, without regard for other institutions or the norms of office long associated with the presidency.
For decades, we assumed these norms were inviolate, that presidents couldn’t use their office to enrich themselves, use the Justice Department to go after their enemies, use federal employees and federal properties as campaign workforces and assets or ignore and belittle the powers of Congress. If these abuses were not per se illegal, they were unimaginable and beyond the pale of American politics. Or so we thought.
We were wrong. It turns out the norms that made our system of checks and balances work so well could be violated with near impunity, provided one condition was present: that one of America’s two great parties put the interests of a president above all other considerations.
The potent remedy the founders provided for a corrupt chief executive has proven ineffective — even for a president who sought illicit foreign help in his election and fomented an insurrection against his own government — in the face of one party’s determination to maintain power at all costs. The founders were deeply concerned about exactly this phenomenon, an excess of what they called “factionalism” and what we now call “extreme partisanship.” And the failure of that remedy to be equal to the evil of factionalism has put our democratic republic at grave risk.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-left-behind-an-autocrats-road-map-were-going-to-destroy-it/ar-AAOGZt4
As I said on another post: It's not just Trump. It's the whole God damn GOP.
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