An open letter to Chief Justice John Roberts. President Trump told New York Times reporters last week that as commander-in-chief, he has only one limit on his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He’s negated what Republican voters, and everyone else’s voters, elected the Congress to do. Govern. He said out loud his rationale for what has been obvious since his inauguration last year. By executive order, and phony declarations of emergency conditions, he has wholesale removed checks and balances within the government.
At the same time, the Supreme Court has created the only person who is above the law, so there no longer is constitutional check on his power. I cannot believe the people who landed in France on D-Day, who froze during battles in Korea, or persisted in the face of IEDs in Iraq, ever imagined that the real threat to democracy in America would become far more likely because Republicans in Congress would refuse to fulfill their sworn responsibility to govern and the Supreme Court would exhibit more allegiance to a unitary executive theory than rules-based decision making and legal due process.
Your absence of loyalty to the Constitution, and separating a president from responsibility for his actions, has fostered piracy and murder on the seas, political kidnapping of foreign political leaders and seizure of their country’s assets, and rampant ICE terrorism in by our communities that is enforced by caging and deporting without due process of law suspected undocumented immigrants. At the moment, you cannot be impeached for dereliction of duty. That may not always be so.
Larry Cervelli
West Chesterfield