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Dershowitz Folly and the Imperial Presidency
I will be hardly the first person to condemn Allan Dershowitz over his expansive statement on the Senate. But I will put it in stark terms. His idea and he is alone on this, that the president can do whatever he deems in the public interest is crazy. It is the last step into the Rubicon. If we accept this, the imperial presidency just took the final step into a dictatorship. By his standards. Watergate was fine. By his standards, taking dirt from foreign governments in internal matters is fine. By his standards, there is nothing to constrain a president. This is not about Donald J Trump, but about the institution. What is even more amazing, is that Dershowitz made the exact contrary argument during the Bill Clinton impeachment.
He calls himself neutral, but he is not. He is a partisan and one has to wonder what he thinks he will gain from declaring the presidency nothing more or less than Caesar. The party that once stood for the constitution is taking this and embracing this argument. This is coming from no less a liberal, so we are told, than Dershowitz, who is helping to cement a new form of government.
Rome once had a senate that stood to the executive. They once were a Republic. In fact, Rome was the model for the American Republic. But once they crossed the Rubicon the Senate became a joke. This is exactly what we are undergoing…