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Updated 1 hour ago
Is it possible — perhaps even likely — that terrified liberals and Democrats are right about President Donald Trump?
Yes. I want to be fair here. It's quite possible they are right.
He holds the awesome power of the federal hammer in his hands. And now, he's exactly the kind of imperial president Democrats never, ever wanted.
Yet there is a solution.
If Democrats are serious with all their caterwauling and shrieking about Trump, if they are truly worried about a chief executive running amok, there's one thing they must do: Support Trump's nomination of a conservative candidate for the Supreme Court in the mold of the late, great Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
If not, then all the Democrat hair-on-fire theatrics, all the hand-wringing about Trump and “alternative facts” (when they were silent about Obama administration falsehoods) tell Americans a story.
This tells Americans that Democrats aren't remotely serious, and that all the left is really doing is screaming about lost power.
If you're truly worried about Trump's overreach, you'll demand an originalist on the Supreme Court.
What the nation needs now is someone who understands that the Constitution was written not to bow to the impulses of an imperial presidential personality, but to hold it in check and protect our liberty.
Yet for decades, the bipartisan establishment didn't care. Some years, Democrats held the presidential hammer and other years, Republicans held it.
Republicans sometimes complained about Democrats referring to a “living document,” but they, too, used that idea of a malleable Constitution and an increasingly muscular executive.
It allowed liberal courts to legislate from the Canlı Bahis bench. It removed responsibility from an increasingly supine Congress that deferred to the presidency. And it put the people on the outside, where the establishment wanted them. That's corrosive, and it erupted with Trump.
One who recognized this long-term danger to the republic was Barack Obama. Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, he rightly chastised President George W. Bush.
“I taught constitutional law for 10 years,” candidate Obama said in 2008 on CNN. “I take the Constitution very seriously.”
He took it seriously all right. Obama seriously grabbed even more power.
When the Democrats had control of Congress, he pushed through his ObamaCare health plan, now falling of its own weight.
That cost the Democrats control, and when he was at an impasse with a Republican-dominated Congress, he tossed his concerns about an imperial presidency out the White House window.
And he announced he'd bypass Congress. “I've got a pen and I've got a phone,” he said, and began writing his own laws, like a boss.
If you want a valuable examination of presidential overreach, I refer you to Ilya Shapiro in The Federalist. Shapiro characterized Obama's imperial presidential overreach this way: “It's as if the goal was to show Donald Trump how it's done.”
The way to stop this is to hold the Constitution close. And to have Supreme Court justices interpret the Constitution just as it was written, for this very reason: American liberty.
John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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