Trump ultimately intervened to ensure Kushner got his top-secret security clearance.
www.axios.com
We knew he was not eligible for a legit security clearance. What else has he done to harm the United States?
Who knows. What we do know is that Trump has exploited every flexibility in the powers granted to his high office to get most of whatever he has wanted.
Watching that happen in both petty and far more significant ways during Trump's time in office has put us in an agonizing bind: the framers of the Constitution understood that in a time of crisis, our head of state needs to be as unfettered as the enemy he faces on our behalf, whether that enemy is a peer head of state or some inanimate situation like a natural disaster, pandemic or economic collapse.
Yet we now see in ways we have never seen before, that it's possible to have elected someone to that high office who will use its powers as he wishes personally, or for his family, without restraint of norms or traditions, and not necessarily to the benefit of other Americans, never mind "all Americans".
When it comes to matters of keeping unusual secrets (Trump's Helsinki meeting w/ Putin comes to mind), or outright coverups (the spinoff of the Trump-Zelenski phone call) or to matters of who gets to see sensitive information gathered by our and allied intel agencies, we begin to understand --if we never did before-- that we are at the mercy of our own assumption that our President, as a public servant, always has American interests at heart even though he's human and can make mistakes. If he puts himself first, however, we don't always have ways of correcting his behavior even with the (usually way too drastic) tools of impeachment and removal from office.
That said -- and so acknowledging that having laws in place doesn't mean a scofflaw will observe them-- we should at least talk about what some legislation to rein in a President run amok on exercising power for personal benefit might look like in 2021 and forward, no matter who wins the election. Even if it's piecemeal legislation aimed at specific threats Trump's behavior happens to have brought to public attention. After all, it's been piecemeal fashion that Congress has implicitly let slide some of its own oversight powers to the executive branch, for whatever reason or just through inattention.
The tricky bit there of course is how a right-leaning Supreme Court of our own times thinks about powers explicitly or implicitly permitted to the president by action or inaction of the Congress in previous years. But I'd be proud to think that Democrats in federal government might join in considering certain restraints upon powers of the presidency, even as a Democrat serves in that office.
For instance, maybe the ultimate power to grant access to intel should not rest with the Presidency. Everyone in that high office needs counsel on such decisions and may or may not get it. But maybe it should be more like the President needs permission to grant access to our sensitive intelligence, not just counsel. Permission from whom, let the arguments begin, so how about next year, and in Congress?
