In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.
It was a good question from DC Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Millett since it brings the arguments and their implications clearly into the open. Reframe the question and the absurdity of this proposition becomes even more clear. If you hire someone to administer your estate, can they burn down the buildings on your estate or chop it up into parcels and sell it off? Presumably not. You hired them to run it, not to destroy it or sell it. It’s not theirs. They were hired for a specific task. That person is your employee. The president is hired to administer the country and enforce it’s laws for four years. He doesn’t own the country or its properties.
These absurdities are just the degenerate spawn of the corrupt and ahistorical “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, a whole concept totally alien to the people who created the presidency and one whose main intellectual roots go back to a Nazi ideologue. It’s the guiding theory of the Roberts Court, except of course when the president is a Democrat. Corrupt theory in, degenerate spawn outcomes out. That’s just how it works.
