Jonathan Bernstein: “It turns out that the bureaucracy isn’t just a check on the president’s ability to get what he wants; it’s a critical source of expertise on the difficult tasks of governing a country of more than 300 million people that also happens to be the most powerful in the world. When a president decides to spy on his domestic opponents even after the agencies that normally do such things turn him down, you get the ‘plumbers’ and the Watergate criminals and the clownish cover-up. When a president decides (or passively allows) the National Security Council staff to carry out an arms-for-hostages swap with the profits diverted elsewhere, despite congressional prohibitions and executive-branch reluctance, you get Oliver North sending a cake and a bible to Iran.”
“This time, it’s Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a cast of other characters in and out of government who apparently forced out the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine so they could run the show themselves on behalf of a president who is even less willing to accept the constraints of the job than Richard Nixon was. The results were, as always, comically tragic. Or tragically comic. We can only hope that future presidents finally learn this lesson and stop trying to find shortcuts around the executive branch. It just doesn’t work.”
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