. . .i can see how failing to carry out an order is insubordination, but not sure it was reach the level of criminality.

Perhaps in time of declared war or something, but that state doesn't exist now.

Fireable, yes. Prosecutable, i kind of doubt it.

Our Constitution envisions an elected President accountable to voters. If an elected President is unfit to discharge his or her duties as President, he or she should be removed from office pursuant to the 25th Amendment. The Constitution does not contemplate that a President who is psychologically and intellectually unfit to serve and ineffectual would be propped up by his party as a figurehead while a cabal of unelected advisers and party faithful actually govern the country. If anything, this just confirms that there in fact is a “shadow state,” albeit one comprised of right-wing ideologues who put party above country.

the *fact* that donnie is unfit for office is a constitutional crisis, and more to the point, the fact that a republican-dominated congress is incapable of using the impeachment power to fix the situation is the real problem.

the fact that the staff is trying to cope is not a *constitutional* matter. all presidents have had staff to help them carry out their duties, and at times members of those staffs have done things poorly or negligently or even insubordinately. it's up to the president to manage that staff properly and fire people as appropriate.

the office, not "unfit." The two words don't mean the same thing. By its very design, the amendment is directed at situations where the president is unable to discharge the duties, not to where he or she can discharge them but does so in a manner that many consider unwise or irrational.

Presidents can fire cabinet members. If they do so, they are demonstrating their ability to discharge the duties of the office. The ability of the president to frustrate the application of the 25th amendment by firing cabinet members would be a problem unless the amendment applies only where the president literally cannot exercise the duties of the office -- for example, is unconscious and thus unable to fire a cabinet member, sign an executive order, sign or veto laws, etc.

First, the text of the relevant section:

Presuming that a President has a significant psychological defect that would render him or her “unfit,” wouldn’t he or she also be “unable” to discharge his or her duties as President? I don’t see removal happening because the Republicans would rather protect their party and maintain power than protect the Union, but I think the distinction you make is one without a difference in this particular case.

The only thing the Constitution gives us is the next election.

unConstitutional itself without an intervening crime?

What about the proposed trade action was illegal or unconstitutional?

All this time it was, again, RW projection.

Who carry out their actions in front of him, only he is too stupid to notice.

Or perhaps one step below, not a civil servant like McCabe.

And it has to be someone who reports to directly to Trump, because anyone who doesn't has a normal person above them who would notice they were disobeying orders.

they know how crazy he is
I thought that is why the daughter was brought in early on to control her dad
which has turned out to be impossible
he has no understanding of laws, decorum, politeness or procedures

All this time the theory that has been espoused by RW conspiracists is that the Deep State is a liberal group working to subvert conservatives. In this instance we learn that there is actually such a group, but it is within his own administration and is conservative. The Deep State is a right wing group acting as a shadow government.

They already thought the Republican Party was part of the swamp. Sure, this confirms that line of thinking, but so does everything else.

So they can't whine on about a Soros funded liberal cabal manipulating government at the highest levels. Not when their lord and savior, Rump, has hand picked the team. And if it is Pence, they will have to burn their "Trump/Pence" shirts. Maybe we ought to push this line of thinking just to mess with them.

as none of these people were elected

the president can then fire those people if he wants.

if the president is prevented even from firing insubordinate people, then perhaps that's a coup....

And ignorant and only concerned about his own image, he might know that his orders weren’t being carried out and then fire people. But feign fealty and kiss his ring and you can do whatever you want.

rotate people, forced vacations, cross-training, quality assurance, second pair of eyes, etc.

there are many things a good manager can require to make it extremely difficult for anyone to "go rogue".

donnie doesn't know how to do such things and doesn't care. if it doesn't end up on foxnews, it's off his radar.
this is one of the many reasons why he is such a horrendous president.

and the point of the OPed is that people, apparently dozens are going/have gone rogue

*he* is the root of the problem.

don't they need to follow the protocol or risk being accused of an Alexander Haig-like power grab?

total scumbag for other reasons, mind you, but he wasn't claiming to be president. he was only claiming to be the senior executive branch official at the white house while reagan was in the hospital and poppy was traveling and apparently temporarily incommunicado.

reporters immediately think "order of succession" when a president gets shot, and of course haig as secretary of state was below not just the vice-president but also the speaker of the house and the president pro tem of the senate.

but haig wasn't talking about actual succession to the presidency, he was only talking about being the senior executive branch official there at the time. that's all. it wouldn't make sense for the speaker of the house to need to come over and start bossing people around the west wing until the vice-president could land.



anyway, what mutiny? it's not really a mutiny if the president is still there, capable of firing insubordinate people....

All intrigue, all the time. Meanwhile, Trump sits on his golden throne tweeting into the night.

except for Kushner and he obviously isn't in on it. That's not to say ambition doesn't come into it for some, but I think he genuinely scares people. Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt told a great deal of the Palin backstory today and how they had the goods on her and were prepared to take her out but it wasn't from ambition but fear for the country that she would be a heartbeat away from a man who had cancer 3x.

it's not illegal or unconstitutional for people to form private organizations and discuss policy.
it's not illegal (in and of itself) for people in such organizations to take actions in their day jobs.

if the action taken in the day job is illegal, then it's illegal having nothing to do with any participation in a "shadow government".

if you have something more specific in mind by "shadow government"...?

the Presidents actions"

"The article asserts that the country is, to some extent, governed not by the President but by a group of people who have taken it upon themselves to moderate, modify, and even block the President’s actions, or, as the anonymous author puts it, his “worst inclinations.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-anonymous-new-york-times-op-ed-and-the-trumpian-corruption-of-language-and-the-media







.

all white houses operate as a team, not as an individual.

the word choice ("governed not by the president but by..." ) makes it *sound* coup-ish, but that choice of words goes not mean that that is what is actually going on. just because some staffers make some changes doesn't mean they're the ones "governing the country".

as long as the president can fire them for insubordination, it's not a coup. it may not even be illegal.

It is not "running a shadow government," even though it sort of sounds that way. It is simple disobedience. The President has the option of firing you if you disobey or screw up. If he chooses not to exercise that option, then that is tacit approval of your actions.

"The article asserts that the country is, to some extent, governed not by the President but by a group of people who have taken it upon themselves to moderate, modify, and even block the President’s actions, or, as the anonymous author puts it, his “worst inclinations.”


https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-anonymous-new-york-times-op-ed-and-the-trumpian-corruption-of-language-and-the-media

I am no lawyer (isn't that the way to start all great persuasive arguments)

But these people are apparently deciding what gets done and what gets seen by the President. If they are controlling the apparatus for how decisions are made and which decisions are being implemented, then they are operating as unelected leaders.

a staff can be bad or even insubordinate, but a staff's job includes weeding out information and deciding what the president sees and so on.

if the president doesn't like the way it's being done (or not done), he can discipline people, including firing and replacing them.

But the implication is that those staff decisions are usually done to control for efficiency and prioritizing.

In this case, they have admitted that they are doing it to implement or not implement policy.

Aside from that, they are doing it without his authority. The staffing decisions that you describe would be done to help a President. the ones described in the memo are being done to circumvent a President.

I find that to be a different thing. Whether it should be considered constitutional or not is above my paygrade but it certainly seems out-of-bounds. The fact that we are glad someone is doing it doesn't make it right.

and to an extent, this always happens. many people in washington have an agenda and want to put their own stamp on things.

usually, yes, these are small changes or merely differences in extent or scheduling, whereas this sounds like rather larger changes.

in theory, a president should be able to tell if this is going on and fire people.
but a good president would create an environment where his staff wouldn't feel such behavior was necessary....

The movie Dave is a charming lighthearted comedy but it could be considered a test case.

In the movie, the President goes into a coma. His staff hides it from the American people and hires an actor to take his place while the staff continues to run the Government.

I would contend this would be illegal.

In this case, the President is considered incapable of doing his duties and his staff is hiding it from the Country while they run the Government.

Discuss

*And yes I know that something approaching this actually happened during the Wilson Administration. His wife became gatekeeper and practically ran the Executive Branch after he suffered a stroke. It is debated whether she was an administrative gatekeeper or a defacto leader. It should also be noted that the 25th amendment did not exist yet.

in the movie, it's an implausibly well-kept secret that the president is in a coma and dave is such a good stand-in that, with practice, he can even give a speech or run a cabinet meeting and still fool everyone.

the implication is that it would all fall apart the instant everyone knew he was a stand-in. with the president in a coma, they'd insist on invoking the 25th.


in the present situation, there's no real secret to the fact that donnie is not remotely suited for the job. but republicans in congress are preventing removal, whether via the 25th or via impeachment.

the people in the white house have been, albeit often anonymously, letting us know just how poorly-suited he is to the job.


as for the movie, i think it should be illegal, though i don't know what specific statute would cover such a thing as concealing a presidential coma from the cabinet (never mind the public).

now, forging the president's signature on executive orders and so on, i would hope that there would be a federal statutes for that....

you don't want to confront your boss and you don't want to do what he says. So you just do something different. Maybe he notices and maybe he doesn't. If he notices, maybe he cares and maybe he doesn't. If he cares, he can fire you. If he doesn't care, then he has forgiven you. There is even a saying, "It easier to get forgiveness than approval."

The implication of both the op-ed and Woodward's book is that Trump is too erratic to give coherent orders anyway. So the best thing they can do for him is to just do whatever they think best. Don't worry, in 5 minutes he will forget or change his mind.

Bottom line, unelected enablers/handlers are running the West Wing and manipulating Trump for their own ends -- to advance their Conservative Agenda. And it is unconstitutional and immoral to do so.

they cannot just circumvent the Constitutional remedies available to them. They are suggesting he is incapable of performing his duties. That is when the legal part kicks in. It is not a good admin. aide helping the president organize his desk. It's Rosemary Woods deciding on her own to erase tapes.

It is there to be used, there is no requirement to use it.

Here is the relevant part of 25:

That Trump is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office"? Doesn't their admission set a clock in motion? I am not trying to be dense, just wanting to follow process with excruciating and scrupulous attention to detail here.

Are we both agreed this anonymous official has violated federal law at the very least?

Read the amendment. It defines a process, a formal process. Writing an op ed is not that process.

Shouldn't someone request a medical exam with a psychological report? To say there is no need to initiate a process that was put in place for such an eventuality seems beside the point. I am just trying to apply my logic to this. If I witness a crime, I have a legal and moral obligation to report what I see. So why is this different? Withholding the information is aiding and abetting. Enabling.

I hope Trump hasn't convinced people that he is above the law. I am just not ready to agree.

What should happen is different from the constitutional requirements of serving in the administration.

Anonymous op-Ed author has no constitutional obligation to invoke the 25th, and in fact may not even qualify to participate in that process.

Under the rule of law, this should not be possible. It does seem like there are people who argue both our positions.

What a crazy week.

and see how things went for the nazis who were only following orders.

Trump is a reality TV star. As long as the sets look realistic and the supporting cast sounds believable as they speak their lines, Trump will carry on as usual. Give him his Fox TV, Twitter, and the oppo media to whine, complain and fling poo at, and he's perfectly content with playing at being the US president... until Mueller takes it all away.

There is no constitutional requirement for the cabinet or any administrative official to be an obsequious toady.

One of the central tenets of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, should a person be given an order that is blatantly illegal or immoral, failure to carry out that order is not considered insubordination, so it would be hard to justify that in a court of law. As to whether this is a coup, I think it can be argued that people have been working around Trump since day one. He has just become sufficiently hard to handle that they are failing to keep the wheels from falling off the bus.

on the other hand it's not clear to me that "the resistance" is only foiling "blatantly illegal or immoral" orders.

i suspect they're also foiling ideas that are just plain stupid.

the Constitution consists of "Article 2" [sic] only.

...here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211099625#post18

"Who's agenda are they actually serving? Is Coats anywhere close to a position in government that he can credibly serve as the arbiter of this president's decisions? It's clear this insider group the author of the propaganda piece cites is working to advantage their conservative wish list. That's not patriotism, it's rank partisanship which seeks to obscure WH malfeasance and criminal behavior. They're propping up Trump like a puppet in a bizarre type of piggyback onto Putin's coup.

As enticing a prospect as this may seem for those of us who wish Trump would just drop dead, this rebel clan's subversion portends to be a serious breach of the trust of the American people, not to mention a breach of the Constitution.

This is no way for the presidency to operate. If the government is being led by a madman, then it is the responsibility of those with evidence of this to publicly report their concerns to Congress. There is no provision or clause in the Constitution for babysitting, or co-opting his decision-making. If he's unfit, they need to disengage from his service and seek to remove him from office. Nothing short of that is acceptable."

Disagreement, blindly follow all orders of the president? The president is only the Commander and Chief of the military. He is not the Commander and Chief of his departments. That's why he has a cabinet. The cabinet heads are in charge of their departments.

Even in the military, following orders is not an immediate, unhesitating, robotic response except out in the field or sea of battle where members are trained to respond immediately. There are many layers of bureaucracy and they serve to slow down top down orders.

As an officer, my job was to evaluate orders to see how best to carry them out. Frequently that would cause delay and reevaluation of an order. But in the end it was done to ensure oders were carried out as intended. Blindly follwing orders is not what the military is all about. Not if you want a functional unit.

And the other executive departments are just as independent and deliberate as the military. But civilians frequently misinterpret what following orders really means.

I find this line of reasoning peculiar. It seems that some people think that the president is a dictator who's orders must be followed to the letter and that the only alternatives to blind obedience are invoking the 25th or impeaching the bastard.

can't get away from it.

i'm thinking "hostile work environment" every time i hear donnie's voice.

ugh!

As in the military, subordinates of the President are obligated to follow lawful orders, but they also must refuse unlawful or Unconstitional orders.

there is nothing in the constitution that requires anyone to follow orders. People in the military are obligated to follow legal military orders, but again that is not a constitutional issue. Trump can fire people in his administration if he thinks they are not doing what he wants them to do.