One of the many knocks on Donald J. Trump as president is that he violated “institutional norms," i.e. had nothing but contempt for the right and proper way of doing things. For instance, he treated the media with undisguised contempt, repeatedly lambasting journalists in crude personal terms. Trump’s behavior was and is deemed unworthy of the high office he held. Quite true, that; I entirely agree.
But there’s a problem with such criticism: It comes mainly from people who themselves display scant respect for institutional norms. Democrats and progressives held up their hands in horror at Trump’s bad behavior but they really aren’t much better than he is. A case in point is Representative Maxwell Frost, Democrat of Florida and all-too-typical specimen of Gen Z. Invited on stage at a Paramour concert in Washington DC, Frost took the opportunity to parade his ideological bona fides by shouting “Fuck Ron DeSantis!” How’s that for an institutional norm?
Right back atcha, Maxwell.
But perhaps we should not judge Rep. Frost too harshly: He hasn’t got much in the way of role models. There was stupid old Nancy Pelosi, tearing up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech on national television. There’s the execrable Sunny Hostin, who opined on The View last week that white women voters are mere tools of the patriarchy, with no minds of their own. And there’s Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, who recently hosted a Jew-bashing mini-Nuremberg Rally under the dome of the US Capitol.
Institutional norms tend to get elbowed aside when Democrats and progressives find their ambitions frustrated by popular opinion, a judicial ruling, or some pesky item in the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court suddenly became “illegitimate” when it acquired a conservative majority that tends to look askance at the comrades’ extravagant claims on behalf of untrammeled state power and imaginary rights. The Electoral College is an intolerable affront to “our democracy” because it complicates the task of transforming America into a postmodern people’s republic. Words like woman and mother have to be replaced by person who is pregnant and chest feeder because, you know, the transgender community!
Just recently, the wrangling between Biden and the GOP House majority over the debt ceiling inspired Democrats and progressives to claim that a power granted to Congress by Article One of the Constitution is actually a dead letter. They made out that the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that the public debt of the United States “shall not be questioned,” empowers the president to borrow money without congressional approval—negating Article One, Section 8, which stipulates that Congress alone has power “to borrow Money on the credit of the United States.” Details, details!
No less a progressive luminary than Lawrence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law emeritus at Harvard Law School, has lent his support to this novel constitutional theory. Which is awkward, because back in 2011 Tribe said just the opposite.
Of course, the Dems’ Fourteenth Amendment theory is rubbish. And despite all the tub-thumping in its favor, our ridiculous president shrank from provoking both a constitutional crisis and a fiscal crisis by trying to go around Congress and borrow money on his own authority. Perhaps it occurred to him that people might not judge Biden Bonds to be a sound investment.
Certainly, there’s a case to be made for respecting institutional norms and discharging public business in regular order while honoring the nation’s founding principles. I’m all for it! But the people who’ve been clamoring for President Biden to violate his oath of office and toss the Constitution into a trash compactor respect and honor none of that, however loudly they proclaim their devotion to “our democracy.” Never mind what they say—just watch what they’re doing.