How We Got Into This Mess: When Leaders Push Past the Constitution and the Supreme Court Stops Holding the Line A lot of people talk about the Constitution, but how many people actually understand what it says or why the Founders wrote it the way they did? The Founders had one big goal: to make sure no one person or group could grab too much power. Remember, the Founders had lived under a King and didn’t like it. They wanted the exact opposite for the United States of America. They built a system with guardrails - limits - to protect everyone's rights and not just the rights of those holding power. These guardrails only work when two things happen: 1. Leaders respect the limits 2. The Supreme Court enforces the limits. Over the last several years, both of those things have broken down. That is how we ended up in the mess we’re in today. You have to ask yourself, “What did the Founders actually want?” I think the Founders cared about a few simple ideas: No one is above the law...
For more than 250 years, the presidency and the country have rested on a simple foundation, the oath. They are just 35 words spoken by every president with a hand on the Bible, promising to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath is supposed to be the anchor that keeps the office tied to the rule of law, no matter the pressure, no matter the politics. But the system was never designed for a president who uses lawsuits as a regular political and personal tool by filing cases against media companies, state officials, private citizens, and even federal agencies within the Executive Branch. My memory goes all the way back to the Eisenhower Administration, and I have never seen anything like it. Legal analysis and historians note that no previous president has sued his own government while simultaneously asserting broad immunity from the laws that bind everyone else. That combination alone pushes the presidency into territory the framers ...