The President* Is in Violation of His Oath of Office
Three years ago this December, Mike Pompeo was a little-known Tea Party flying monkey congresscritter from Kansas who spent his time advising members of the United States military to disaffect. Two years before that, he was simply a little-known Tea Party flying-monkey congresscritter from the lab-rat state of Kansas who was trying to convince people he gave a damn about poor folks. In other words, for most of his public life, Mike Pompeo was a fairly run-of-the-mill Republican legislator who was wrong about most everything and lied about it badly.
Now, because everything is insane, this guy is the Secretary of State. He's overseas now, acting as a de facto accessory-after-the-fact in the gruesome slaying of Jamal Khashoggi, trying to keep from selling Yellowstone to the Saudis for a bag of magic beans, and not doing at all well at it. From The New York Times:
After meeting on Tuesday with top Saudi officials, including King Salman and Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Mr. Pompeo told reporters early Wednesday before leaving Riyadh, the Saudi capital: “They made a commitment to hold anyone connected to any wrongdoing that may be found accountable for that. Whether they are a senior officer or official, they promised accountability.”
The Saudi regime, of course, is notable for its transparency and willingness to hold itself to account for its crimes. Why, just last month, in the course of its genocidal campaign in Yemen, the Saudis blew up an ambulance. After an extensive investigation in which at least one of the the participants probably had to go out for coffee, the Saudi government cleared itself. I swear, Pompeo's lucky he didn't leave Riyadh wearing a barrel.
Pompeo, of course, is backed up by the President* of the United States, who's likely in hock-along with his spalpeen-in-law-with the Saudis up to his eyeballs, and who, during a completely batshit interview with the AP, said we were being terribly unfair to his good friends and lien-holders. Via CNN:
"Here we go again with you know you're guilty until proven innocent. I don't like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh, and he was innocent all the way as far as I'm concerned."
I was going to write about all of this in the context of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, but a fellow named Jonathan Ladd from the Brookings Institute and Georgetown University got there first Wednesday morning on the electric Twitter machine. (Read the whole thread.)
There is absolutely no question that the president* is acting against the Constitution and in violation of his oath of office in continuing to conduct private business the way he and his family are conducting it, and there is also absolutely no question that this hedging about the murderous Saudi royalty-for reasons that very likely have as much or more to do with his business interests as they do with oil or some vague threat from Iran-is precisely what the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution was designed to prevent.
The Founders in convention in Philadelphia were very clear on precisely what the threat to republican government a grifting chief executive would be, at least according to Mr. Madison's notes. (One study found that the members of the convention discussed corruption in office on 25 percent of the days the convention was in session. They recognized that rampant corruption was a form of tyranny all its own, and that it likely always would lead to more conventional forms.)
During the ratification debate in South Carolina, C.C. Pinckney, who was the primary author of the Emoluments Clause as it was written into the Constitution, argued that the clause was necessary precisely because the presidency was a democratically elected office, and not an inherited royal title.
Kings are less liable to foreign bribery and corruption... because no bribe that could be given them could compensate the loss they must necessarily sustain for injuring their dominions... the situation of a President would be very different.
They were so concerned about it that the prohibition against emoluments was one of the few things that they transferred to the Constitution from the failed Articles of Confederation, amending the original only to the extent that Congress was empowered to determine the propriety of a proposed emolument from a foreign power, and this was a prerogative that the early Congresses guarded quite jealousy.
A Congressman named James Bayard from Delaware anticipated this president* by a couple of centuries when he argued:
If presents were allowed to be received without number, and privately, they might produce an improper effect, by seducing men from an honest attachment for their country, in favor of that which was loading them with favors.
As Jonathan Ladd points out in his Twitter thread, the only reason that the Emoluments Clause hasn't been dropped on the president*'s feathery head is that Congress long ago abdicated its constitutional duty to do so. (Ladd also points out that the descent of the Clause into functional irrelevancy pretty much demolishes any theory of constitutional "originalism," but that's a fight for another day.) As Ladd tweeted:
The best procedure to enforce the emoluments clause is impeachment, but the president's party in Congress just decided that they didn't care about foreign bribes, Constitutional text and tradition be damned. So now that Constitutional clause is unenforced and dead.
Right now, at this moment, it appears that the President* of the United States is assisting a foreign government in a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the political murder of a resident of the United States, and it is fair to say that he's doing so because to do otherwise would be detrimental to his personal business interests. James Bayard would slap him silly.
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