From suicide pact to Faustian bargain to the art of the deal: Bowing to presidential power | David Adler

The evolution in America of rationales for the cascading growth of presidential power, which began in earnest in the post-war world and followed a trajectory through the expression of the Imperial Presidency before reaching new heights in President Donald Trump’s authoritarian pretensions, has long found traction in the misappropriation and misuse of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s famous aphorism, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

Apologists for a sweeping scope of executive power — both Democrats and Republicans — found sustenance in imagining a world in which U.S. national security interests were imperiled if the projection of presidential power was handcuffed, depriving the chief executive of the latitude to act with “speed and dispatch,” yet another misappropriation of a famous aphorism, this one from Alexander Hamilton’s writing in the Federalist Papers.

The assertion during the early days of the Cold War of a presidential emergency power, succored by the purported need to act on a moment’s notice in the realm of international relations, stilled the objections of the few politicians willing to challenge claims of power that that threatened the metes and bounds of the Constitution, lest they face career-ending accusations of being soft on communism. The purchase of silence from members of Congress spurred the growth of unilateral executive warmaking in Southeast Asia and beyond and fed the springs of executive privilege in domestic affairs. At all events, the claims of presidential power were ascendant, while congressional power was in retreat.

President Trump’s predecessors in the Oval Office, politically skillful in varying degrees at issuing warnings about the threats to the nation of a diminished presidency, invoked notional understandings of the separation of powers, checks and balances and the rule of law, while expanding the scope of executive power. Their words were not necessarily cynical, but rather a reflection of the institutional ideology that they inherited and, in turn, advanced. Meanwhile, the growing interest of congressional representatives in careerism and longevity in Washington, trimmed their appetites for challenging the president. In time, Trump’s domination of the Republican Party and, with it, the raw power to “primary” and defeat GOP incumbents, as demonstrated in the election losses of Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, has revealed the futility of the Faustian Bargain that GOP Senators have struck with Trump and his exercise of untrammeled power executive power that has vitiated constitutional limits.

Sens. Cassidy and Cornyn, typical of GOP Senators, have been Trump accommodationists, bowing to his demands and conditions at nearly every turn. Their loyalty to Trump — the Faustian Bargain — however, was never repaid. They certainly now understand the Art of the Deal.

The loss of an election and, with it, the opportunity that a U.S. Senator has to promote the national interest, however, hardly compares to the abject surrender of the constitutional authority of Congress, in both foreign and domestic affairs, in the face of authoritarian power grabs that have defaced republican principles. Congressional Republicans’ complicity in President Trump’s soaring assertions of absolute, unilateral power in the realms of foreign relations and national security, which have sacrificed American leadership, credibility, stability and safety, will tattoo resumes and careers.

Trump’s war of choice in Iran, from which there is no viable exit strategy that will allow him to save face, reveals the infliction of financial pain on everyday Americans, will render our nation less, not more, secure. If nothing else, Trump has taught the Iranians what was previously an unarticulated, indeed, unmentionable lesson, one that was simply a matter of supposition: Iran could, indeed, convert the Strait of Hormuz into a strait jacket on the world’s economy.

Participation in a Faustian Bargain — by congressional representatives and community leaders — does not serve Madisonian constitutional principles but rather leads to constitutional corruption and collapse.