When a President Punishes Scrutiny, He Forgets Who Holds the Power in Trust

I read that a president of this republic has proposed an “anti-weaponization” fund, that a senator has taken alarm at it, and that the same president, displeased, has publicly lashed out and blessed a challenger against him. I learn also that the senator now withholds his support for the president’s chosen attorney general, Todd Blanche, and that the president replies by saying the senator never objected to this fund before the endorsement of a rival. In these bare facts there is much I do not know; yet there is one thing I see clearly. When the executive punishes scrutiny, the true question is not the senator’s consistency, but the president’s claim of power.

For to understand political power right, as I once wrote in the Second Treatise of Government, we must remember that it is a trust, placed by free and equal men in certain hands for one end only, the preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates. Any authority that cannot show how its measures serve that end stands already under suspicion. Here the fund is said to be “anti-weaponization,” yet I am not told what weapons it restrains, who commands its purse, or against whom it is chiefly aimed. To demand those particulars is not faction, but duty. Free men do not sign blank cheques to those who govern them.

The senator, we are told, uses his “lame-duck power” to delay or deny his assent to the acting attorney general, and does so in express protest of this fund. Many will say he acts from pique, or from new courage taken once his own election is lost; others that his earlier silence proves a want of sincerity now. Perhaps so; the hearts of men are dark to other men. Yet the private springs of his action, while fit for moralists, are not the chief matter in politics. The question is simpler: may those entrusted with legislative power use it to oblige the executive to give account of new instruments of force? If not, what is the legislature for?

In my day I called “prerogative” that power whereby the executive sometimes acts without, or even against, the letter of the law, pretending public good. I argued then, and I repeat now, that such power is tolerable only so long as it is manifestly employed for the people’s benefit and remains in their hands to continue or recall. A special fund, loosely described, devised by the very man most likely to benefit from its shield, and pressed upon the public with little explanation, bears all the marks of prerogative asking to be made permanent. At that point, the people’s representatives are bound to pause, to question, and, if need be, to refuse.

When a president answers that pause not with reasons but with retaliation, by endorsing a challenger and rebuking the senator’s change of heart, he forgets himself. The magistrate who says, in effect, “you did not oppose me before your own interests were touched” confesses more than he intends. He admits that support or silence has been taken as the price of favour, that candid opposition will be punished, and that offices and endorsements are instruments to bend other powers of the commonwealth to his private will. That is what I meant when I warned against any man being judge in his own case. For if the purse, the sword, and the careers of those who should restrain him all depend on his pleasure, what is left but arbitrary power?

I do not say, upon such slender reports, that this single fund, or this single nomination, amounts to tyranny; such words must be reserved for a long train of abuses, not a solitary contest. Yet I do say this much with assurance: a president who treats legislative resistance as personal treachery has already mistaken the nature of his office. The legislator, or whoever shares in that power, sins not in slowing an appointment until the terms of a new instrument of force are made plain; he sins rather if he lets it pass in silence for the sake of courtly peace. Resistance at such moments is not a breach of trust, but the keeping of it.

Men are the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world not to be prey to each other’s will, but to live under a common rule of reason. The law of nature forbids any of us, however exalted, to harm another in his life, liberty, or possessions; human laws that contradict this are but force dressed in ceremony. I judge the present quarrel, therefore, not by who is popular, but by who remembers that power is answerable. The senator who makes his support conditional on an account of this fund acts, in that respect, as a guardian of the people’s trust. The president who treats such conditions as insolence walks toward a power no free people can safely grant.

In such a case, what remains unknown to me is whether this disputed fund, once fully exposed to the public understanding, would indeed prove a necessary shield for all, or a cloak for the few who already wield power.