Let’s assume that the next administration, and Congress, all agree that Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department – using it to punish political enemies – was a bad thing and can’t happen again.
How do they go about doing that? We (and they) can’t rely on the good will of a future president – we see how well that worked out.
Can this be done through legislation? What would the wording of such a bill be like? Or do they need a complete re-organization of the DOJ?
Anything that can be done through legislation can be undone through legislation, so that only protects the DoJ so long as there’s no Trump-like person in office.
Amending the Constitution to make the DoJ strongly independent would be better protection, but still not absolute, if a later amendment gets enough support.
But you also have to establish a culture in the DoJ, from the top to the bottom, that they simply do not bow to political pressure, of any sort. Prosecute based on the facts alone, and damn the President.
Amendments are so hard to enact; a second amendment to repeal the first would be even less likely. I’m in favor of this approach. It goes on my lengthy list of fixes to the Constitution that are needed to make sure this Never Happens Again.
The problem with this, at least as I read it, is that it’s a form of giving up. Let’s take a realistic best case scenario* of the Democratic candidate winning in 2028. In order to change the culture, that POTUS would have to purge all of Trump’s lackeys. If those lackeys are following a “simply do not bow to political pressure of any sort” standard, that means they get to stay in their positions despite the Democratic POTUS not wanting them there.
I don’t know what would have to be done to keep a fixed DOJ from being broken again. I do know that in order to fix it (and therefore to keep it from breaking again), Trump’s lackeys need to be purged.
*. Although even in the unrealistic best case scenario of Democrats taking both the House and Senate after the 2026 mid-terms, impeaching and convicting Trump and Vance, and thus making Hakeem Jeffries POTUS, the above would still apply.
Reform SCOTUS. I think that’s 90% of the problem. Maybe 99%. A truly independent, non-political SCOTUS would have stopped most, if not all, of the violations of due process and rule of law that have occurred under this administration.
This does not work though.
The president will just keep firing people who do not do his bidding till he finds one that does.
That culture can be wiped out very fast.
I think the solution is an amendment that breaks the hold the executive has over justice which really should be a wholly independent branch of government (it already is supposed to be but the president controls the DOJ…therein lies the problem). The president can appoint people on a pre-defined schedule and that’s it. No firing people he doesn’t like on a whim.
And somehow fix how judges are appointed and confirmed. That is well and truly broken. When the senate decided to refuse to have hearings over a judge Obama nominated you know the system is broken.
Yes, which is why I also said you’d need to establish a DoJ that is “strongly independent”. It won’t be the current DoJ with a new paint job. Yes, you’ll likely have to fire a whole lot of the current staff, and fundamentally re-build it. Appointments to management positions should not be made by politicians, or political appointees. DoJ should be in complete control of their own hiring, and should almost exclusively promote from within. There should be minimum standards in place regarding how long a person should have done Job X before being considered for Job Y. Appointment to the top job should be made by a committee of the senior DoJ leadership, guided by such guidelines.
Yes, this will not be easy, or clean. Yes, it might fail. But the current system has already failed. It’s like doing CPR on someone whose heart has stopped. At that point, it’s kind of silly to worry about how you might end up with a worse result; the patient is already dead.
When people do something that wrong, and that evil, having them give up is not considered to be a problem.
It would be great if they simply left, but I doubt they will. Handcuffing the next Democratic POTUS by making a rule that “the POTUS can’t interfere in the DOJ because politics” only plays into the hands of the Republicans, and will make it even harder to remove those Trump appointees. That’s what I meant.
I’m not really sure anything else can be done - recent Supreme Court decisions seem to have established that there is no way for Congress to create a truly independent agency other than the Federal Reserve.You can say an agency is independent , but it really isn’t if the president can fire Bondi and Blanche. States and counties/municipalities often keep prosecution and some other functions independent by having a multiple executive system where the Attorney General/county prosecutor is independently elected. (Sometimes the chief fiscal officer is also independently elected. ) But that would require a constitutional amendment - and I’m not at all certain that’s a realistic hope.
Like they would still be in place and unindicted once the Democrats get in power?
They might be, if the next Democrat is the sort to hesitate about taking decisive action when needed because of the old fashioned theory of “it just isn’t done that way”. It’s happened before (see Joe Biden and Merrick Garland) and it could happen again.
It’s tough to fix anything with more laws when the root of the problem are people abandoning norms, ignoring existing laws, and all three branches abrogating their responsibilities. Laws are written with the assumption you have a group of sane, responsible people governing.
Exactly. And getting those people (the ones abrogating their responsibilities) to change their minds and start behaving responsibly is almost certainly impossible. Therefore the only way to begin fixing things is to remove from power the people that broke it in the first place. Once they’re removed, we can then talk about which types of technicians are needed to fix the specific damage that has been done, but until that happens we’re stuck at square zero.
Read what has actually been written. It will not be, cannot be, such a simplistic solution. I’m advocating a complete redesign of the whole mess. Hell, if I thought it had any chance of happening, I’d advocate a complete redesign of the entire system of government in the US. Your whole system was built on a flawed foundation, and that foundation is now completely rotted, to boot.
I agree but the problem is fixing this system would mean the people currently in power, who broke it, would be those trying to fix it. I think you can see the problem with that.
The alternative is probably a violent process and that is likewise terrifying.
I can’t see a good route out of this mess.
I’ve been wondering about a Presidential Code of Conduct. Breaches of the Code could be used as evidence for impeachment. The code would consist of fairly mundane, non-controversial things of the type that previous Presidents abided by anyway. Stuff like not using the office for personal enrichment, divestment from businesses and use of blind trusts, not renaming federal property or installing personal branding, not using federal resources for private business interests, not interfere with criminal investigations and prosecutions. Other stuff too but that’s the general idea. It would be deliberately fairly bland so that Republicans can’t disagree with any of it
Wouldn’t really matter - whether Republicans disagree witht the code or not, you have to have a House willing to impeach and a Senate willing to convict. Which is really the current problem more than the president’s behavior - at least part of the reason he didn’t do these things in his first term was becasue he wasn’t emboldened by the SC decision giving him immunity and the knowledge that the Senate acquitted him after he was impeached for Jan 6
Absolutely anything can be used as grounds for impeachment. Didn’t like his tie could be grounds for impeachment. It is not a law, it is a political process and it can be whatever congress wants it to be at that time. In general congress should be able to point to things more important than a lousy tie but they can do what they like here.
And the current reality is there is no way to get 2/3 of congress to impeach and then convict. I honestly wonder if congress would manage to impeach/convict Trump if he nuked New York (that would probably be sufficient but even that I cannot say for sure).
Impeachment/conviction is very, very hard to do.
He was impeached twice…and reelected.