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Ryan LaRochelle is a senior lecturer at the Cohen Institute for Leadership and Public Service at the University of Maine. He is a member of the Maine chapter of the national Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the views of the University of Maine or the Scholars Strategy Network.
In the past few weeks, President Donald Trump issued a series of social media posts in which he threatened to attack civilian infrastructure in Iran, warned that “all Hell will reign down” on the nation, before finally declaring: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump eventually backed down from his threats as the U.S. and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire, but Iran still controls the strait, and ongoing peace talks show only limited progress.
As his popularity has declined and he has struggled to control events during his second term, Trump’s rhetoric has grown increasingly worrisome. Attacking civilian infrastructure such as bridges and power plants and annihilating an entire civilization would be classified as war crimes. One of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb, said in a recent interview that Trump is “clearly insane.” His former press secretary Stephanie Grisham claimed he “is clearly not well.”
Trump’s recent outbursts have prompted calls from both sides of the political aisle to use constitutional tools to remove him from office. Dozens of Democrats in Congress advocated impeachment and some conservatives including media personality Tucker Carlson and former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have urged Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. The amendment outlines the process of presidential succession and also allows the president to voluntarily transfer power temporarily to the vice president, which has occurred several times while presidents underwent medical procedures. Section 4, which has never been invoked, allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare the president unable to carry out his duties and remove him from office, transferring power to the vice president.
The Constitution’s delicate system of checks and balances, however, does not operate on its own. It will take courageous leadership in government, be it the president’s cabinet or Congress, to constrain the president’s worst impulses.
Mainers need to look no further than former U.S. representative, senator, and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen for an example of such courageous leadership. During his first term in the House, Cohen — a Republican — found himself on the House Judiciary Committee investigating a president of his own party. Cohen recognized that the Constitution provided the tools to protect the nation from a dangerous executive, but only if leaders used them.
In the midst of the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon, Cohen argued that “Our laws and our Constitution are and they must be more than a pious wish, more than a sanctimonious recital of what we should prefer but will not insist upon because we who hold the public office are more than simply craftsmen and draftsmen who hammer out legislation for the benefit of the people of this country. We are the keepers of the flame, the symbol of this Nation’s ideals. And we do the greatest disservice when we allow that flame to be diminished or snuffed out.” Cohen was the first Republican to break with the party to advance impeachment proceedings against Nixon, ensuring that the constitutional system remained intact.
A decade later, Cohen, then serving in the U.S. Senate, again found himself in the midst of a constitutional crisis during the Iran-Contra affair, when the Reagan administration circumvented Congress and engaged in a secretive and illegal foreign policy program in Iran and Nicaragua. In his notes on the joint House-Senate investigation, Cohen wrote that “Speed of action is not the object of a democracy. A King is faster than a Congressman. They [the framers] decided that the measure of a democracy should be deliberation, it consists of debate, discussion, and dissent, so that its leaders might act wisely.”
Cohen understood that the American constitutional system was designed to work slowly — this was a feature of the system, not an obstacle to be trampled over by unilateral action by the executive branch. He eventually signed on to the Iran-Contra Committee’s majority report — one of only three Republicans to do so — which criticized the Reagan administration for failing to engage Congress in the conduct of foreign policy.
It seems unlikely that Congress or Trump’s cabinet will remove him from office. But Congress can limit his ability to continue waging war. The war in Iran will reach its sixtieth day on May 1, which means Congress will decide soon whether to authorize the conflict, in accordance with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The Constitution outlines the powers of Congress in Article I for a reason, as they imagined that it would be the most powerful and decisive branch of government.
The question is whether members of Congress will muster the courage to perform their constitutional duty to reign in President Trump’s unpopular and unilateral war in the Middle East.
