Liz Chaney's belated epiphany like Paul on the way to Damascus
She helped to create the gaping constitutional hole which Trump attempted to climb through on January 6, 2021
Liz Chaney’s Oath and Honor memoir bespeaks an unacknowledged Paul on the way to Damascus epiphany about the sacredness of the United States Constitution.
At the granular level, Cheney assembles overwhelming evidence that President Donald Trump’s malfeasance and nonfeasance on or about January 6th, 2023, were both criminal, e.g., 18 U.S.C. 1512, 1001, 2383, and impeachable offenses. She voices astonishment and anger that a President would so brazenly flout his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
But Ms. Chaney’s conversion to constitutional fastidiousness seems late in the game. During her service at the State Department and in Congress and as co-author with her father and former Vice President Dick of the ultra-imperialist, chosen people book, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, Ms. Chaney championed limitless extraconstitutional, executive power: to initiate war, to substitute executive agreements for treaties, to replace transparency with secret government shielded from congressional or judicial oversight by intoning state secrets or executive privilege (she also refused to assert the inherent contempt power of Congress affirmed by the Supreme Court in McGrain v. Daugherty to force former Vice President Pence and former President Trump to testify before Congress’ January 6th Committee), to undertake dragnet warrantless surveillance of the “not-yet-guilty” in violation of the Fourth Amendment, to make obstruction of justice as a way of life at the White House, to shake down foreign leaders by conditioning military assistance provided by Congress on helping the President win re-election in violation of the Impoundment Control Act and the Federal Election Campaign Act, 52 U.S.C. 30121.
Ms. Cheney thrills at unchecked presidential power to play prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill any person on the planet based on secret suspicion that the target might become a national security threat with not a crumb of corroboration. In other words, according to Liz Chaney (and her father), the President is crowned with power to assassinate one and all at will with impunity—the power of life or death over not only every American but over every inhabitant of the globe!
Due process and separation of powers are airbrushed out of Liz Cheney’s idiosyncratic Constitution which would have horrified the Founding Fathers.
To believe, like Chaney, in a presidential power of assassination is to exhibit constitutional derangement. The text of Article II is granular, not open-ended, for example, authorizing the President to receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers and to deliver State of the Union messages. Yet not one word expresses or implies a power of limitless presidential assassination which even King George III did not claim.
Liz Chaney should not have been surprised by Trump’s unconstitutional orchestration of the insurrection on January 6, 2021, to prevent enforcement of the 12th Amendment and Electoral Count Act. She had already torn a gaping whole in the Constitution by endorsing, celebrating, or acquiescing in unchecked executive power for decades. Trump walked through the hole that Cheney helped to create.
Chaney seems clueless that the rule of law is dead the minute you begin to pick and choose which constitutional edicts or provisions to obey like picking your friends out of a crowd. Oath and Honor is replete with wonderful quotes, but Cheney omitted the quotations most important for January 6th from playwright Robert Boldt’s A Man for All Seasons:
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”