In sports, when a star player gets injured the coach invariably says “somebody has to step up”. In other words, some player who had a lesser role has an opportunity to show he can do more.
Right now, in the USA, we don’t have a star player. The most charitable thing we can say about the Office of President of the United States is that it’s basically vacant.
We have someone living in the residential quarters of the White House (the “Occupant”). He dresses up with a clean shirt and tie. He slithers about in reptilian fashion and people come to see him. He says things like “we’ll see what happens.” His family dresses beautifully and they scurry around with massive security details. They whisper in the Occupant’s ear and it has nothing to do with anything. Its all bullshit. Nobody knows anything. There’s no there there.
The Occupant doesn’t preside over anything. So, he’s hardly the President. He’s more or less the heckler in chief. He calls his friends and complains about the ineffectiveness of his staff…people who gave their all to him when he didn’t have a snowball’s chance. He sends out tweets in the middle of the night to remind us that he’s a little bit stupider than he was the day before.
I’m a bit of a student of Richard Nixon. When the wheels started coming off in the Nixon Presidency and Nixon became more and more irrational his staff would just ignore some of his more bizarre orders and hope that Nixon would forget that he gave them. Then, at the very end, when
the pressure was more than he could take Nixon just shut down. His last Chief of Staff, Al Haig, would bring in a stack of papers to be acted on and Nixon would wave him off and say “you handle it Al…I can’t do it”. By then, it was just a matter of days and he was gone.
We’re not at end times yet with the Occupant but you can see them from here. People are going to have to step up. The Occupant isn’t going to go easy. His ability to wreck havoc has to be checked until that happy day when he’s gone.
This is where Congress comes in. Without the Congress the Occupant can’t put fuel in Air Force One and the Supreme Court can’t keep the lights on in the Court’s Law Library. Through the power of the purse and the power to declare war, the Congress is the preeminent branch of government…if it choses to be. It’s been decades since it embraced its rightful role.
Anybody in the Democratic Party who aspires to lead this country had better show us what they’ve got right now. They’ve got to take the lead in containing the damage the Occupant is capable of doing and then campaign tirelessly for Democrats in 2018 to further contain the Occupant and Remove him if the facts warrant.
There’s a vacuum that needs to be filled. So, who’s going to step up?