Adler warns of 'Constitutional Crisis'

A Constitutional expert stood before a jam-packed Coeur d’Alene crowd Thursday night and explained the frailties of one of America’s oldest founding documents against the country’s contemporary political climate.

Dr. David Adler, a Constitutional historian marking his eighth annual appearance to the area, delivered a captivating no-notes presentation entitled “Constitutional Conservatism And The Limits Of Presidential Power” to 188 attendees at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, in which he urged that presidential power has ballooned beyond conservative interpretations of the framers’ intent.

“When the framers created the presidency,” he said during the event — sponsored by Adler’s Alturas Institute, The Idaho Humanities Council, the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, Cd’A TV and the Coeur d’Alene Press — “they sharply curtailed the newly-minted president’s executive powers. That phrase meant simply the authority to enforce laws and make appointments to office. That was it: sharply limited, [with] no conception of granting the president a prerogative power that would allow him to act in an emergency against the law or in absence of law, because that would be too much discretion.”

Adler went on to say that expanding executive power did not — and does not — fit into the view of Constitutional conservatism.

“Even though, in later years, over the last couple centuries, you would later hear presidents assert they have emergency power or prerogative power,” he said, “that argument could not be entertained by any self-respecting Constitutional conservative. It represents great violence to the framers’ intentions.”

Adler said the original intent was for the president to serve as administrator-in-chief, rather than commander-in-chief.

“If the president is flaunting the law or ignoring the law,” he said, “then he is not taking care to enforce the law.”

Adler made this speech during a particularly timely moment in executive lore, as President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was subpoenaed Wednesday to testify before the United States Senate.

“The framers would not recognize the presidency that they created in 1787, so vastly different is it,” Adler said. “We know, in the last few days, Congress has issued subpoenas and threatened to hold the attorney general [William Barr] in contempt. We know the president has thrown down a blanket refusal to comply to subpoenas, refusing to let aides or former aides go to the Hill and testify.”

Adler said the notion of a president refusing to comply was unthinkable during the nation’s infancy, and that for more than a century, Congressional power was unreviewable. It was President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adler added, who changed the scope of presidential power with the invention of executive privilege to combat the anti-Communist rhetoric of Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1957.

Executive privilege has been flexed and tested and — to Adler, historically abused — by President Richard Nixon’s attempts to obfuscate the Watergate scandal, President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings and now President Trump’s handling of both the Mueller Report and the concealment of tax documents. Adler said he worries about exact remedies but postulated an archaic but plausible theory: hiring a sergeant of arms to incarcerate those who don’t comply with subpoenas, including presidents themselves.

“It sounds a little bit funny,” he said, “but imagine the theater of it all.”

Ultimately, Adler warned the crowd of what he considers a Constitutional crisis spawned by both an unpopular legislative branch and a defiant President Trump.

“For a president to throw down a blanket refusal is a deliberate effort to make him untouchable,” Adler said, “beyond the reach of the law, exactly what the founders feared when they embraced the concept of the rule of law in 1787.”

The lecture is now available for viewing through Cd’A TV’s YouTube channel.