In a recent decision, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded presidential power, and groups aligned with Donald Trump, like the Heritage Foundation, have ambitious plans for remaking the federal government. As Democrats wrestle with doubts about President Joe Biden, what is the outlook for American democracy? Are the traditional checks and balances of our system out of whack? And does the way in which Americans responded to overreaching presidents in the past offer clues for the future? This week on Political Roundtable, I’m going in-depth with Brown University political science professor Corey Brettschneider, author of The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend it.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Ian Donnis: Welcome to the Public’s Radio.
Corey Brettschneider: A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Donnis: Your book references how the 18th century Revolutionary hero Patrick Henry warned that a criminal president could undermine the Republic. Do you think democracy is on the line if Donald Trump wins in November?
Brettschneider: Absolutely, and I think that that’s become especially clear with the decision recently saying that a sitting president and a former president have immunity from criminal charges. And, you know, those charges concern Trump and January 6th and the insurrection.
Donnis: We’ll get more into that, but why do you think Trump is such a threat?
Brettschneider: Well, let’s start with the insurrection. I think the events of January 6th weren’t just a riot and weren’t just violent, although they were that. They were part of a concerted effort to stop the certification of electoral votes. Pressure was put on the vice president, which he resisted, to illegally stop the counting of those votes. Why was there an attempt to do that? It was a kind of self coup, an attempt of Trump to illegally stay in power, and that’s part of why he’s charged with what he is charged with criminally
Donnis: Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election makes him a historic outlier. And he’s done and said all manner of things that would have been politically toxic for a conventional politician. If he’s such a threat to democracy, what does it tell us that he has the potential support to win back the White House?
Brettschneider: Well, I think we really, and this is part of what the book is about, have to think more seriously about what democracy means than we often have. I think, for some people, and this includes Trump, what democracy means is the people elected me and so I can do whatever I want. And you hear Trump saying things like that often. But as I see it and as I argue it in the book, that’s not democracy. That’s a form of populism that actually risks the destruction of democracy. It’s the kind of populism that people like Patrick Henry were worried about.
So what is democracy? Democracy, of course, includes voting. It includes majority rule and the right to vote. But it’s more than that. It is about the rule of law. The idea that no person is above the law, an idea that Trump dispenses with. It’s about the right to dissent, to criticize anyone, including a president, an idea that Trump disagrees with clearly. And it’s about the idea of equal citizenship regardless of race, not an idea that he’s championed, certainly, and an idea that the court has really struggled, I think to recognize despite the legislation that we’ve won over the decades and centuries really to guarantee that right.
Donnis: You wrote in a column for the Guardian that the current threat is unique compared to some of the previous presidents, you wrote about In your new book, since Trump learned in his previous term where the choke points of democracy are. More recently, as you said earlier, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled to expand presidential power. Where will the accountability come from if the, if the biggest concern is about Trump overstepping his bounds, and if those do come to fruition?
Brettschneider: You know, I wish I could tell you that we have a system of checks and balances, the one that we learned about in grade school, that will certainly hold. But part of what the book is saying, is that what we think of as these constitutional police, these checks that are always there, actually turn out to be pretty weak. And that is part of what Patrick Henry was warning about at the founding. Start to go through them. What about the idea, the main check, that the Supreme Court and courts in general enforce the criminal law against anyone who violates them, including as Richard Nixon, was told in U.S. v. Nixon, that a president is not above the law. After the immunity decision, it’s very hard to see that that principle is as stable as it should be. Who is supposed to do the prosecution of a criminal president? It’s the attorney general or the special counsel, but who does that person work for? For the president. And so that person can be fired. And finally, the framers thought it was really impeachment that was going to do a lot of work. And even in January 6th, attempted self coup, insurrection, a failure, some bipartisanship, but a failure to remove this president. So those traditional checks are not there. It has to come. The checks, and I argue historically, they have really only come from the people themselves through elections, for instance.
Donnis: How much responsibility do Democrats bear for this situation? Because as we talk, Democrats are tying themselves in knots about Joe Biden and whether he should be the nominee. They could have resolved months ago to come up with a candidate who was younger and perhaps more forceful in prosecuting the case against Trump. What do you say about that?
Brettschneider: I mean, to my mind, as past cases reveal, we’ve had moments in American history, the election of 1800, the election of 1868, and this election, which are less about the particular person challenging the walking threat to democracy and more about the recovery of democracy itself. So to my mind, regardless of who the nominee is, the real issue here is stopping someone who is truly promising explicitly. to destroy the foundations of American democracy.
Donnis: We’re talking here with Brown University political science professor Corey Brettschneider. I have to ask you, do you think Democrats are making a strategic mistake if they stick with Joe Biden?
Brettschneider: I think that regardless of who the nominee is, and this is something that just has to be worked out, and there are questions, of course, about the president’s health that we’re going to look at in the next couple of weeks. I believe that If Democrats unite behind whoever the nominee is, that the country will come to see, despite the flirtation with authoritarianism, that that candidate is the candidate to beat Donald Trump. It isn’t about the specific nominee, it is about the issue of democracy generally.
Donnis: David Scharfenberg has kind of a contrarian essay in the Boston Globe this week discounting the idea that Trump will erode democracy. He says the federal government is so big and some of Trump’s stated goals like mass deportations are so impractical that this is more bluster. What do you make of that view?
Brettschneider: Wow, I read that piece and I was really disappointed in it because it shows a lack of understanding of how the federal government actually works. What Trump has pledged to do is to put loyalists in power and the president has an enormous amount of power, especially under the theory of the unitary executive that this court has affirmed, and an extreme sense the immunity case showed this, but also power more generally over hiring and firing. To replace people who would really uphold their oath to protect the constitution with people who are going to be loyalist to him. He didn’t understand how this worked last time around, and it was true that many of the institutions held because of people who were devoted to the constitution and the rule of law rather than to the president. But he’s certainly figured it out, and he’s reshaped the court in his image of authoritarian populism. And my worry is those checks are really gone. When you look into it, the president has enormous control over the bureaucracy, more than 2.5 million members. For instance, how is he going to do some of this authoritarian stuff? There is an insurrection act. There are enabling acts that really allow the president to aggrandize power. And there are few checks on the president when he would try to do that, especially from the court. But so I really thought that piece was off and minimizing the actual threat from those who are frankly know how the federal government works.
Donnis: Speaking of checks and balances, critics argue that institutions like the Senate are fundamentally undemocratic since sparsely populated red states get the same two senators as more populous blue states. They say the electoral college distorts. public sentiment since a number of Republican presidents in recent history have failed to win the popular vote. How do these institutional practices affect the ability of citizens to impose accountability on our politics?
Brettschneider: They certainly are limits, but there are ways around it and, accepting the constitution’s principles doesn’t mean accepting everything the way that it is. And so the idea of an interstate compact, for instance, that would replace the current system of electing a president within the electoral college, of states agreeing to throw their votes to the majority winner would be one way of reforming it. The Senate isn’t going anywhere. It can’t be, removed even with a constitutional amendment. So it’s an idea that we’ll have to work around and that’s what courts have said in announcing the principle of one person, one vote. The Senate is an anomaly and we’re stuck with it.
Donnis: In terms of the immunity ruling that came down recently from the U.S. Supreme Court, how would the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon have played out differently, if at all, if that immunity ruling had been in place at that time?
Brettschneider: One of the arguments of the book, and I went into depth here, with I think one of the last interviews with Daniel Ellsberg before he died and also uncovering a lot of what the grand jury in that case was up to. What I argue is that really the foundation of that immunity decision is found in the failure of those people. Ellsberg in speaking out against the president’s authoritarianism and the grand jury’s attempt, with two hands to indict that president that was stymied by Jaworski, the special prosecutor working with them. What I mean is that a deal was made essentially. Don’t indict him now, Jaworski said to the grand jury, we’ll indict him after he leaves office, and the country will see justice. But the pardon of course got in the way of all that. So the country really never got to see what it’s like to prosecute a president. And then frankly, they don’t know still, and I’m trying to reveal this, what happened with Nixon’s crimes. The attempt to blow up the Brookings Institution to get information that he thought was damaging to him. the attempt on Ellsberg’s life at the Capitol steps. This country has never prosecuted a president, and this immunity decision has solidified the mistake that was made by Ford and the pardon.
Donnis: The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a political issue that has helped Democrats, but Republicans and conservatives seem to have outsmarted Democrats in remaking the Supreme Court in a more conservative way. Is this an instance where Democrats bear responsibility for the concentration of power that we now see supporting Donald Trump?
Brettschneider: You know, these nominations, I think, especially of Kavanaugh, when he was nominated. I wrote a book about, Kavanaugh’s extreme, view of executive power. In fact, he was asked about it during the hearing and he responded to it by saying that I wasn’t a law professor. And so, okay, that’s one response that turned out to be true, that Kavanaugh really did, as I predicted, work with the court to eviscerate U.S. versus Nixon. So there was a failure to stop these nominations, to really see how serious a threat they were to the country. And we’re paying for it right now, the destruction of not just Roe versus Wade, but the right to privacy and the aggrandizement to an absurd degree of executive power, where really a president is now above the law.
Donnis: Of the five presidents you write about in your book, which up to now has posed the greatest threat to democracy?
Brettschneider: What happened in the past with Adams, for instance, who was a very serious threat, almost toppled American democracy entirely, and I’ll just mention a couple of things. The first is that there was a plot by the Federalist Party to deny the certification of electoral votes, to throw the vote, the election to a House of Representatives that would have reelected Adams. It was also an attempted self coup. And when that was discovered, the result, the payback was that the Federalists tried to shut down the opposition party with the Sedition Act. Not a minimal part of what Adams did. But the election of 1800 was a triumph. The country recovered. Jefferson said, we’re all Federalists. We’re all Republicans. Nixon is very different. As I said, the failure to prosecute him, the really belief that Nixon had that I wish was rejected, which is that when a president does it, it’s not illegal that the country was in a civil war and the president could commit no crimes. That idea for the time being is victorious. And so that’s why I say it’s the most threatening of the examples because we’ve never recovered from it. Unlike Adams, for instance.
Donnis: Thank you for joining me, Brown University political science professor Corey Brettschneider, author of The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.
Brettschneider: Thanks, Ian. What a pleasure to join you.
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What can be done when there’s broad support for a bill in Rhode Island, but legislative leaders decline to bring it to a vote? That’s a pertinent question for observers of the General Assembly. Maybe there’s a change that would make it easier for that kind of legislation to see the light of day. You can read more about that in my TGIF column, posting around 4 this afternoon at thepublicsradio.org/TGIF and on what used to be known as Twitter @IanDon.
That’s it for our show. Political Roundtable is a production of The Public’s Radio. Our producer is James Baumgartner. I’m Ian Donnis, and I’ll see you on the radio.