My Take | Why the US ‘imperial presidency’ is looking a lot like China’s
- The privileges and powers of the US president as argued by Donald Trump’s lawyers in their Senate defence against impeachment are making mincemeat of the much celebrated checks and balances by Congress
The lawyers defending US President Donald Trump help me understand something about the great logician Kurt Godel.
The great Harvard law professor was not arguing in a vacuum, but well within a commonly held conservative constitutional theory that anything the president does is legal by the executive powers of his office. On this view, the much celebrated constitutional checks and balances as institutionalised through Congress can be not so much bypassed as ignored.
Now back to Godel. Shortly before being sworn in as a US citizen, he studied the US Constitution intently, as he did with any subject that attracted his awesome intellect. On the day of the ceremony, he refused to go, even though he went to America to escape the Nazis, and had to be arm-twisted to attend the event by his friends, Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern, a co-founder of mathematical game theory.
When Einstein asked why he tried to refuse his citizenship, he replied the US Constitution was logically compatible with a dictatorship. The citizenship incident is well-known among Godel aficionados, but as much as I have searched over the years, I have never found any study of his constitutional interpretation. That’s not surprising; professional logicians don’t write about politics, and political scientists don’t care much about mathematical logic.
But one doesn’t have to look far to know that Godel was right. The late liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger and French sociologist Raymond Aron had long ago warned against the “imperial presidency”, the practice of every administration since that of Franklin Roosevelt to ever expand unchecked presidential powers.
What is different since the 1980s reign of Ronald Reagan is that a conservative constitutional theory has been articulated to justify a “unitary executive” president. Sounds familiar? That’s because the Chinese constitution also defines the one-party state as “unitary”, unencumbered by checks and balances.
Far be it that China would evolve to be like America, in their 21st century rivalry, it’s the latter that will likely become more like the former.