Thursday, June 8, 2017

Trump’s loyalty demand to Comey is part of his ongoing corrosion of constitutional government

https://www.vox.com/2017/6/7/15758412/comey-testimony-trump-loyalty
"In the United States of America, government appointees swear an oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The oath is to the Constitution, not to their immediate supervisor in the executive branch and certainly not to the president personally. The FBI’s own website contains a useful essay written by FBI Academy legal instructor Jonathan Rudd about the significance of the oath of office. “It is significant,” he writes, “that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office, or entity ... a government based on individuals — who are inconsistent, fallible, and often prone to error — too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other.” That is the foundation of the rule of law in this and other countries, and to expect officials to do anything else would be fundamentally toxic to the endurance of the American republic. And yet, according to former FBI Director James Comey’s written testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that is exactly what Donald Trump asked of his FBI director."