18 February 2017

… yet there is method in’t

Dear friends of Verfassungsblog,

The President of the United States is a crackpot. This diagnosis seems to be consensus in  the part of the public sphere that I overlook after the baffling White House event this week generally called, for lack of a better word, “press conference”. Unhinged, insane, bat-shit crazy: many commentators, in their bewilderment, sought refuge in psychiatric terms to explain what had happened, and a palpable sense of shock and disbelief was on display not just among Donald Trump’s alleged “fake news” enemies, but even on Fox News.

I am in no position to make a statement about Trump’s state of mind. My suspicion: though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

One of the most befuddling moments was when a CNN reporter asked Trump about the leaked informations on the stepped-down security adviser Michael Flynn’s Russian contacts. How, the reporter asked, can a leak be real and at the same time news reports about it be fake? Which is it? Is the information true or false? They cannot be both, right?

True or false, tertium non datur: The reporter seemed to have played a card which cannot be trumped (no pun intended): logic. Not a problem for the Donald, though. The public, he said calmly, does not know what is true and what is false. But he does. “I know when you are telling the truth and when you are not.”

To lie is to call true what is false or vice versa. Trump is doing that on a regular basis, and that is bad enough. To claim that an assertion can be both true and false at the same time is a whole different ballgame, though. That denies the condition of the possibility of an argument about true or false in the first place. Then, true and false becomes a matter of decision: I decide what is true and what is false.

Is there a method in’t? I am afraid there is.

What Trump is doing could perhaps be compared to some extent to what Kaczyński’s people have done to the Polish constitution: they created a law that is at the same time constitutional and unconstitutional. If you root for the rule of law, you will find this unbearable. If you root for the rule of yourself, though, this is not a bad idea at all. Internal contradiction of that sort is good. It digs a cavity into the mesh of the constitution. It generates uncertainty about what power is allowed to do. It gives you room to set up a stage on which you can display all your decisionist energy, to the delight of your thrilled followers.

Isn’t Trump getting away rather too easily if he is pathologized? Is that man just sick? Or is he actually a tyrant, or a tyrant-to-be, in the plain, classical sense?

Constitutional chaos

If Trump were a nut case, the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution would come into play. It provides for a procedure whereby a President “unfit” for office is replaced by the vice president if the Congress ultimately so decides. MARK TUSHNET has written a short blog post on this, which I have translated into German for Verfassungsblog: The 25th Amendment, in his views, could also be applied to “demonstrations of sustained and serious failures of temperament”, i.e. Trump – provided the Republican establishment musters the courage to face the wrath of Trump’s supporters, helped on by the prospect of a President Pence who delivers everything they crave with a lot less trouble.

As for Poland, MARCIN MATCZAK reports on the ever stranger fruits the constitutional schemes of Kaczyński’s PiS Party are bearing. A civil court now has to decide whether the new PiS-nominated President of the Constitutional Tribunal has been lawfully elected. Which is doubtful on several accounts. If the Warsaw Court of Appeals were to share these doubts, that could perhaps open a door to some degree of substitute constitutional review by civil courts taking the place of the neutralized Constitutional Tribunal.

In Germany a new head of state was elected last Sunday. Much of the public applause, though, went to the No. 2 in the ranks of state officials, to Parliamentary Speaker Norbert Lammert whose speech was widely understood as an elegantly placed punch in the face of both Trump and the far-right AfD party. Can this speech be reconciled with his constitutionally required neutrality as an election supervisor? SEBASTIAN LEUSCHNER, all political sympathy aside, has some doubts.

Turkey’s constitution will, according to the will of its President, be soon thoroughly overhauled if the announced referendum goes his way, the benefits of which, in terms of power, will go mostly to the President himself. It would be wrong, though, to perceive this move as a mere change of system from parliamentary to presidential  democracy, warns SILVIA VON STEINSDORFF: the result, according to her analysis, would be a constitution that just would not work very well.

In Romania, on the other hand, a malicious corruption-stricken government keeps facing mass protests of an epic scale. There too, the President plays a powerful role, albeit as an opponent of the government. He, too, calls for a referendum, but this one will be about anti-corruption legislation. BIANCA SELEJAN-GUTAN keeps us up to date and tells us what this is all about.

Finally: Brexit. The Tory majority in the UK House of Commons has refused to assure EU citizens who live and work in the UK that they will be safe after Brexit, instead preferring to use them as a bargaining chip in the negotiations with Brussels. RUVI ZIEGLER finds these tactics despicable and now hopes for the House of Lords.

Elsewhere

First, about Trump:

On matters non-Trump:

Next week, we will see a new attempt by the Trump administration to issue an executive order on immigration, this time legally proof. The Strasbourg Court of Human Rights will hand down a Grand Chamber judgment on preventive house arrest for criminals in Italy. I will travel to Karlsruhe for the annual press conference of the Federal Constitutional Court, and I am very excited about the opportunity to talk at length with Justice Peter Müller, the judge-rapporteur in the NPD ban proceedings. The interview, if all goes to plan, will appear next week on Verfassungsblog.

All the best, and take care,

Max Steinbeis

 


SUGGESTED CITATION  Steinbeis, Maximilian: … yet there is method in’t, VerfBlog, 2017/2/18, https://verfassungsblog.de/yet-there-is-method-int/, DOI: 10.17176/20170220-104548.

Leave A Comment

WRITE A COMMENT

1. We welcome your comments but you do so as our guest. Please note that we will exercise our property rights to make sure that Verfassungsblog remains a safe and attractive place for everyone. Your comment will not appear immediately but will be moderated by us. Just as with posts, we make a choice. That means not all submitted comments will be published.

2. We expect comments to be matter-of-fact, on-topic and free of sarcasm, innuendo and ad personam arguments.

3. Racist, sexist and otherwise discriminatory comments will not be published.

4. Comments under pseudonym are allowed but a valid email address is obligatory. The use of more than one pseudonym is not allowed.