Jason Chaffetz Doesn’t Care About Ethics

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The Republican in charge of government oversight wants to prohibit criticism of Trump’s ethical violations.

It is going to be practically impossible for Donald Trump to take office next Friday and stay on the right side of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause without divesting and placing his businesses in a blind trust. This fact is—with a clutch of dissenters—not in dispute. Ethics experts across the political spectrum have explained carefully what needed to be done to avoid the appearance that the president was benefiting financially from foreign gifts, payments, or favors. But Trump announced this week that he has no intention of creating a blind trust, arguing that voters don’t care about the issue and declaring that he would donate any hotel profits from foreign governments to the Treasury and let his sons manage his business for the duration of his presidency.

At his Wednesday announcement, Trump’s lawyer, Sheri Dillon, disputed claims that he even has any such constitutional obligations: “These people are wrong. This is not what the Constitution says, paying for a hotel is not a gift or present and has nothing to do with an office. It is not an emolument,” she said. She added that “President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built,” meaning, I suppose, that the normal rules don’t apply to rich presidents. (Mitt Romney was willing to divest in 2012, so maybe it’s just that the normal rules don’t apply to Trump).

The director of the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, immediately dismissed the president-elect’s dramatic nonplan as “meaningless.” He was quoted this week as saying at an unprecedented press conference at the Brookings Institution, “It’s important to understand that the president is now entering the world of public service. He’s going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. So, no, I don’t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the president.”

Most ethics experts have agreed with Shaub that the arrangement announced Wednesday is inadequate to address the conflict rules. Trump’s expectation and hope seems to be that—since the only fix for an Emoluments Clause violation is impeachment—Republicans will do as Trump has instructed and stop caring and that Democrats won’t have the nerve to raise the point that the president will—every day after next Friday—be violating the Constitution in a way that risks putting him in thrall to foreign powers. Republicans seem happy to oblige.

Indeed, to the extent that the GOP has a new mantra it’s that violations of ethics rules are not legal problems but political ones. That is code for the proposition that so long as Trump and the GOP are in alignment about what is legal or unconstitutional, there will be no such thing as illegal or unconstitutional anymore.

Of course, Republicans could have left it at that. But Jason Chaffetz, the head of the House Oversight Committee, has decided that not only are blatant ethics and constitutional violations now OK but also that criticizing blatant ethics and constitutional violations is not OK.

Read the rest at:

 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/01/jason_chaffetz_is_ethically_bankrupt.html

 

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Discrimination 

I suppose, that the normal rules don’t apply to rich presidents.