Trump’s been busy in the last few days, demonstrating the weakness in the United States’ “Inspector General” model of Executive oversight; for the details see Trump Firing Intelligence IG For Doing His Job? Sure, Why Not? and more recently Fired Intel Community Inspector General Very Nicely Tells President Crime-Baby To Eat A Bag Of F*ck.
Weak. Sad.
As he’s demonstrated before, and is demonstrating now, when your oversight staff serves at the whim of the President you effectively have no oversight at all.
Because why not just fire the Inspectors?
No one’s going to stop him, or even make him appoint replacements.
In the existing system, two groups could stop him:
- Congress, who could Impeach and remove him
- the Article 25 staff, who could remove him
The first would take time, and the second would not only take time but also involve a weird yo-yo effect where he’d be in-and-out-of-power a few times before it finished.
They could do it.
But they won’t.
Nothing’s really changed since the second post on this blog (Failed Constitution Check: Executive Oversight.), and the solution I proposed then is (I think) still the best: seperate off all the oversight groups in the Executive branch into an autonymous pseudo-branch and put the second-place finisher in the Presidential election in charge of that.
It’d solve this problem, at least.
