The military doesn’t just answer to Trump
Half of active-duty military personnel contacted in the poll held an unfavorable view of President Trump, showing a continued decline in his approval rating since he was elected in 2016.
Trump’s 42 percent approval in the latest poll, conducted from Oct. 23 to Dec. 2, sets his lowest mark in the survey since being elected president. Some 50 percent of troops said they had an unfavorable view of him. By comparison, just a few weeks after his electoral victory in November 2016, 46 percent of troops surveyed had a positive view of the businessman-turned-politician, and 37 percent had a negative opinion.
Law professor Deborah Pearlstein made an important observation about the relationship between the military and the other branches ofgovernment in this article in the Atlantic
In his efforts to mask the seriousness of his actions around Russia and Ukraine, President Donald Trump has taken aim at one essential democratic institution after another—questioning the legitimacy of the press, the intelligence community, the courts, and, most recently, the House of Representatives itself. But he has so far mostly held his fire against both “his generals” and “our boys” in America’s military. “I will always stick up for our great fighters,” Trump promised his political supporters in Florida at a recent rally, championing on that day his recent decisions to pardon soldiers accused of war crimes.
The military, for its part, has had more mixed feelings. As a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, described one such pardon, the president’s action was nothing less than an “abdication of moral responsibility.” Indeed, the military’s generally steadying reactions to the president’s worst moments of volatility have given members of Congress on both sides of the aisle reason to hope that the Pentagon at least will remain a check on presidential impulse that might really compromise national security, should other checking institutions fail. But hoping that a president will defer to the judgment of the professional military is a sign that something has gone very wrong in America’s constitutional infrastructure. The American republic was, after all, founded on the complaint that the king had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
She goes on to describe the debate that took place at the founding in which they contemplated the unique relationship between a civilian commander-in-chief and what was not, at the time, a standing military.They worried about the military becoming enmeshed in politics or following a charismatic leader over the will of the people. In the end they followed George Washington’s advice that there needed to be a disciplined, regulated force subject to the rule of law and they decided “the president would command the armed forces; Congress would regulate them:
And regulate the military Congress has, with many of the Framers’ concerns in mind…In large part, these measures have worked. Congressional regulation has prevented the realization of the Framers’ worst fears—either a military that chronically runs roughshod over the preferences of elected civilian authorities, or a civilian leader able to exploit military might outside the rule of law for his own partisan ends.
This is part of what made President Trump’s recent pardons of Mathew Golsteyn, Edward Gallagher, and others like them, so troubling. Watching the president of the United States reward the violation of the most fundamental laws of war, inflaming America’s enemies and alienating America’s allies, was bad enough. But the president’s action appeared to be an intervention in otherwise semi-independent legal and disciplinary processes inside the military—an intervention for the purpose of currying favor with his political base.
She points out that the congress has the power to intervene on behalf of the rule of law. And hey can hold hearings and conduct oversight on foreign and national security policy in general. They have certainly done so in the past.
But she also cautions against getting the military enmeshed in partisan disagreements which is a noble goal but very difficult at a time when one party is so blinded by devotion to the president that any kind of oversight is seen as a partisan attack. I’m not sure what we can do about that.
But it is true that the congress has this power and if the Democrats win in 2020 they must take a long look at military policy and see if there is a way to insulate military justice from a president who openly admires and protects war criminals and works to destroy military discipline with his twitter feed. We have never confronted this issue before but now we know.
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