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Bonfire of the Sophisticates (Part 1)
Just a few days before Christmas, National Review’s Rich Lowry — easily one of my favorite writers — penned a sober analysis titled, “The Right’s Post-Constitutional Moment,” in which he laments that, “Trump has captivated a share of the Tea Party with a style of politics utterly alien to the Constitution.” This is especially vexing, Lowry continues, in light of a movement which in 2010 produced “… a class of constitutional obsessives, such as Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, who were focused not just on what government shouldn’t do, but on what it couldn’t do, and why.”
Interesting turn of phrase there, using the designation, “constitutional obsessives,” to describe people who took a solemn oath of constitutional fidelity. I suppose I could be described as “matrimonially obsessive,” since I took a solemn and sacred vow of fidelity to my wife, but the term seems a bit quirky somehow, underscoring the Republican view of these upstarts and the voters who sent them, as borderline fanatics. In any event, Lowry goes on to describe Donald Trump in terms that strike this observer as disconcertingly accurate:
Donald Trump exists in a plane where there isn’t a Congress or Constitution. There are no trade-offs or limits. There is only his will and his team of experts who will figure out how to do whatever he wants to do, no matter how seemingly impossible. The thought you can’t do that doesn’t ever occur to him.