The Scoop on Why a Felon Can Stand for President
The Times tries — yet again — to blame Donald Trump on the Founding Fathers.

The latest scoop from the Times turns up the culprits who allowed President Trump to run for another term of office despite being adjudged a felon. That “a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate,” the Times says, “upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.” It turns out the blame attaches to George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, and the other miscreants who came up with the Constitution.
The last person who tried to pin the tail on that particular donkey was the Times’s columnist, Michelle Goldberg, who found that the culprit for January 6 wasn’t Trump, or the Proud Boys, or even Speaker Pelosi, for failing to defend the Capitol. It was the Framers whodunnit, Ms. Goldberg averred. She pointed to two Harvard professors who say the “countermajoritarian provisions” in the Constitution are to blame for our “unfolding ordeal.”
In other words, per this argument, the Founders’s efforts to set up checks and balances to prevent unbridled majority rule did not reflect “judicious wisdom,” but “accident, contingency” and “capitulation.” Ms. Goldberg underscores the irony that, in her view, “our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy,” is what caused “American democracy” to become “eroded.”
A similarly sour view of the Framers’s handiwork is put forward in the Times’s new dispatch. “As hard as they worked,” the Times observes, “the system they constructed to hold wayward presidents accountable has ultimately proved to be unsteady.” As an authority on the matter the Grey Lady brings in no less a hero of the Revolutionary era than Patrick Henry. He electrified the colonists with the demand “give me liberty or give me death.”
Henry, in the Times’s telling, “knew this day would come,” fretting that “eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency” and try to “use his powers to thwart anyone who tried to hold him accountable.” In 1788, when Virginia was considering whether to ratify the Constitution, he warned: “Away with your president, we shall have a king.” The “rights and liberties of the people,” he said, should not rely “on the sole chance of their rulers being good men.”
Henry evoked a vision of a future “President, in the field, at the head of his army,” being able to “prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master.” Such a tyranny, he warned, could go “so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke.” The Framers, though, were hardly naive about the dangers of an unscrupulous president. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote in 51 Federalist.
For a government “administered by men over men,” Madison said, “the great difficulty” was ensuring the government would “control itself.” Hence the checks and balances of the constitutional enterprise, which is designed not only to hold back the president, but the federal government itself. Madison urged, too, at the convention in 1787, a “provision” for “defending the Community” from “the incapacity, negligence or perfidy” of the president.
The provision devised by the Framers was not a series of alert local district attorneys operating in jurisdictions across the land. Nor was it the justice department, itself an extension of the president. The Framers’s safeguard against a malevolent president is impeachment, which requires a supermajority in the Senate to bar its abuse. Having failed to impeach Trump, the Democrats have instead turned to the courts to thwart his bid for re-election.
“American lawmakers,” the Times concedes, “have struggled to devise an independent mechanism to enforce presidential accountability.” The challenge, as the Times puts it, is devising one that isn’t “so tainted by politics that it loses credibility with the public.” The “lawfare” currently being waged against Trump underscores why the Founders left this accountability, ultimately, up to Americans themselves — at the ballot box.