A President Clinton would be out of control: Glenn
Reynolds
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 10:38 a.m. EDT
October 30, 2016
He's
no paragon of virtue, but it won’t be that way with a President Trump.
“Someone somewhere should have told her no.” Those are the words of
a Clinton ally quoted in a roundup of Democratic reactions to Hillary Clinton’s
FBI news by congressional newspaper The Hill. And, despite the fact that
they come from a Clinton supporter, albeit an angry and disappointed one, they
may illustrate the best reason for choosing Donald Trump instead of Clinton.
Here’s the full quote:
“I'm livid, actually. . . .This has
turned into malpractice. It's an unforced error at this point. I have no idea
what Comey is up to but the idea this email issue is popping back up again is
outrageous. It never should have occurred in the first place. Someone somewhere
should have told her no. And they didn't and now we're all paying the price.”
Someone, somewhere, should have told
her no. Well, yes. But who? That was the problem with Secretary of State
Clinton, and it will be a bigger problem with a President Clinton. Because, by
all appearances, nobody tells Clinton no, and Clinton has no compunction about
breaking the rules when it suits her purposes.
Thus the Clinton Foundation became a
global money-laundering and influence-peddling organization without precedent
in American history. Donors to the foundation were encouraged to steer money to what one employee called “Bill
Clinton, Inc.,” and later to Clinton. State Department personnel did favors for people who donated money to the Foundation. And to make sure
that nobody found out what was going on, Clinton ran her own homebrew server
operation designed to ensure that Freedom of Information Act requests turned up nothing — and even President Obama,
rather than saying no, went along, sending her emails at her non-government
address under a fake name.
Someone somewhere should have told
her no. But if the president wasn’t going to tell her no, who would? Staff at
the State Department? They might have been willing to tell some other
secretary of state no, but Clinton? Too risky, it seems. They certainly went
along without visible objection, and without even leaks.
The press? When The New York Times
reported Clinton’s secret, illegal server, Politico’s Glenn Thrush,
far from condemning it, called it “badass.”
Congress? Clinton has stonewalled
and run rings around numerous committees investigating her.
Besides,
Congress had already told her no, in the form of statutes governing the
treatment of government communications and classified information. She just
ignored those rules and did what she wanted. Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley
famously said that “only little people pay taxes.” Clinton seems to
feel the same way about obeying laws.
It won’t be that way with a
President Trump. This isn’t because Trump is any less arrogant than Clinton
(though it would be hard to be more arrogant). It’s because more people
will be willing to tell Trump no. The civil service, which leans overwhelmingly
Democratic, won’t be bending over backwards to do his will. The press can’t
stand him. And the Congress, even if controlled by the GOP, won’t support him
if he misbehaves because so many Republicans dislike him, too.
The truth is, neither one of our
leading candidates for president is a paragon of virtue. But only one of them
has already made a habit of flouting the law while in office, selling
favors and escaping the consequences, and only one of them is likely to be
able to pull it off from the White House.
And that’s the problem. If Secretary
of State Clinton, serving under a president and with an eye on winning a second
term in the White House, wasn’t constrained by the rules, who will
constrain her if she’s president?
The answer, most likely, is nobody.
And, once again, we’ll all be paying the price.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of
Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will
Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board
of Contributors.
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