An Empty Suit by an Unknown French Tailor:
Benjamin Franklin's Suit
(circa 1778)

"…we're slaves to fortune…"

Our Founding Fathers were clearly clever people, but I question their practicality. You see, clever people father countries while practical people accomplish things like balancing budgets. One does not want a practical person founding their country; otherwise, one might end up with an utterly uninspiring entity. A country requires a certain mythology that few, if any, practical people seem capable of concocting. The People are never terribly impressed by the latest accounting tricks, even if they might personally benefit. No, The People demand a genuine hero’s mythology, and nothing less, to anchor their belief and allegiance: an inspiring story that might not fully adhere to any truth, but that nonetheless better serves its purpose. Nobody ever pledges their allegiance to anything practical. They demand something uplifting, if fictional.

Unfortunately, though, the uplifting only rarely intersects with the practical. We can elect a “president” to distinguish the role from a king’s, but that act attracts a raft of questions, not the least of which must inevitably be, “How might we remove a defective President?” It couldn’t have been more obvious than to consider how to answer this question while our Founding Fathers were busy pondering our founding mythology. A spare ounce of practicality might have prevented much heartache in the unlikely event that we somehow managed to elect ourselves a genuinely defective President. The Comeuppances our founders prescribed for their progeny to invoke were terribly light on practicality, with hardly a spare ounce of it evident in the Constitutionally-prescribed remedy. If this unlikely recipe were presented as the key to making cake, we might immediately delete cake from the menu. Removing a President for “cause” seems just that unlikely to succeed.

What do we need to succeed? First, we require a President who is clearly unable to fulfill their duties of office. We’ve had those before: a few due to innate belligerence and a couple due to some disabling occurrence. Woodrow Wilson was paralyzed by a stroke, which his wife and handlers successfully hid from his cabinet and Congress. She more or less faithfully fulfilled the duties of his office until the regular process elected a replacement. Andrew Johnson, who inherited the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, proved himself to be temperamentally incapable of fulfilling the role, yet nobody—not his shell-shocked cabinet or the Congress, which would go on to successfully impeach him before the Senate refused to convict and remove him from office—succeeded in removing him from that office, whose responsibilities he had proven himself utterly incapable of fulfilling. He fucked up Reconstruction, a failure that continues to inspire insurrectionists today. Nixon resigned before he could set a useful precedent for successful removal. Trump was impeached for cause twice, but his partisan Senate couldn’t face prosecuting and removing him from office. He could have been barred from ever holding office again, but the system seemed incapable of reaching even that simple conclusion. Delusional!

In the British Parliamentary system, my friend Dan Starr reminds me, a simple majority vote of No Confidence puts their Prime Minister back on their bench. No trial, no formal accusatory impeachment, and no lengthy prosecution by people, none of whom were ever trained as prosecutors. The system our Founders designed seems unlikely to work. Ironically, such impractical procedures render our President essentially a king. If our incumbent isn’t utterly incapable of fulfilling the duties of his office, what might further disqualify him? If this isn’t the bottom of that barrel, do I want to know what lies beneath? Now, a majority of the incumbent’s cabinet must sign a statement that their President is incapable of fulfilling the office, and then present this sworn statement (on the permanent record) to Congressional leadership. The Vice President immediately assumes the role of President unless the President in question disagrees with his cabinet’s assessment. Then, the President reassumes the presidential role unless his cabinet and Congress reassert their claim within four days. Those four days look awfully dicey from here.

What do we imagine Hegseth doing during those four days? I presume he would be among the minority who voted against removing his meal ticket. Come to think of it, name one cabinet member who could fulfill their role if not for their President’s patronage. Just one. Yeah, I couldn’t either. The precondition for removing an infirm or insane incumbent seems impossible to achieve if every cabinet member holds their role solely because of that president’s patronage, and they all always do. The Founders seemed to assume cabinet members accepted their roles for higher purposes, ones similar to those I’m confident they saw in themselves, for they were idealistic patriots, not ideologically dependent fanticists, like the lickspittle cabinet members our incumbent deliberately chose. They are less administrative figures than Removal From Office Insurance. Vice President Vance might harbor night sweats about his chances of inheritance, but that cabinet ain’t about to switch allegiances, even if their President daily demonstrates that he’s absolutely loony, like theirs does. They’re arguably crazier than him, incapable of checking or balancing; not a patriot among them!

So, this incumbent won’t be removed for committing Treason! at noon in the town square, nor will he be removed through the consensus of his cabinet and Congressional leadership for being crazy in office. Consequently, we essentially have a king surrounded by a tenacious mythology our Founders might have inadvertently bequeathed to us. Our inadvertent monarchy might have always been a Democracy in name only. It depended entirely on people of goodwill and generous interpretation to properly animate the founding mythology. Take one person of genuinely evil intent and elect him incumbent, and the whole facade crumbles; Constitutionally-mandated remedies, literally, be damned. The only truly practical remedy apparently remains in the hands of the Gods of Alzheimer’s Disease. He’s clearly fading. He conflates delusion with policy, and he’s clearly crazy. Those blinded by partisan fealty or merely trying ever harder to preserve their corner of the ever-disappearing iceberg this administration balances upon prove a point our visionary Founders must have missed. Founding a country doesn’t reform human nature. A simple No Confidence vote might have saved our presently foundering Democracy In Name Only (DINO), but couldn’t, so we’re slaves to fortune instead.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz