WallBuilders president Tim Barton, son of Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, posted a video on social media defending President Donald Trump's call to impeach federal judges who have been ruling against the policies he has enacted during his first months back in office.
Barton claimed that Trump and the GOP's impeachment efforts are entirely constitutional and necessary to protect the separation of powers. But in making his case, Barton actually revealed exactly why the Founders created a government based on checks and balances in the first place.
"The Founding Fathers in their brilliance, when they set up a separation of powers, when they established checks and balances, what they recognized—and John Adams has several letters on this, but even George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, all of them wrote about this—they said, 'We don't trust people,'" Barton claimed. "They said, 'The heart of man is wicked and deceitful. You can't trust it, so we need to separate powers and that way, when you finally have somebody that's crazy, they won't have all the control.' There will be checks and balances. People can come in and hopefully get the right decision made."
That is, of course, pretty much what is happening now, as the president and his team are unilaterally dismantling the federal government, eliminating oversight, and snatching people off the streets and disappearing them.
All of that is fine and perfectly constitutional, Barton insists; it is the judges who are ruling against the administration's illegal actions who need to be removed from office.
"We are seeing some of it right now why there's checks and balances," Barton said. "When President Trump said, 'Hey, if this judge is telling us we can't do things to protect the American people, maybe we should consider impeaching that judge,' and Justice Roberts said, 'Oh, no, you should never look at impeachment as a response to a political decision.' That's utterly ridiculous. It's literally one of the things the Constitution dealt with more than any other topic was impeachment."
"Just because we haven't impeached judges maybe relatively recently doesn't mean we shouldn't go back and explore it," Barton asserted. "If there is a judge that is going to prevent a president from doing his constitutional duty, if there is a judge that's gonna do things that endanger the lives of Americans, then not only is there a reason we have a check and balance, separation of powers, but maybe there's a reason, like President Trump said, maybe we should explore this impeachment process."
A president believing himself to be king and acting like one is exactly what the Founding Fathers feared and it is precisely why they crafted the Constitution in the manner that they did: so that one man could never seize the power of government and pervert it to his own ends. Judicial review—judges defending the Constitution and rule of law from “somebody that’s crazy”—is at the heart of the checks and balances that protect Americans’ freedom.
