Why resign?
Several White House aides and policymakers have resigned in the past 24 hours. Frankly, I don’t get it.
First, it’s way too late to salvage your reputation. Second, at this point you can (arguably) do more to protect your reputation by saying that you are staying to prevent Trump from doing something crazy in the final days of his presidency.
Someone has to be there to tackle him when he lunges for the football.
It’s how conservatives define responsibility, find someone else to blame.
Except then they might actually have to do something.
I am stunned. I have nothing more realistic to say than the three excellent comments before me.
Perhaps Trump cabinet members
are hoping he will take their hints.
Otherwise…
If only a few ‘authentic’ (non-acting)
cabinet members are left, will there
still be a quorum sufficient to do the
25th Amendment ouster of Trump?
Ostensibly, the reason for resigning is to facilitate a pardon from
his temporary successor Mike Pence. Not much of an enticement
for Pence, sadly.
Can Trump Pre-emptively Pardon Allies or Himself?
NY Times – January 7
… In August 1974, four days before Nixon resigned, Mary C. Lawton, then the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, issued a terse legal opinion stating that “it would seem” that he could not pardon himself “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” But she did not explain what transformed that principle into an unwritten legal limit on the power the Constitution bestows on presidents.
Is there a way Trump might try to engineer a more clearly legal pardon for himself?
Yes. He could get Vice President Mike Pence to do it for him, using the 25th Amendment.
This part of the Constitution provides a mechanism for temporarily making the vice president the “acting president” when a president is disabled from carrying out his duties. In 2002 and 2007, for example, when President George W. Bush was preparing to be sedated for colonoscopies, he briefly handed the powers of the presidency to Vice President Dick Cheney. …