No matter how good you think a president is, he should be investigated by an independent prosecutor when he leaves office. Every president should go through his entire term in office knowing his decisions will be scrutinized to determine whether he broke any laws. No incoming president should be able to decide that his predecessor does not rate investigation. It should be mandatory and not something the president gets to decide. No declarations about looking forward, not back. EVERY president should make every decision knowing that, as the most powerful person in the world, he will be held accountable for every decision.
Once the president leaves office he will NOT be able to claim presidential privilege to protect his aides and appointees from testifying.
This is simple on its face, but not so simple in the details. For example, who will lead the investigation? Who will appoint who leads the investigation? What powers will the investigation have. The powers should be significant. An impotent investigation will be meaningless.
In the big picture, this should be a bi-partisan choice. In the near term, to get it passed, there may have to be a concession that the policy starts with the president after Trump. I hate that possibility, but it may be the only way to get the legislation passed. Hopefully there will be enough of a backlash against Trump so the president who replaces Trump will order a comparable investigation, and the congress that is elected will support that decision.
Who knows. Maybe that will set a precedent that is used to set similar policies for all very powerful people in government, including top generals and leaders in the house and senate and presidential appointees. This could play well with Libertarians who don't like big government. But it should play well with all who believe that there should be checks and balances.
This is legislation that should happen now. It would go into effect in 2025, or, 2029, if Trump is defeated in 2020 (if he makes it that far.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet (more...)
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