Sleeper Cells Awakening in the White House Are Not a Good Thing

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

07 September 18

n a democracy or a constitutional republic, sleeper cells functioning in any capacity in the presidential theater would generally be a sign that the government is neither a democracy nor a constitutional republic. Or to put it another way, if we didn’t have a Deep State before, we apparently do now. One comprised not of hostile Democrats but rather of Trump appointees. The irony is rich.

Sleeper cells, Deep States, and shadow actors at the highest levels of government are highly illegal and totally unacceptable. We are hearing from the unnamed author of the New York Times op-ed I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, and from Bob Woodward’s as yet unreleased book Fear, that the individual acting as President may not be in control of the executive branch and that, more importantly, other unidentified individuals may in fact be.

(Image: Delcan & Company/The New York Times)

The graphic appearing with the New York Times sleeper cells article depicts four individuals, three men and a woman, holding a rope tethered to an image of the continental United States teetering on the edge of a precipice. The implication is that these individuals are preventing the nation and its institutions from falling off that precipice. It’s a picture of heroism, assuming the intentions of the shadow actors are altruistic. It’s also a risky notion. A mere discussion by administration officials of invoking the 25th Amendment, while it would be anathema to the President, would not be in any way illegal. There is a constitutional framework for such a discussion. However, organized, unspecified resistance might easily be more legally complicated.

Challenges to the President’s authority are nothing new. Donald Trump has been constrained in extraordinary measure by Congress twice. The first instance was a bill that passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof majorities restricting Trump’s ability to lift sanctions already in place against Russia and specifying new and additional ones. In separate actions, the House and Senate both passed resolutions in support of the US-NATO alliance and a determination that the US government should stand united in efforts to counter Russian interference in US elections.

In 2016, Seymour M. Hersh, reporting in the London Review of Books, set off constitutional alarm bells with his report titled Military to Military, detailing decades of backchannel communications between US military officials and foreign actors, often military counterparts, that, according to the report, the executive branch may not always have been specifically aware of or have even approved.

Donald Trump’s actions and comportment as President of the United States have been a source of deep concern to Washington officials on both sides of the aisle, millions of Americans, and countless foreign observers from the inception of his tenure. That there would be officials, some perhaps senior at the White House, who would feel compelled to do everything in their power to keep the country on the rails is unremarkable. The implication of sleeper cells functioning at the highest levels of government, however, portends a shift from what analysts lament as Banana Republicanism to a full-blown Banana Republic realized.

We have to trust that The New York Times would not publish a document like this without being certain it was not orchestrated by Trump himself to garner public sympathy.

That presumably being the case, it would then be a good idea to better understand how sleeper cells trying, according to the Times op-ed, to manage the chief executive came to the point of believing that such dire measures were necessary.

The job of overseeing the executive branch in constitutional terms falls to Congress. Both houses of Congress are at this juncture controlled by Republicans. They are turning a blind eye to immense irregularities and transgressions by the President as they reap the political benefits of his tenure. A perfect example is their ability to bring an ultra-conservative nominee like Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the threshold of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Trump empowers extreme right-wing policies. As a result, Republican Congressional lawmakers are abdicating their constitutional responsibility for oversight.

Right now we have sleeper cells awakening because Congressional Republicans will not. Nothing about the Faustian bargain between Congressional Republicans and an administration they know has serious legitimacy problems makes the country more secure.

As long as Congress abdicates, sleeper cells will continue to awaken.

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.