Column: Washington is having a ‘break glass’ moment. Where are the emergency responders?

Donald Trump hasn’t even reached the midpoint of his first 100 days, yet the constant, cruel and unconstitutional chaos he’s wreaking at home and abroad argues more strongly by the day that the nation is already at a break-glass moment.

The question is whether there’s anything behind the glass to counter the emergency. Spoiler alert: There is — read on — but only because all the usual responders are failing.

Congress, under Republican — that is, Trump’s — control, is betraying the role that the founders crafted for it as the first branch of government. It will neither check nor balance the president who heads the second branch, even as he abuses Congress’ constitutional power of the purse, dismantles congressionally created federal agencies and fires lawmakers’ constituents there without cause. Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski, often Republicans’ lone dissident, last week despaired to a tele-town hall constituent who wondered what more the senator could do to “uphold the Constitution in the crisis that we are in.” Effective opposition, she lamented, “requires … more than just one or two Republicans.” Indeed.

Opinion Columnist

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

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The third branch — federal courts — has tapped the brakes, Trump judges included, in scores of cases already brought by Democratic governors, federal employees, media companies and affected groups. Yet the slow, deliberative pace of the judiciary is no match for the rush of diktats by an impulsive, self-professed “king” and the shock troops implementing his agenda, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Should actionable evidence of Trump’s criminality surface, well, in the words of Emily Litella of “Saturday Night Live” fame, “Never mind.” The right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court last year ruled in the aptly titled Trump vs. United States decision that presidents are above the law for alleged crimes committed under the guise of official acts. Justice Sonia Sotomayor accurately dissented, writing that the stunning ruling was “an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now.”

Democrats are all but impotent in opposition, stripped of Washington’s levers of power, rudderless and leaderless. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House counterpart Rep. Hakeem Jeffries are good inside players, but the two New Yorkers have few cards and the septuagenarian Schumer is a miserable, meme-able messenger — witness his globally viral pronouncement that people are “aroused” by the president’s outrages.

Democrats can gum up the works, but they couldn’t prevent Senate Republicans’ capitulation in confirming Trump’s unfit Cabinet of yay-sayers. The minority will have some leverage over must-pass budget and debt measures, given Republicans’ deep divisions and slim Senate and House majorities, but that does nothing to address the current emergencies.

The slavishness of Congress and the Trump Cabinet means that the ultimate break-glass scenarios — impeachment and Senate conviction, or invoking the 25th amendment to remove a rogue president (as former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall this week dubbed Trump after his purge of the military) — are out of the question.

The so-called fourth branch of government, the media, no longer occupies that influential place given this century’s information maelstrom. The historical watchdog is economically sapped by the internet’s free, if unreliable content, and news is fractured: Trump has spent years discrediting fact-based mainstream outlets to his MAGA backers, while MAGA media has abased itself into a state organ of propaganda. We Americans no longer share a reality.

Trump this month banned the global Associated Press from his events and from Air Force One for the crime of not complying with his inane renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. A Trump-appointed judge on Monday warned administration lawyers that the ban is “pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” though he declined to issue a restraining order restoring AP’s access while the case plays out.

Undeterred, on Tuesday the White House overturned eight decades of practice and decreed that it, not the White House Correspondents’ Assn., would determine which reporters get to be in the press pool that covers Trump when it’s impractical to include all accredited media representatives.

New York Times correspondent Peter Baker posted this chilling analogy: “Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.” Trump mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt countered with a clown emoji, then proved Baker’s point by putting reporters from pro-Trump websites Newsmax and The Blaze in Wednesday’s White House press pool, ousting reporters from Reuters and Huffington Post.

Trump is following the autocrats’ playbook: Choke off independent sources of news and commentary and elevate echo chambers. Some media owners are going along: On Wednesday, MAGA-friendly billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, announced that its Opinion section editor had quit rather than oversee Bezos’ just-announced vision to leave “broad-based opinion” to the internet and focus on commentaries supporting “free markets and personal liberties.”

Breaking the glass could also mean an unprecedented intervention from the nation’s elder statesmen. I’ve long wished for the four former presidents and other ex-VIPs from the government, the military and diplomacy to stand together and speak out against the anticonstitutional Trump. Yet they’ve remained mostly mute aside from scattered individual protestations, adhering to norms — as Trump does not — against criticizing the democratically elected incumbent.

That leaves one last class of first-responders: American voters. The backlash has begun, at lawmakers’ town halls and over Congress’ phone lines. Democrats report unusually high interest among would-be candidates for office in next year’s midterm elections.

As the now-silent Barack Obama said as a candidate: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

@jackiekcalmes