U.S. is ‘suffering under incompetent’ president

I applaud the Fresno Bee editors for calling our current president what he is: bad for business and bad for the country.

That is obvious to a majority of Americans but still important to state: To remedy this harm, lawmakers must act. The majority in Congress has been unable to put country before party. Mostly, that is not due to blindness to the damage to the country’s economy and its moral values and standing in the world but to a faulty assessment of their No. 1 priority: their re-electability.

This is tragic for the rest of us and our democracy. As a country, we are blessed with constitutional safeguards for this situation: impeachment trial and the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. The latter provides for removal of a president judged by the vice president and a majority of the principal officers of the executive branch as being unfit for his office.

Peoples of many troubled countries without such constitutional protections against incompetent or nefarious presidents envy us.

The U.S. is suffering under this incompetent president without using the remedies we have.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 1:57 PM with the headline "U.S. is ‘suffering under incompetent’ president."