GOP Senator Thinks Trump Probably Shouldn't Have the Nuclear Codes but Can Still Stay President, Why Not

By Katie McDonough  |  November 14, 2017 | 6:00pm
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Senator Bob Corker, who has called the White House an “adult day care center” and believes President Trump is reckless enough to put the United States on “the path to World War III” and feels that the president should “concern anyone who cares about our nation” and claims he has firsthand knowledge of “several instances” in which the president has “hurt us” on matters of diplomacy and has also said nothing about taking the steps necessary to remove this president from office even though he apparently believes he is very dangerous and erratic, held a hearing on Tuesday morning about whether or not a president should have unilateral authority to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike.

Only because it seemed like…… the time…… to….. do so……. but not for any particular…….. reason.

As USA Today reported on Tuesday, when asked about Trump before the hearing, the Tennessee Republican replied: “This [hearing] is not specific to anybody.”

But as USA Today also reported on Tuesday, no one believes that. “The committee is clearly looking for remedies to ensure that a demented president could not unilaterally start a nuclear conflagration,” said Bruce Blair, a nuclear command expert and research scholar at Princeton University.

And two hours deep into the hearing, a good and important question—what kinds of checks and limits should exist more broadly on the power of any president to cause so much destruction and human misery—was largely reduced to a back and forth on whether or not this particular president is too dumb or volatile to possess that power.

Here’s something that was said by Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University who was called as an expert witness, which I believe was supposed to be reassuring:

I can’t speak in open session about the particularities, [but] I will say that the system is not a button that the president can accidentally lean against on the desk and immediately cause missiles to fly… The president by himself cannot press a button and cause missiles to fly; he can only give an authenticated order that others will follow and cause missiles to fly.

So, rest easy, Bob Corker.

 
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