On Monday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who is a constitutional attorney by training, joined “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss former Trump administration Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s bombshell revelation, in her new book, that former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson allegedly attempted to recruit her to deliberately undermine and thwart various aspects of the president’s foreign policy agenda.
As The Daily Wire reported on Monday: “Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Haley claimed according to Fox News, were working on a ‘resistance’ group within the White House and tried to recruit her as a front-line member. … Haley [said] that the pair ‘confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country’ and that ‘Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president’s decisions was because, if he didn’t, people would die.'”
Wheeler and Hammer discussed the political and legal ramifications of Haley’s revelations, with Hammer first pointing out that the insubordination here is not from the “Deep State” — but from the “very, very Shallow State”:
This is actually not the Deep State — this is the very, very shallow State. This is the White House chief of staff and the U.S. secretary of state, for God’s sake. These are not unelected 24-, 25-year-old … Ivy League college grads working deep in the bowels of the NSA or CIA. This is the chief of staff to the president of the United States and the lead foreign diplomat for the most powerful country in the world. This is as shallow as the Shallow State gets. But you know what, I’m assuming Nikki Haley is telling the truth — I have no reason to disbelieve her — so first of all, good for her for actually standing up for the president of the United States here.
Hammer continued to explain why the actions Haley revealed were not just immoral due to rank insubordination, but are also actually unconstitutional:
Let’s break this down a little bit, legally. The Constitution is extraordinarily clear on this. Article II, Section 1 says “[t]he executive power” shall be vested in a president of the United States. Not vested in the entire executive branch — that’s it, it’s [vested] in the president of the United States.
So let’s ask, what is “the executive power?” Well, we have great scholarship on this. There is a famous 2001 law review article by legal scholars Sai Prakash and Mike Ramsey that looks back and determines that the term “executive power,” as used by Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, was a well-known legal turn of phrase that encompassed most of the foreign affairs power. So let’s put two and two together. The foreign affairs power is expressly vested in the Constitution of the United States in a president to the United States. It is unconstitutional for subversive bureaucrats, no matter how high or how deep they are, to undermine the president on this.
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