Some years ago, when I was executive director of what was then the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, a member of the Indiana House of Representatives and I got into a public squabble.
He had used his position to direct taxpayer money to fund an Easter pageant in his district.

It was a clear violation of both the U.S. Constitution and the Indiana Constitution, which prohibit government from endorsing or elevating any one faith tradition over another.

When he was caught, the representative said one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard a public official say up to that point.

He said he appropriated the money to the pageant and violated his oath of office because his constituents wanted him to.

He’d do it again, he said.

My response was not gentle.

If his constituents took a vote and wanted him to rob a bank, I asked, would he do it? How about if they wanted him to murder someone?

Just how many laws was he willing to break if he thought there was sufficient public support for the transgression?

That dustup came and went.

The Indiana General Assembly put new safeguards in place that—in theory, anyway—make it harder and less likely for similar misappropriations to occur.

About a decade after he and I traded arguments, he ended up leaving office following an ethics scandal. Evidence suggested he had been using his position to lobby for his own personal financial interests.

An investigation cleared him of legal wrongdoing but said that he had not honored the ethical obligations a state representative should uphold. He resigned his seat a few weeks later.

When he left, I thought I never again would hear an elected official make statements of such stunning stupidity.

But that was before Donald Trump came to dominate the national political stage.

Trump and his minions across the nation now are advancing a version of the argument that Indiana representative did years ago.

Whenever a court strikes down one of the Trump administration’s half-baked attempts to skirt the law and ignore his obligation to uphold the Constitution, the president and his flunkies trot out the same defense.

They don’t make a case that they’re actually following the law. That’s probably because they aren’t.

No, they say no district court should have the authority to stop the president from doing what he wants to, because—you guessed it—he’s doing what his constituents want him to do. And any judge who rules against him should be impeached.

Sigh.

There are so many things wrong with Trump’s contention that one feels a bit like a mosquito at a nudist camp. There’s so much there that I almost don’t know where to start.

But let’s begin with his contention that what he’s doing is supported by the American public.

Donald Trump was the Republican candidate for president in the last three elections. In none of those elections did he capture 50% of the vote.

Every time he ran, more Americans voted for him not to be president than voted for him to be in the Oval Office.

So, the notion that he has massive public support to override the judgments of the courts is just dishonest nonsense.

But it’s also beside the point.

Judicial review is as much a part of the American system as blood and bone are part of the human body.

One of the most important jobs of any court is making sure that government, which we entrust with power to enforce our laws, does not itself break the law—particularly our fundamental law, the Constitution.

It’s interesting how Trump’s views change when his circumstances do.

When he was out of power, he was more than happy to rely on the constitutional safeguards, such as the Fifth Amendment, that he now regards as outrages. My guess is that the prosecutors in New York would have loved to have been able to compel him to testify so that they could have led him through his own lies and thus add a perjury rap to his 34 felony convictions.

But they couldn’t because Trump, like everyone, has rights.

Constitutional rights.

It’s not surprising that this president doesn’t care for our constitutional system of government.

He is who he is.

Unlike that long-ago Hoosier legislator, he doesn’t need his constituents to tell him to break the law.

He just does it naturally.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.