Mission Impossible and Donald Trump

 I have been thinking a bit about the limits of Presidential power. To be more specific, just what can the president do to keep our nation safe.

Now, to be fair, I come at this question from a rather contrary point of view. I used to enjoy Mission Impossible as a kid. Every week, the team figured out some elaborate scheme to get rid of some bad guy. Often, they did it by arranging for some other bad guy to kill him.

It made me wonder why they didn’t just shoot the bad guy themselves and save 20 minutes or so of program time. Remember, this was long before James Bond.

So now, years later, we have a president who tells us that, for national security reasons that can’t be disclosed to a judge, he has to keep hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country for 90 days.

OK, maybe our immigration standards are so poor that terrorists will come flooding in on flights tomorrow if the ban doesn’t go into effect immediately. Or, maybe not. Maybe he knows something I don’t.

But. what if the president got a tip that two terrorists were coming into the country wearing sweatshirts and were planning to release a deadly germ in a bus terminal or a subway. Fine, let's immediately ban people wearing sweatshirts from getting on airplanes, and let's detain everyone on airplanes coming into the country wearing sweatshirts until we can check them out extremely - we’ll only have to hold some of them for a week or so.

Or, maybe, the president hears something about terrorists from the Middle East planning to attack the United States. And, he goes to a list of seven countries where our vetting process isn’t great, and says let's stop immigration for 90 days until we figure out how to check the backgrounds of people coming from there.

And, let's say the terrorists realize this, and just go to another nearby country not on the list, and come into the United States from there.

But we don’t have to pick any specific example. All we have to realize is that the president has the power to do many things to keep our nation safe from terrorism, but that he doesn’t have the unilateral power to do everything he wants to keep us safe.

That does, of course, get into the question of drones and killing terrorists, and suspected terrorists, and some of the innocent people - children included - who may be with the suspected terrorists when the bomb hits. It did, as I recall, raise some problems for the previous administration.

Still, in the end,  our president, unlike the secretary in Mission Impossible, can’t disavow all knowledge of the people working for him.