The Constitution calls for a president to take care that the laws are “faithfully performed.” Donald Trump appears to be harassed approximately using “execute.” If you tell anyone to “execute” something, you may mean it in the way gangsters do: Say, which you want Luca Brasi to sleep with the fishes. But there are other linguistic uses of the word. For instance, while the Constitution tells a president to execute the laws, it wants the president to put them into effect. Not kill them.
Such are the idiosyncrasies of the language. Sometimes a word can mean one thing and its opposite. For example, the police can “take care” of a witness to a criminal offense using making sure she is secure. But then, you can “take care” of a witness in the sense of making sure she never lives to testify. You can see how this kind of thing is probably confusing to a president, especially if he isn’t always overly worried about the English language and is a real estate developer from New York.
After all, culture is context. Funnily enough, the history of presidential impeachment strongly helps the “enforcement” definition of the mandate to “execute” the legal guidelines. The Articles of Impeachment towards Richard Nixon, for example, covered a fee that the president “did not take care that the legal guidelines have been faithfully performed with the aid of failing to behave whilst he knew or had reason to understand that his close subordinates endeavored to obstruct and frustrate lawful inquiries with the aid of duly constituted executive, judicial and legislative entities.”
And all four of the Articles of Impeachment in opposition to Bill Clinton charged him with violating his constitutional responsibility to take care that the legal guidelines be faithfully executed. The specifics of the prices protected perjured testimony about his sexual relationships with Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, inspiring witnesses to offer false testimony concerning those relationships. Nothing is approximately sleeping with fish in there.
The need for Congress to get directly into this bit of constitutional interpretation has arisen maximum recently from Trump’s recommendation to candidates about what they ought to do if they’re approached using representatives of a foreign adversary offering to provide stolen files to help the candidate get elected. Trump is confident that the FBI director became “incorrect” while he said that such attempts by overseas adversaries to meddle in our elections need to be reported to law enforcement.
