OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, MAY 18, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Port of Astoria
Commission
is now poised
for progress
V
oters sent a clear message Tuesday of what they expect
from the Port of Astoria’s commissioners — civility,
professionalism and progress.
In electing incumbent James Campbell, Dirk Rohne and
Frank Spence by overwhelming margins over incumbent
Stephen Fulton, Dick Hellberg and Pat O’Grady, the results also
registered a vote of confidence in the Port’s professional staff
and executive director, Jim Knight. More than 34 percent of reg-
istered voters cast ballots, with turnout surpassing the past two
off-year special district elections in 2015 and 2013.
While the election was nonpartisan, Campbell, Rohne and
Spence had similar platforms, pledging
to bring civility to the commission, sup-
porting Knight and the Port’s staff and
favoring the Port’s $1.96 million bond
measure to develop infrastructure at the
Astoria Regional Airport. Fulton, Hellberg
and O’Grady were closely aligned and
highly critical of Port management.
They each opposed the bond measure,
which failed by 145 votes.
Fulton, an incumbent who chose
James Campbell
to run against fellow commissioner
Campbell rather than to try and retain
his own seat, was the most vocal of the
trio, and he often clashed with Campbell
and others during stressful commis-
sion meetings filled with tension that he
helped create. He and Commissioner
Bill Hunsinger have been highly criti-
cal of Knight and have been on the los-
ing end of 3-2 votes at the hands of
Dirk Rohne
Campbell and Commissioners Robert
Mushen and John Raichl.
Campbell, who earned a fifth term as
a commissioner, captured more than 70
percent of the votes. He said voters took
notice of how disruptive and uncivil
Fulton has been. “I’m glad I won,” he
said. “Maybe we’re getting one step
closer to getting something done.”
In defeating Hellberg for Fulton’s
former seat, Rohne captured more than
Frank Spence
69 percent of the votes. Rohne, a for-
mer Clatsop County commissioner and Clatsop Community
College Board member, said the election helped showcase the
community’s confidence in the Port’s management. “It basically
became people who want to see the current administration suc-
ceed, and those who want to replace the current administration,”
Rohne said. “It seems like there’s a mandate for supporting the
management and trying to move the Port forward in a positive
direction.”
For the Port to move forward
as voters want, it will take
hard work, innovation and
leadership. It’s now up to the
commission to provide that.
Spence, a former longtime city and county administrator else-
where, was opposed by O’Grady and won with more than 60
percent of the votes. He will replace Raichl, who chose not to
run for re-election. He also saw the tally as a message from vot-
ers. “I think it definitely is a repudiation of our opponents’ posi-
tion and what they’ve been a part of in not moving the Port for-
ward,” he said.
Rohne and Spence will join the commission in July and it will
now be up to commissioners to follow through with Knight and
his staff to meet the challenges that lie ahead.
The Port needs to generate more revenue to cope with rising
costs and aging infrastructure, and the airport needs improve-
ments if it is to grow and reach its potential. Knight said he
believes the bond measure failed because voters are simply tired
of being taxed.
For the Port to move forward as voters want, it will take hard
work, innovation and leadership. It’s now up to the commission
to provide that.
The 25th Amendment solution
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
I
t was just three days and a life-
time ago that I wrote a column
about Donald Trump’s unfitness
for the presidency that affected
a world-weary
tone. Nothing
about this White
House’s chaos was
surprising given the
style of Trump’s
campaign, I argued.
None of the breaking scandals
necessarily suggested high crimes as
opposed to simple omni-incompe-
tence. And given that Republicans
made their peace with Trump’s unfit-
ness many months ago, it seemed
pointless to expect their leaders to
move against him unless something
far, far worse came out.
As I said, three days and a life-
time. If the GOP’s surrender to can-
didate Trump made exhortations
about Republican politicians’ duty
to their country seem like so much
pointless verbiage, now President
Trump has managed to make exhor-
tation seem unavoidable again.
He has done so, if several days’
worth of entirely credible leaks and
revelations are to be believed, by
demonstrating in a particularly egre-
gious fashion why the question of
“fitness” matters in the first place.
The presidency is not just another
office. It has become, for good
reasons and bad ones, a seat of
semi-monarchical political power, a
fixed place on which unimaginable
pressures are daily brought to bear,
and the final stopping point for deci-
sions that can lead very swiftly to life
or death for people the world over.
One does not need to be a Mar-
vel superhero or Nietzschean Uber-
mensch to rise to this responsibility.
But one needs some basic attributes:
a reasonable level of intellectual curi-
osity, a certain seriousness of pur-
pose, a basic level of managerial
competence, a decent attention span,
a functional moral compass, a mea-
sure of restraint and self-control. And
if a president is deficient in one or
more of them, you can be sure it will
be exposed.
Trump is seemingly deficient in
them all. Some he perhaps never had,
others have presumably atrophied
with age. He certainly has political
talent — charisma, a raw cunning,
an instinct for the jugular, a form of
the common touch, a certain creativ-
ity that normal politicians lack. He
would not have been elected with-
out these qualities. But they are not
enough, they cannot fill the void
where other, very normal human
gifts should be.
There is, as my colleague David
Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic child-
ishness to the man who now occu-
pies the presidency. That is the sim-
plest way of understanding what has
come tumbling into light in the last
few days: The presidency now has
kinglike qualities, and we have a
child upon the throne.
It is a child who blurts out classi-
fied information in order to impress
distinguished visitors. It is a child
who asks the head of the FBI why
the rules cannot be suspended for
his friend and ally. It is a child who
does not understand the obvious con-
sequences of his more vindictive
AP Photo/Steven Senne
President Donald Trump speaks with Homeland Security Secretary
John Kelly during commencement exercises for the U.S. Coast
Guard Academy Wednesday in New London, Conn.
actions — like firing the very same
man whom you had asked to poten-
tially obstruct justice on your say-so.
A child cannot be president. I love
my children; they cannot have the
nuclear codes.
But a child also cannot really
commit “high crimes and misde-
meanors” in any usual meaning of
the term. There will be more talk
of impeachment now, more talk of
a special prosecutor for the Russia
business; well and good. But ulti-
mately I do not believe that our pres-
ident sufficiently understands the
nature of the office that he holds, the
nature of the legal constraints that are
supposed to bind him, perhaps even
the nature of normal human interac-
tions, to be guilty of obstruction of
justice in the Nixonian or even Clin-
tonian sense of the phrase. I do not
believe he is really capable of the
behind-the-scenes conspiring that the
darker Russia theories envision. And
it is hard to betray an oath of office
whose obligations you evince no sign
of really understanding or respecting.
The presidency
now has
kinglike
qualities, and
we have a
child upon the
throne.
Which is not an argument for
allowing him to occupy that office.
It is an argument, instead, for using
a constitutional mechanism more
appropriate to this strange situa-
tion than impeachment: the 25th
Amendment to the Constitution,
which allows for the removal of the
president if a majority of the Cabi-
net informs the Congress that he is
“unable to discharge the powers and
duties of his office” and (should the
president contest his own removal)
a two-thirds vote by Congress con-
firms the Cabinet’s judgment.
The Trump situation is not exactly
the sort that the amendment’s Cold
War-era designers were envision-
ing. He has not endured an assassi-
nation attempt or suffered a stroke or
fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. But his
incapacity to really govern, to truly
execute the serious duties that fall to
him to carry out, is nevertheless tes-
tified to daily — not by his enemies
or external critics, but by precisely
the men and women whom the Con-
stitution asks to stand in judgment on
him, the men and women who serve
around him in the White House and
the Cabinet.
Read the things that these peo-
ple, members of his inner circle, his
personally selected appointees, say
daily through anonymous quotations
to the press. (And I assure you they
say worse off the record.) They have
no respect for him, indeed they seem
to palpate with contempt for him,
and to regard their mission as equiv-
alent to being stewards for a syphi-
litic emperor.
It is not squishy New York Times
conservatives who regard the presi-
dent as a child, an intellectual void,
a hopeless case, a threat to national
security; it is people who are self-se-
lected loyalists, who supported him
in the campaign, who daily go to
work for him. And all this, in the
third month of his administration.
This will not get better. It could
easily get worse. And as hard and
controversial as a 25th Amendment
remedy would be, there are ways in
which Trump’s removal today should
be less painful for conservatives
than abandoning him in the cam-
paign would have been — since Hil-
lary Clinton will not be retroactively
elected if Trump is removed, nor will
Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost
to Republicans will be counted in
internal divisions and future primary
challenges, not in immediate policy
defeats.
Meanwhile, from the perspec-
tive of the Republican leadership’s
duty to their country, and indeed
to the world that our imperium
bestrides, leaving a man this wit-
less and unmastered in an office with
these powers and responsibilities is
an act of gross negligence, which no
objective on the near-term political
horizon seems remotely significant
enough to justify.
There will be time to return again
to world-weariness and cynicism
as this agony drags on. Right now,
though, I will be boring in my sin-
cerity: I respectfully ask Mike Pence
and Paul Ryan and Mitch McCon-
nell to reconsider their support for
a man who never should have had
his party’s nomination, never should
have been elevated to this office,
never should have been endorsed and
propped up and defended by peo-
ple who understood his unfitness all
along.
Now is a day for redemption.
Now is an acceptable time.
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