Our view: No, Mr. President, you can’t cancel the Constitution

President Abraham Lincoln once told the story of a man who was tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail. Asked how he felt about the situation, the man replied, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Timmons, appearing earlier this month in Charleston federal court on behalf of an American president few would call Lincolnian, probably knows exactly how the man felt.

Timmons’s thankless task? To stand behind the claim of Travis Voyles, the deputy administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that he’d individually reviewed 38 Biden-era environmental grants before cancelling them on February 25 — even though Voyles couldn’t produce a single document to prove it.

Unsurprisingly, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Gergel wasn’t amused.

“I was, frankly, embarrassed for the government to read Mr. Voyles’ affidavit,” he told Timmons from the bench. “I’ve just never seen anything submitted to me like that. It was, frankly, sort of an insult to the Court.”

But the clearly gobsmacked judge wasn’t finished.

“You know, y’all can do what you wish,” Gergel continued. “I’m used to the government speaking to me straight, to answer my questions honestly. Fifteen years on the bench, I’ve never had an experience where I thought the government did not do that.”

Apparently unwilling or unable to defend Voyles’ claim that he’d reviewed the grants in accordance with the law, the Justice Department essentially conceded the case. Shortly before the hearing, during which Gergel ruled from the bench, they told the court that the government would no longer contest it on the statutory merits.

And just like that, 12 nonprofits around the country got their illegally-cancelled grants back — including North Charleston’s Sustainability Institute, which plans to use its $11.4 million allotment to provide energy-efficient affordable housing in one of the city’s most long-suffering neighborhoods.

Of course, as Gergel made clear, he was prepared to rule against the government before the concession. The evidence clearly showed the administration violated the law — specifically the Administrative Procedure Act — and more consequentially, the constitutional separation of powers.

Put simply, the president doesn’t have the authority to usurp Congress’s power of the purse.

“It’s the Constitution we’re having to address,” Gergel said. “And it just seems to me that the public interest lies most directly in upholding our form of government.”

To which we can only say: Hear, hear.

Because as Trump has made clear time and again since his second swearing-in just four months ago, upholding our form of government is precisely the issue at hand.

From patently illegal detentions and deportations to daily depredations of the American constitutional order, Trump has shown himself to be precisely the threat to democracy that his most vocal critics always claimed.

And as another, better Republican president once reminded us: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said. “It has to be fought for and defended by each generation. This is the recurrent challenge, the one from which we cannot shrink.”

Now, that challenge has fallen to our generation of Americans. And it’s up to all of us — judges, citizens, reporters, elected officials, Republicans, Democrats and independents — to stand up for our democracy in the political fight ahead.

So brace yourself. Find courage. And get to work defending what millions who we honored Monday died for.