Coming up on this episode of The Roundtable.

For a long time, it was perfectly normal in American politics to assume that the president

could remove military officers, especially senior ones, really for any reason he wanted to.

I mean, it would probably would have been seen and should still be seen as not quite above

board if he removed them for purely, I don't want to call them political

reasons because that doesn't quite capture the right thing, but just petty, capricious, personal

reasons. That would be inappropriate. He'd still have the right to do it. And the remedy would

be Congress messing with him through the appropriation power

or even impeachment at the extreme end. But we've adopted this legalistic view and deference

to expertise. And so the Press Corps and official Washington views something like the Joint

Chiefs of Staff and the military officer corps as possessing some secret expert knowledge that civilian

leadership dare not question.

And we would be a little concerned, I think, especially in the modern age, if Trump was questioning

tactical staff sergeant level commands on the battlefield.

But the idea that he shouldn't be able to

remove someone for, quote, political reasons, which we would take in the most capacious sense

of a proper view of the American government and its purposes.

And that's, of course, the domain of the president.

And Brown was not exercising any particular military expert judgment in wanting to push DEI as much as the modern

incantation from bureaucrat military types is that diversity is a key to our readiness.

I mean, nobody buys that BS.

I hope most people don't. The

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