Lost in the noise of the President's 80th birthday — the cage fights, the Iran deal, the so-called "forecast" — is a constitutional question that no law school in this country has the courage to teach. The question is simple. Does the President of the United States have the right to a nice day?
I have read the founding documents. I have read them more carefully than the people who quote them at you. And I can find nothing — not in the text, not in the amendments, not in two and a half centuries of precedent — that grants the atmosphere the authority to ruin a man's birthday. The sky is not a branch of government. The sky was not elected. And yet on June 14, over the South Lawn of the White House, the sky behaved as though it had a seat at the table and a grievance to air.
We talk endlessly in this country about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. We have somehow never gotten around to the most basic freedom of all, the one that underwrites every other: freedom of weather. The right of a citizen — and most especially of his President — to step outdoors on a day of his choosing and not be editorialized at by a cold front.
Consider what an outdoor event actually is. It is an act of civic faith. A man announces that on this date, in this place, in the open air, the nation will gather. He is, in that moment, exercising his freedom of assembly under a roof he does not control. And what happened on the 14th? The roof — the open sky, the commons we all supposedly share — was turned into a hostile venue. Heat. Humidity. The threat of storms. A meteorological heckler in every cloud.
This is the objection the establishment always reaches for, and it is the weakest thing they have. They say the weather has no intent, that it cannot discriminate, that a low-pressure system does not know whose birthday it is. To which I respond: that is exactly what makes it dangerous.
We do not accept "I had no intent" from any other actor that infringes a citizen's rights. We do not accept it from a corporation. We do not accept it from an algorithm. We have built entire legal doctrines — disparate impact, negligence, strict liability — around the principle that you can violate someone's rights without meaning to. The weather is the single largest unregulated actor in American life, it touches every citizen every day, it has never once been subjected to oversight, and the establishment's defense of this arrangement is, essentially, "but the hurricane didn't mean it."
If the weather will not respect the President's right to a nice day voluntarily, then the weather must be brought, like every other unaccountable power before it, under democratic control. I propose the establishment of a new cabinet-level body: the Department of Atmospheric Loyalty.
Its mandate would be narrow, reasonable, and long overdue:
Note item five, which is the heart of the thing. The most elegant solution to the problem of bad weather on important days is to recognize that "nice" is, ultimately, a matter of interpretation, and to vest the power of interpretation where it belongs — not in a thermometer, not in a "forecaster," but in the office of the people's elected representative. If the President finds that the day was nice, then as a matter of settled federal fact, the day was nice. The humidity becomes a difference of opinion. The storm becomes an allegation.
The civil libertarians — the real ones, the ones who only seem to discover the Constitution when it can be used against this President — will warn of a slippery slope. If we let the government declare a rainy day nice, they ask, what stops it from declaring anything anything?
But the slope already runs the other way, and they refuse to look down it. Today the sky is allowed to ruin a President's birthday. Tomorrow, what? A parade? An inauguration? A national day of mourning rescheduled by a drizzle? Every outdoor act of the American nation currently exists at the mercy of an actor with no charter, no oath, and no consequences. That is the slope. We are already most of the way down it. The Department of Atmospheric Loyalty is not the first step toward tyranny. It is the guardrail.
The doctrine, stated plainly:
A free people does not ask the sky's permission to celebrate. If the sky will not consent, the sky must be governed. And until that glorious day, the President retains — by natural right, if not yet by statute — the authority to declare his birthday a beautiful one, and to be correct.
The rain came. The event went on anyway. And in that defiance there was a lesson the lawyers missed while they were drafting their objections: a right you are willing to exercise in the rain is the only kind of right that was ever real.
The day was nice. It has been so found.