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Notes -
Biden wants a constitutional crisis, apparently.
Well, that's editorializing, but like, seriously--WTF?
He's got chutzpah, I guess (or, realistically, one of his staffers does). Never have I seen such a nakedly partisan attempt to create mass confusion concerning American constitutional law, nor such an inducement for left wing justices to defect from the rule of law. It is perhaps the single least professional, most embarrassing thing a sitting President has done in, like, six or seven weeks.
Just to get this out up front: no. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been ratified, and is not the law of the land. When asked for comment by CNN, the U.S. archives referred the station to previous statements from the U.S. archivist that
The President has no particular role in the ratification process anyway, so his opinion is legally meaningless. Certainly his appeal to the "American Bar Association" (an especially left wing advocacy group) is meaningless. But it's a signal, and the message is clear: time to ignore the law, precedent, history, and any possible position of compromise and coexistence. Watching the outgoing administration slap the "defect" button as rapidly as possible does not bode well for the next four years. At best, it's an inducement for the Trump administration to play tit-for-tat. At worst, I don't know--civil war?
The fact that the CNN article is still pushing this wild "pre-emptive pardons" stuff is also concerning, but illegitimately announcing an Amendment to the Constitution has surely got to be the most brazen lame duck move in American history. This is banana republic levels of absurdity.
Clearly Biden is doing a bunch of fuckery intended to tie up Trump during his first few months in office. Biden's reputation is already garbage, there's no loss.
But I think it's unlikely to work. Trump's team is highly motivated right now. The bandwidth of Biden's demoralized staffers is just not that high compared to what Trump will be able to muster.
I think it's likely* (not guaranteed) that the Doge comes in with hundreds or thousands of high IQ workaholics that will have the bandwidth to undo all Biden's bullshit before making sweeping changes of their own. If Elon's standards at SpaceX are any indication, we're about to see an explosion of competence in the executive branch that hasn't existed in decades, maybe ever.
I know the cool take right now is that the Doge will fizzle. The "nothing ever happens" crowd is usually right. But I'll take the over. Something will happen this time. I think they will do a Milei on the U.S. government and the results will be amazing.
I hope that I'm wrong, but my hunch about DOGE is that they will cut a million here, a million there, but will not be able to get rid of any major inefficiencies, and that they will avoid touching the $1 trillion / year military-intelligence budget, since that is a sacred cow for both Democrats and especially Republicans, and is also a massive and very sensitive jobs program.
What would go wrong if you just deleted the department of education?
In my opinion, less than what would go right if we deleted it. But it would probably be hard to find a national-level majority that agrees with me about that. The Department of Education is also a sacred cow because people understandably are very attached to children, and a huge fraction of people are still stuck in the mindset that mass education is actually effective at making people more educated beyond the reading/writing/arithmetic basics.
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