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The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."
While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.
Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.
Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:
(Emphasis mine.)
Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.
Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.
And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.
Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.
But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.
I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.
To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.
I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.
EDIT: Typos.
Where was all this complaining about the forms of the Republic when Obama was using his phone and pen, or everyone from Johnson to Biden was implementing DEI by executive order?
No, the Democrats have knocked every check and balance in the nation flat in their attempt to purge Republicans from power, and now the Republicans have turned tail on them. It's too late to call upon institutional integrity now.
I mean... libertarian and anarchist types were indeed complaining from at least Obama onward.
Are you in agreement that this executive is overstepping its powers, and just think it's justified?
If you think both this administration and the previous one are overstepping its powers... do you think they are doing it to the same degree? Which Biden-admin actions do you think are of a similar level to those mentioned above?
Biden went so far as to proclaim a new Amendment to the Constitution.
Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.
I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.
Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.
But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.
He did a lot of stuff in the beginning and middle of his Presidency too. Student loan forgiveness -- after getting slapped down by the Supreme Court, he just "found another way". Remember the rent moratorium? After the deciding vote on the Supreme Court says basically "it's unconstitutional but I'll allow an orderly wind-down", he extended it. DEI everywhere. He made a rule all but banning gasoline cars. He floated the idea of banning gas stoves through the CPSC, and when that failed he had the Department of Energy pass regulations to make them crappy instead. There's probably lots more.
No, the pardons, at least the ones specifying people and laws (including the one for his son), were pretty firmly within his power. This is another soldier; mildly criticize Biden for his use of the pardon power to provide cover for criticizing Trump for his even-more-justified use of it.
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Biden gives 10 year broad pardons for any "non-violent" crimes known and unknown to his immediate family, all of whom are involved in corruption and pay-for-access schemes, including his own son who has been the bag man for Biden family corruption for at least a decade and left a laptop of him recording himself doing it among like 100+ other crimes
Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.
think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain
and even if you don't think they were fully justified, putting them in the same category of "abuse of the pardon power" as Biden giving full pardons for crimes known and unknown covering 10 year periods to his family is ridiculous and stinks of "poisoned partisan thinking"
what is a "presidential act" which "proclaim[s] a new Amendment"?
Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused. So instead, he had to settle with twitter and a media blitz trying to make it happen.
I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.
J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.
I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.
The following statements can all be true:
I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.
I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.
Why should we use the hypocrisy standard when speaking directly to the substantive pardons themselves? No, the pardon "abuses" aren't the same nor should be treated the same because JD Vance, who is not the President, said people who committed violence "shouldn't be pardoned" (and soon after clarified he meant people who weren't provoked or didn't receive garbage trials, etc. ), and Biden said he wouldn't pardon his son but then pardoned his son not for charged crimes and convictions but for a 10 year period for any crimes known and unknown and even gave him a full day or two of prospective pardon left if he wanted to rush out and commit some more federal felonies. You can think "hypocrisy" occurred and yet the fact they both pardons happened anyway (and we're going to ignore there is any difference in a commutation or pardon) do not make the underlying pardons the same or in the same category of abuse. Nor any of the other 8,000+ other pardons issued by the Biden admin.
I'm not accusing Trump (or I guess his VP elect) and Biden of not being in same category of hypocrites. And this hypocrisy standard accusation assumes a whole lot about either admin's standards and degrees of wrong they would apply which I don't think is supportable either.
Putting pardons used by Trump and by the Biden admin even in the same zipcode of "bad," even if you don't think Trump was justified in every single one of the Jan6 examples, is ridiculous.
Protests across the country, especially during the BLM riots of summer 2020, see these kinds of numbers because cops are heavily incentivized to record and log each and every injury from a small scratch from a branch to spraining their ankle to smashing their finger while attempting to baton a protestor on the head. For e.g., when a BLM protest breached security barricades and lit the road and St. John's church on fire right outside the Whitehouse. We can compare the prosecutions, convictions, and sentences, from that example if you'd like.
And it's not 14 "unambiguously violent" protestors, there were 14 which were identified and charged not that this represents all violent protestors there that day, and given I watched the livestreams when this happened this doesn't seem unreasonable especially if you condition this on Vance's caveats. It's not unreasonable to claim this is close to meeting Vance's clarified standard anyway.
I didn't say the facts are unknowable, I said the process which was supposed to be used to determine the facts was fatally corrupted and the government actors involved intentionally hid, destroyed, and manipulated evidence and the courts helped them do it. I've noticed many a person complaining about these pardons endorsed or at least never complained when other criminals are let out of jail because of some error in the trial that convicted them, but suddenly the fact that hundreds of clown-trials sent regular Americans to jail and failed to protect them from a weaponized DOJ isn't enough to justify a President pardoning them to stop the damage. Who/whom explains these differences far better than torturing some alleged twisted principle they just discovered.
And I did look at and follow a lot of these cases and they all fell well-below what I or anyone should consider a fair trial. We don't know how much of a "case-by-case" review was done, but given even a supportable standard for fair trials and government conduct, it wouldn't be hard to quickly review and note all of these cases fall well-below it. You imply this review wasn't done, but clearly there was one because Trump didn't fully pardon 14 convicted people.
Yeah, well they were. All of them have suffered quite a bit; their houses were raided, their property was seized, they were detained pre-trial, some for years, they were tortured in jail by screws, they lost houses and families, and they lost years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is all well beyond any of the people who engaged in similar conduct who weren't being politically prosecuted. All of which makes me really question people who portend these pardons were even in the same zipcode as a dude pardoning his corrupt family members for crimes, known and unknown, for a period of 10 years, before they've suffered even a small fraction of the damage these regular Americans have suffered.
No one should accept the double standard if you want to enforce a standard; you either prosecute and punish similarly situated people equally or you don't at all and anything otherwise is the direct undermining of the rule of law, something you claimed to lament. Your "both sides are bad" feels empty when the de facto result is "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law."
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Vance is not the President. Worst case, he was lying about Trump's intention. That doesn't make the pardons an abuse.
And arguably he didn’t lie. Commutation isn’t pardon.
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You need to be looking at the subset of unambiguously violent protestors within the set of those convicted -- it seems quite unlikely that everyone guilty of violence was identified and arrested.
Which makes '14' at least plausible -- what criteria do you suppose Trump was using in deciding whom to pardon and who's sentence to commute?
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