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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   30844 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Trump did an interview with "Time," to mark the end of the first 100 days of his second term. The first topic they discussed was Presidential power:

Q: You know better than anyone that the President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world. At the same time, it seems like you are expanding the power of the presidency. Why do you think you need more power?

A: Well, I don't feel I'm expanding it. I think I'm using it as it was meant to be used. I feel that we've had a very successful presidency in 100 days. We've had people writing it was the best first month and best second month, and really the best third month. But that you won't know about for a little while, because it takes a little time in transition. You know, we're resetting a table. We were losing $2 trillion a year on trade, and you can't do that. I mean, at some point somebody has to come along and stop it, because it's not sustainable. We were carrying other countries on our back with, you know, with trade numbers, with horrible numbers, and we've changed it. You see the market fluctuates quite a bit. Today, it's up 1,000 or 1,200 points. It goes up and down, but that will steady out, and we're taking in tremendous amounts of money. We have, as you know, already, 25% on cars, 25% on steel and aluminum—

Q: Mr. President, I think what we’re driving at is that you've taken congressional authority on trade and appropriations. You fired the heads of independent agencies. You're challenging the courts right now, as you know. You're using the levers of government to weaken private institutions like law firms and universities. Isn't this seizing power away from institutions and concentrating them inside the presidency?

A: No, I think that what I'm doing is exactly what I've campaigned on. If you look at what I campaigned on, for instance, you can talk about removing people from the country. We have to do it because Biden allowed people to come in through his open border crazy, insanity. He allowed people to come into our country that we can't have in our country. Many criminals—they emptied their prisons, many countries, almost every country, but not a complete emptying, but some countries a complete emptying of their prison system. But you look all over the world, and I'm not just talking about South America, we're talking about all over the world. People have been led into our country that are very dangerous. If you were walking down the street, and if you happen to be near one of these people, they could, they would kill you, and they wouldn't even think about it. And we can't have that in our country.

Q: So you're not concentrating more power in the presidency?

A: I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. I saw what was happening early on when I heard that he had open borders, when I, because it was a hard thing to believe. I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then he didn't want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. An extension. And he didn't want to do that. And when he said he wasn't going to do that, I said, “Well, he must want open borders.” There were sections that were being built. And he stopped to work on it, and I said, this guy actually wants to have open borders. That's going to be a tragedy for our country. That's going to mean that other countries will release into our country some very rough people.

Anyone know of a mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that claims Trump has not done anything to expand Presidential power and is "using it as it was meant to be used?"

He also claimed to have made more trade deals than there are countries... The way he answers questions is peculiar and worth reading. Near the end of the interview:

Q: You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—

A:Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn't do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.

Q: We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.

A: Huh?

Q: We spoke to him a year ago.

A: How did he do?

Q: You can read the interview yourself.

A: Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.

Q: Well, we appreciate that you are able and willing to answer these questions. It says something about you, Mr. President.

A: I am indeed. I've been answering them for years and I’ve been getting elected by bigger and bigger numbers all the time, but you didn't ask questions like this to Biden, because if you did, he would have crawled under this beautiful desk.

Should we be considering the possibility that Trump has dementia?

  • -19

Anyone know of a mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that claims Trump has not done anything to expand Presidential power and is "using it as it was meant to be used?"

I think the only think Trump has done that really counts as an expansion of Presidential power (off the top of my head, but I am quite willing to be shown other examples) is asserting authority over independent agencies. (Pushing for diversity of viewpoint from universities also seems...novel...but I have not read the supposed authorities cited and "regulators pushing an extremely novel interpretation of US civil rights law on universities" is not exactly new, so I am not sure if that's really a good example, but it is the other one that readily comes to mind.)

I believe there's a fairly mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that holds that these independent agencies shouldn't exist, because they are not contemplated in the traditional Constitutional scheme, as they are neither executive agencies, nor part of Congress, nor part of the judiciary. Under that interpretation, Trump is not expanding his power by asserting authority over independent boards - he is exercising authority that has always been his, over all executive agencies. And in fact it seems to me like an awful lot of the stuff that Trump has done that's been attacked as being a novel use of Presidential power has just been exercising latent power over the executive branch.

From my point of view, the most problematic thing Trump has done from a separation-of-powers issue might be TARIFFS. Congress is supposed to make the laws, and, you know, our overall tariff policy is pretty important and under the original Constitutional schema probably would be left to Congress to decide. But guess what? Congress - as I understand it - decided to delegate him those powers. So he's not aggregating new powers to himself, unless SCOTUS rules that those powers are inherently those of Congress and that the executive may not modify them, which as far as I know they have not done. And probably are unlikely to do.

I think it's quite fair to argue that Trump is sort of double-dealing here - he's pushing (on the one hand) for expanded executive power from what might be a more originalist or right-of-center angle (the "you can't delegate too much power to unelected bureaucrats" theory of the Constitution) while on the other hand he's making maximal use out of the power that Congress delegated him under the more modern way of doing things (you might call this the "legislating is hard, let's let the President do that" theory of the Constitution) that might itself be subject to criticism under more originalist means of governing.

But here's the fundamental deal. The executive was always supposed to have a lot of decisive authority over the executive branch. It's just that the scope of his duties was originally quite small. Over the course of 200 years a number of makeshift patches were applied in US law that arguably would not fly by original-intent standards but (charitably) were necessary to make the Constitution workable so that the President and Congress could delegate sufficient functions to experts or (uncharitably) were necessary to subvert democracy by placing an unelected class of power-maximizing bureaucrats between the American people and their elected representatives and the levers of power. (That's not the only two options, and I think the truth of the matter is more complex than either or both of them, but I think phrasing it like that is clarifying). And when wielding both of those powers, the President might be much more powerful than contemplated under either the original or hotfixed versions of the Constitution.

And now we've essentially gotten the point where the President is willing to make vigorous use of the full scope of his authority under both the Constitution and those makeshift patches that we've applied, and in a way that is not only controversial but also impacts a lot of people. (Remember that Obama straight-up drone struck a noncombatant American citizen, which was controversial and arguably a bigger Presidential power-grab than anything Trump has done, but it only, ah, impacted a few people directly.) So now, maybe, Congress will decide to take the reins and do something about it.

Or not. Frankly, I wouldn't bet on it.

So he's not aggregating new powers to himself, unless SCOTUS rules that those powers are inherently those of Congress and that the executive may not modify them, which as far as I know they have not done. And probably are unlikely to do.

Given how extreme Trump's tariff policy is, they may invoke "major questions doctrine," as with Biden's student load policy.

Quite possible. I don't know that much about the legal grounding of the tariffs. My understanding is that Congress delegated a truly insane amount of authority to POTUS in "times of emergency" - I suppose SCOTUS might also rule there is no justifying emergency.

The fundamental issue, I think, is that SCOTUS and Congress want POTUS to have sweeping emergency powers. They have arguably relied overmuch on "norms" to govern the President's use of them.

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