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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30656 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?

  • -17

There's a trick in the question.

Is using the Alien Enemies Act, for example, to immediately deport a members of a particular 'foreign' gang an "Expansion" of Presidential powers?

The AEA has been used by Presidents before, and its existed for almost as long as the Presidency has existed.

But Trump may be using it in a 'novel' way to perform an act that was not originally anticipated by Congress or explicitly approved by the courts...

So question becomes:

Has the President ALWAYS had the authority to do this under the AEA, and Trump was just the first one to receive an electoral mandate to use this authority...

or

Is Trump CREATING the power to do this via utterly novel interpretation and application of the law, and possibly thumbing his nose a 'traditional' boundaries on Presidential power... and he thinks he can get away with it?

I really think its the former. Trump saw a particular law that granted a particular power, sitting there dusty and unused in the warehouse of executive authority, and reached over and pulled the lever to activate it. But it has always been sitting there, he didn't invent it or wrest it from Congress or the Courts.

So ask that question about most of his actions. Is he 'expanding' power to take the particular actions he's taken, or do most, or even ALL of the powers he's wielding have established precedent in previous administrations, he's just one of the first to wield ALL of them this aggressively, so it looks like a scary expansion of power.

My personal view, as a guy that voted for Ron Paul in 2012, is that Trump is literally just flexing the full set of powers and authority that Congress has ceded to the President and that the Courts have permitted to continue for decades and decades.

I'm STILL mad about the PATRIOT Act, and that's 24 years old now. Congress has delegated even more power to the president since then. They could try to take it back at any time, but they don't. So they're tacitly approving of the executive's current exercise of authority.

I dunno, The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973 and lamented the expansion of the President's war powers. Congress has delegated much of their rulemaking authority to the executive since then in thousands and thousands of pages of laws creating various agencies. Its the logical outcome of about a century of SCOTUS precedent.

If you're scared of what the Presidency has become only because Trump is the guy wielding all that authority, well, I'm going to feel impotently smug once again. Or maybe smugly impotent. The problem has always been that the power is too broad and lacks any effective checks, if you were counting on the goodness of the man occupying the seat of power to keep the office limited, you're basically praying that God doesn't put madman on the throne.

I really think its the former. Trump saw a particular law that granted a particular power, sitting there dusty and unused in the warehouse of executive authority, and reached over and pulled the lever to activate it. But it has always been sitting there, he didn't invent it or wrest it from Congress or the Courts.

No it isn't. There was a separate law that was passed at about the same time as the Alien Enemies Act that really did give the president the power to do what Trump did. That law is no longer in effect.

In comparison, for those who haven't looked at the text of the still-existing law, the important part that is about to be argued in all the courts says:

any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government

Having not looked at any briefs yet, just the face of the text, I think it's going to be a bit of a tough road to hoe to argue that the nation or government of Venezuela is perpetrating, attempting, or threatening an invasion or predatory incursion. They would indeed be on far stronger grounds if the Alien Friends Act were still in effect.

Mmhmm.

So which branch of government is tasked with DECIDING if the government of Venezuela is attempting an invasion or predatory incursion.

And what if, for example, the FBI issued a finding that Venezuela is intentionally releasing gang members to the U.S. to undermine public safety?

Are courts authorized to overrule that finding?

I think courts are authorized to, at the very least, assume that the assertions of the executive branch are correct as to what is being alleged (which they may or may not need to do; this part gets complicated), then decide whether or not those assertions, as stated, constitute "an invasion or predatory incursion [that] is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government" as a matter of statutory interpretation.

Possible hypo land. Suppose the literal Venezuelan government sent precisely one spy to the US. This spy does some stuff. Maybe standard espionage stuff. Maybe a targeted assassination or something. The executive branch asserts this and decides to throw all the rest of the Venezuelan nationals out of the country. Is that enough to trigger the statute? I think courts might want to say "no", even if the executive branch wants to say "yes". But I don't know! They might say yes! I could even imagine reasons for them to say yes! But I do, indeed, think that they have some room to do statutory interpretation. ...then, we proceed down a chain of increasing hypos until we start to get a sense for how to interpret the statute.

Can you think of any cases whatsoever where a court overruled a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy?

Taking a look at the "Muslim Travel bans" from Trump 1 is possibly instructive here.

Taking a look at the "Muslim Travel bans" from Trump 1 is possibly instructive here.

Precisely. They engaged in standard statutory interpretation of the INA. If the INA had said something different, for example, (or the Trump I administration was trying to do something different,) then perhaps that statutory interpretation could have come out the other way. Their opinion was in no way, "Eh, this is remotely related to 'a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy', so we just can't say anything at all." Instead, they had a statute that delegated certain powers under certain conditions, and they did standard statutory interpretation to decide that the executive branch was, indeed, correct in interpreting it in a way that allowed them to do the things they were doing in the situation which they were doing it.

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