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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2701 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 26, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there anything to this: "The Coup We've Feared Has Already Happened"?

The coup we’ve been fearing has already happened. Utterly servile to Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to convene the House of Representatives for even pro forma business (and by extension Congress) indefinitely, thereby shielding Trump from all manner of inquiry and accountability, not least the Epstein files, and giving him de facto full dictatorial powers. The longer the shutdown continues, the more irrelevant Congress becomes. Next expect unilateral executive decrees on assuming full funding authority, essentially rendering Congress defunct. It may never reconvene. Suspension of the Constitution cannot be far behind. Dictatorship came to us while we slept.

Is this what it seems like to me — just more lefty pearl-clutching and crying wolf — or is there something to the arguments James Bruno and Tonoccus McClain are making?

That substack is a bad take on it - the best version of the theory I have seen is spread across multiple posts on lawfaremedia.org. But the underlying story is absolutely serious, and as far as I can see it is true. The three-bullet version of the story is

  1. Trump is trying to replace the Congress-driven budget process established by the Constitution with a White House-driven budget process.
  2. Johnson is helping him, and Senate Republicans are not trying to stop him
  3. So far he is succeeding

The slightly longer version is:

  • Trump has, on numerous occasions, refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Congressional Republicans have not complained. As well as using his partisan majorities in both houses of Congress to pass recissions under the Impoundment Control Act (which can't be filibustered), Trump has used a dubiously-legal pocket recission to cut spending without a Congressional vote. SCOTUS has helped this along by setting up procedural barriers to anyone suing over this.
  • Despite the Republican trifecta, Congress did not pass a budget in FY 2025, and does not appear to be trying to pass a budget in FY 2026. Notably, Johnson has shut the House down rather than trying to make progress on any of the outstanding appropriations bills.
  • Rather than moving a mini-CR to pay the troops (Enough Democrats have said they support this that it would pass both houses of Congress), Trump has paid the troops with a combination of private donations and funds illegally transferred from the military R&D budget. The White House ballroom is another example of using private donations to pay for what should be Congressionally-approved government spending.
  • On the revenue side, Trump has raised a helluvalot of revenue with dubiously-legal tariffs. He also did a deal with Nvidia and AMD where they pay what is in effect a 15% export tax in exchange for Trump waiving controls on advanced chip exports to China. Export taxes are unconstitutional. There has been no attempt to incorporate any of this revenue into a budget passed by Congress.
  • An obvious combination of this type of "deal" and funding specific programs with private donations is to set up a parallel budget where money is raised and spent outside the official Congressional budget process, all backed by more or less soft threats of government coercion. Trump hasn't done this yet, but it is a logical continuation of things he has done.
  • Trump has also claimed in social media posts that he can spend the tariff revenue without Congressional approval.

The claim that Trump and Johnson are trying to change the US budget process to one where (at least as regards discretionary spending - the only changes to entitlement spending have been done in regular order through the OBBBA) Congress does not meaningfully exercise the power of the purse seems to me to be straightforwardly true.

A side note here: I find it fascinating how inflamed people become when they learn something the government directs is paid by people giving money voluntarily, rather than by money forcibly extracted from unwilling subjects. It's like the act of forcible extraction itself is the one that sanctifies the money and makes them fit for the official purposes, and otherwise it's impure and unfit for use. Thinking about it, though, it's probably not surprising - the same people probably are deeply suspicious of any action done by private individuals voluntarily cooperating (aka "business") and think that only giving all power and control to a small set of government functionaries can make anything those individuals do morally acceptable. Why spending money should be any different?

The government is not a charity, and empirically people don't donate to the government for altruistic reasons. So if the government is being funded by "voluntary" "donations" then the way to bet is that either the donations are not really voluntary and the constitutional requirements for raising taxes have been circumvented (as with the Nvidia and AMD deals) or the voluntary payments are not really donations and something has been sold non-transparently, probably at a loss.

Paying the troops with voluntary donations is a special case of badness - the fact that the Executive needs to go to Congress (and to do so regularly - the Constitution specifically prohibits long-term appropriations for the army) to pay the troops was intended as a key check on Executive power.

empirically people don't donate to the government for altruistic reasons.

People donate to all kinds of causes for altruistic reasons. In fact, people have been known donating literally their lives to governments. And the government is not shy to demand it. We hear that it is our patriotic duty to give as much as we can to the government. But somehow this only is laudable when done under the penalty of jail, if you do it without the threat, you are a pervert. Is that some kind of BDSM thing I am not aware of?

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