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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2269 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?

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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?

I am not inflamed by it, but I am deeply suspicious of the motives and incentives. Organizations or people with huge amounts of money are rarely motivated by a deep sense of charity. How did they get so much money in the first place if they're so kind and charitable? It's possible, but suspicious. So much of politics seems to be wink wink nudge nudge soft corruption: trading favors for favors in the future. It's bad and illegal for someone to pay the president $100 million personal money in exchange for cutting their taxes by $200 million. It's equally bad, but effectively legal for someone to donate $100 million to something the president wants done, and then for reasons that are definitely completely unrelated ;) their taxes get cut by $200 million, or some other legal change is made or not made in their favor.

In a hypothetical scenario where someone is actually genuinely out of the kindness of their heart donating money to government projects with literally no ulterior motives, no quid pro quo, no future favors or influence gained, I think that's fine. But how often do you think that really happens? It's usually bribery with just enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.

Money forcibly taken is clean because the giver can't use it to extract concessions and manipulate the government.

Organizations or people with huge amounts of money are rarely motivated by a deep sense of charity

Cool, now please do Open Society Foundations and Tides. Or Zuckerberg paying for elections. Or any of the thousands of other examples where people with huge amounts of money donated for causes directly benefitting some politicians.

How did they get so much money in the first place if they're so kind and charitable?

How does "none of your damn business" grab you as an explanation? Unless you have a probable cause and a warrant, nobody owes you explanation about anything in their property, and it is certainly absolutely unwarranted to accuse a person of being a moral degenerate and possibly criminal just because he did not give away all his money yet.

It's bad and illegal for someone to pay the president $100 million personal money in exchange for cutting their taxes by $200 million

It is completely legal for someone to give an NGO $100 million in exchange for the government not raising taxes by $200 million to finance the NGO. Though usually what happens they raise it anyway, the NGO gets $300 million and spends it on electing Democrats (well, that and buying large mansions, of course).

But how often do you think that really happens?

I don't know. Let's examine the whole multi-billion-dollar NGO network that is deeply intermeshed with governmental structures by now, especially on state and local level, and see? Somehow except a couple of DOGE folks nobody ever is interested in looking into that, and what you get for such interest is being called a Nazi.

It's usually bribery with just enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.

If it's indeed so, then I prefer the bribery to pay for the soldier's salary and not for Governor's second cousin's yacht. If we're going to get rid of that bribery altogether, I would prefer to start from the latter, which had been going on forever and nobody ever showed any interest in it, and not with the former, which started just a week ago and somehow everybody is obsessed with intermixing private and government money. With this pattern, my strong suspicion is, as always, they don't give a whistle about any of the high-minded principles they cloak themselves in, and cynically use them to attack their political enemies, while in the same time doing the same thing ten times more, with gusto.

Money forcibly taken is clean because the giver can't use it to extract concessions and manipulate the government.

Yes, we never heard of the case when rich people could extract concessions and manipulate the government. I mean, until Trump came and ruined the perfect system.

I'm not even sure what sort of strawman you're attacking here, but it sure isn't me. I don't support any of the things that you're propping up as "but they do it too". They're all bad. I don't think Trump is any worse than the rest of the corrupt politicians taking money in exchange for political favors but... again... they're all bad.

Trump didn't take any money in exchange for political favors (at least in this case). But if it has been happening for 100 years, and people suddenly start screaming today about it, saying they suddenly discovered that they had principles all that time, but somehow stayed silent right up until that moment, but now they honestly declare "they all bad" - they are lying. They just want to use this as a weapon to attack Trump. As they would use anything to attack Trump, because the point is not any principles - the point is attacking Trump.

Trump didn't take any money in exchange for political favors (at least in this case)

How could you possibly know that? The entire point of wink wink nudge nudge quid pro quo is that there isn't any concrete written contract. They don't have to have anything specific they want right now, they just have to be friendly to Trump and make him like them, and then the next time they ask him for a favor they're likely to get it because he likes them and he knows he owes them a favor according to unofficial business/politics etiquette. There is no evidence until they ask for the favor (behind closed doors) and get it with tons of plausible deniability.

But if it has been happening for 100 years, and people suddenly start screaming today about it, saying they suddenly discovered that they had principles all that time, but somehow stayed silent right up until that moment, but now they honestly declare "they all bad" - they are lying. They just want to use this as a weapon to attack Trump. As they would use anything to attack Trump, because the point is not any principles - the point is attacking Trump.

Yeah. But bad people making motivated arguments for bad reasons doesn't automatically make them wrong. My burden in life appears to be doomed to living with a swarm of idiots on my own side of each issue screaming bad arguments in favor of things I believe and making it look bad. And I say this as someone center-right who is usually being disappointed by pro-Trump idiots making bad arguments in favor of his good policies I mostly agree with like on immigration. And the woke left get to knock down easy strawmen and become more convinced that their stupid policies are justified without ever hearing the actual good arguments. But in this case it's the idiots on the left who mostly agree with me making stupid arguments that don't hold weight because they've wasted all their credibility crying wolf over the last dozen non-issues, so this too looks like a non-issue even when they have a bit of a point.

Trump being right 70% of the time doesn't make him magically right all the time. I don't think he's any worse than any of the other politicians, but that doesn't make him right in this case, and it doesn't make criticisms of him factually wrong even if the critics are mostly biased and disingenuous and should be applying these arguments more broadly instead of waiting until now. They still have a point.

How could you possibly know that?

How could you? I think I have more base to claim the person is not a criminal if there's absolutely zero proof he is, than you do to claim he is a criminal with the same amount of proof.

There is no evidence

Thank you.

But bad people making motivated arguments for bad reasons doesn't automatically make them wrong.

It automatically makes their arguments dismissible. There's no point in considering argument if the whole framework of discussion is built just to manipulate you. Discussion makes sense when the goal is to find the truth. Or at least get closer to it somehow. If the goal is to just pull your strings, the right strategy is not to play the game at all.

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