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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2784 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.

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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?

For a variety of government purposes, I probably wouldn't care all that much. For things like paying the military, it touches bad historical examples. At least part of the mess in Rome is attributable to individual generals slash political figures paying their armies effectively out of their own pocket. This not only breeds loyalty to an individual over the legitimacy of a system, but it also produced plenty of situations where the leader they were loyal to was making promises to pay them, only once they conquered some stuff and extracted loot (and political victory for the leader). It thus ties the military's individual remuneration directly to an individual political figure's political success.

IF one is not a total abolish-the-government libertarian/anarchist type and instead thinks that there is at least some value in having a democratic Constitutional system with civilian control of the military (yes, an extractive gang, but with some structure to try to align it), and CIVMIL relations that try to breed military loyalty primarily to said democratic Constitutional system rather than to the political success of individual political figures, then yeah, it's probably a good thing to have the foot soldiers be paid more by the abstract system and a formal process of the extractive gang as a whole rather than directly by particular extractive gang leaders.

We have the formal process and abstract system. Except it's broken, and being broken down further by the very same people who are now clutching the pearls about 0.05% of the military budget that is supplied as a short-term stopgap measure. Again, all the talk that this is about some high-minded principle is bullshit. It's not about "democratic Constitutional system", it's about hurting people on the ground so they lose faith in Trump and make them give money to the particular extractive gang leaders to distribute between their supporters. That's all.

I understand your perspective, but I don't see how this responded at all to my comment. You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician. Sure. I never contested that. I said something different, which I believe remains unaddressed.

You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician.

No, it's the reverse - they are able to "leverage" it because it's broken. The whole "debt ceiling" debacle should never happen at all, let alone be happening year after year. But my main point it's not that, it's that discussing all these high-minded concepts is useless when we're dealing with a banal case of political extortion. Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates, what Trump is doing is just trying to make people not suffer from the consequences of the brokenness of the system and its abuse. The pearl-clutchers may scream this is because he wants to turn US Army into a Pretorian guard loyal personally to him, but not only it has nothing to do with the truth, but they themselves know perfectly well it's false, they are just using it to try and fool some part of the public into putting pressure on Trump to achieve the real goal - getting the money. That's my point - considering all that as if it were a real argument about the real role of US Military is pointless, because there's no relevance for this discussion to the current events. It's all performative manipulation, not real discussion.

Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates

I think this is the main and best claim. It is likely true, in my view. That said, the context of this thread is that @MadMonzer presented an opposite view. Your response was, expressly, a "side note" on the general topic of whether it matters where/how money comes to gov't purposes. I was responding to that. It's not really responsive to my comments to just go all the way back, pre-side-note, and have your claim really be that the whole original premise is just false, anyway, as a contingent factual matter.

I'm here to talk about why people would, in general and in theory, care about the topic of your side note. Notice that your side note was not in any way connected to any contingent, on-the-ground, facts about what Trump or his political opponents are currently doing or trying to do.

I think this is the main and best claim.

Well, it is false. Moreover, as I noted, even people advancing this claim (I don't mean well-akshually-ers on internet forums, I mean politicians and media) don't really think it is true - they are just using it as a wedge to open the box with the sweet sweet budget money, and that's all. In the best case. That's like calling the opponent a Nazi - when it's done, they don't really think you are about to don the Hugo Boss uniform and invade Poland. They are just giving themselves permission to treat you like you already did. Same here - they are just giving themselves permission to treat Trump as if he already dismantled the democracy, even though he had no intent to, and they know it perfectly well - but that's not the reason to deny oneself a useful weapon!

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