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On the sqs thread, @Capital_Room had an interesting query, about whether Trump is actually being authoritarian:
Is there anything to this: "The Coup We've Feared Has Already Happened"?
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?
Some of the commenters like @MadMonzer offer an interesting response:
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
The slightly longer version is:
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.
Overall I tend to agree that Trump's admin is acting in authoritarian ways, and even moreso than past administrations. However, it seems to me that the Congressional structure is so broken that, it kind of makes sense?
The way I see it, and the way Trump et al probably sees it, is that the Three Branches as they exist are extremely dysfunctional, and cannot do the actual job of governing the country pretty much at all. This has allowed NGOs and other non-state actors to come in and basically take over by deploying social and cultural capital in key areas, craftily created a sort of secret network of influence, etc.
The only way for us to get out of this morass, the theory goes, is to have a strong executive who basically burns this gridlock down. Though I don't know if Trump's team would want to restore a functioning American government after or just keep an extremely strong executive.
Anyway, I can't say I fully agree with Trump's seeming plan to just destroy jurisprudence for the executive and do whatever he wants, but I admire the sheer boldness. OTOH, I'm also not convinced that the U.S. has more than a 2% chance of meaningfully falling into an authoritarian dictatorship under Trump, or even in the next 10-20 years. Hopefully I don't eat my words!
I think even Republicans, if they were thinking more clearly, should have great cause for concern. As the supposed originalists, they should be extra aware of the original Constitution's ideas for how the branches' relations should be. And there are objectively several gigantic fractures in the original Constitutional checks-and-balances design (who you blame for this is a separate discussion). We have:
Again, these are not really partisan spin-type allegations, they are very strongly rooted in fact. I can't emphasize enough that all of those problems are fundamental and direct threats to the checks and balances system. There's also some federal-vs-state stuff too but I tend to view that as less important.
Also, you have varying degrees of extra-Constitutional but still foundational stuff like:
I'm still a believer in the system, but... shit's bad. That's not an exaggeration. While political polarization is overblown (historically), the checks and balances are I believe in a worse state than they have ever been in the entire history of the state. I do fear for an American Empire era. Not in the next 10 years probably, but in the next 30, absolutely. Weirdly, I actually kind of think that making Senators directly elected (done via amendment) might have been a mistake, that the original idea of making them appointed by legislatures was more conducive to the role they were expected to play.
Again, let's step back for a moment: that's SEVEN major failures of critical pillars of the three-branch system to sustain itself properly (as originally envisioned). That's very concerning. Only so many checks and balances can be nullified before the system functionally collapses. (In fact, an argument could actually be made that Congress allowing too much federal rule-making many decades ago has created a vicious downward spiral as the responsibilities became increasingly easy to evade). This is, again, just simple facts and logic so to speak.
Now, to your original point, does dysfunction in one place justify dysfunction in another? I say no, two wrongs don't make a right. IF, and that's a big IF, major and fundamental stuff is going undone due to failings of Congress, I think the President is probably allowed some latitude. But that in my view is not broadly the case here, not now and not historically either. Executive rule-making infringing on legislative turf, the whole rescission stuff, presidential military encroachment, at least all of those have a long history of occurring independently even when Congress isn't dropping the ball. Like, the President is probably within his rights to move money around to pay the troops in a government shutdown like this, even if I don't like it. But the President is NOT allowed to deliberately, for example, decline to nominate someone to a Cabinet-level position on purpose because he prefers the current non-confirmed dude, as he recently did. I'm not quite sure what the ideal remedy for that failure is, if any, but it IS still a failure.
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The problem with claims of “authoritarianism” about Trump or anyone else is that the entire thing is so unempirical that it’s basically “boo outgroup” name calling.
Trump is going around Congress? What about Obama threatening to simply mint money to pay for things? Trump is using the National Guard, but in the 1960s the National Guard enforced desegregation including removing the Arkansas governor from the school house door. It’s not what laws are bent or broken, it’s scored differently depending on whether or not you agree with the goal and like the guy doing it.
Right back at you, no?
We can trade lazy whataboutisms all week and never get any closer to a conclusion. Instead, I’ll ask you: what’s something that would actually change your mind about authoritarian tendencies? I’m not asking you to abandon Trump. Just…what would cause you to say “yeah, the Democrats are correct in calling that an unconstitutional power grab?”
My point has nothing to do with Trump. I don’t like him anyway. My point is that pretty much any supposed “warning of authoritarianism” is so overbroad that literally any political figure doing something that the accuser disagrees with can fit into the usual definitions of fascism Or authoritarianism.
So in answer to the question, the first step would be to come up with an empirical definition of the points of fascism Or authoritarianism that even someone who agrees with the policies would say “sure I think we can agree on this point being fascist and not just using power in a way you don’t happen to like.” As it sits, this isn’t true. Eco’s 14 points are nearly as bad as Lichmann’s election keys: undefined terms, vague rules for deciding what counts, and lots of vibes-based handwringing. So I’ll answer by saying that I’ll take the cries of fascism by Trump seriously when you can explain why for example Obama’s trillion dollar bill to go around congress isn’t a fascist power grab, but Trump using Tariff funds is. Or why Eisenhower using the National Guard to arrest the governor of Arkansas for standing in the school door isn’t fascist, but tge National Guard protecting ICE agents is. I don’t like how Trump is doing things, but that doesn’t make it fascist, it means I disagree.
I have major qualms about throwing around these kinds of accusations without a lot of proof for a couple of reasons. First and most obvious is that they essentially declare the sitting government to be “outlaws” in the sense that the Western moral ethos has decided that any government that is authoritarian or fascist is to be opposed by any means necessary. It’s a declaration of war, it says that the government and anyone who supports them for any reason is evil and to be condemned. This is how you get assassination— and we’ve already had one. Second, Theres a danger that I think has already happened that so many false alarms have been issued that nobody takes such claims as literal anymore. You simply cannot because pretty much every conservative government that tries to govern like a conservative government is decried as Fascism. Reagan is fascist. Bush is fascist. Thatcher. If that’s also fascism, how do you actually raise the alarm if you get a genocidal regime who wants to actually rule with an iron fist?
Notice how I didn’t say anything about fascism. No need to quibble over definitions!
I am asking you: what would Trump have to do before you’d say “yes, that’s an unconstitutional power grab.”
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Indeed, this would have been an equivalent if he'd actually done it.
It wouldn't have been directly equivalent, because the spending he minted the platinum coin to pay for would have been approved by Congress.
When Congress passes a deficit budget without raising the debt ceiling to pay for it, the President is subject to mutually contradictory laws - at which point the concept of obeying the law goes out of the window. I suppose you could argue that if a loophole like the platinum coin exists, the President is legally required to use it as the alternative breaks a law (either the budget or the debt ceiling). When Congress doesn't pass a budget, the legally correct thing is clear - the executive branch should stop spending money that hasn't been appropriated.
The fundamental asymmetry here is that the debt ceiling is constitutionally pointless - it doesn't give the Congress any useful additional powers because if Congress wants the debt not to increase they can just pass a balanced budget. The requirement for annual appropriations is a core structural feature of the US Constitution.
The factual and political logic is the same in both cases - when Congress behaves in a sufficiently retarded manner, the President is going to look for a loophole. It is hard to say that Trump is doing the wrong thing by paying the troops illegally, but he is making a novel move to increase the power of the Presidency at the expense of Congress, and it is part of a pattern of behaviour of circumventing the power of the purse, not all of which was a necessary response to Congressional retardation.
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That is a long way to state "USA main governance problem is congress refusing to congress". The whole mess is caused by the fact that the Congress has refused to do its job for decades. And power just routes around it. Congress writes vague laws and creates massive bureaucracies that no one seems to be able to reign in to execute them. Congress doesn't pass budgets. And activists decided to create the whole legislation from the bench thing because Congress refused to congress.
There is no coup. Leave power on the ground - someone will pick it up.
The Modal congressperson seems completely and utterly happy to divvy most of their time between complaining and campaigning. Complaining that somehow the other side is rendering them completely unable to act, and then occasionally proposing a bill or voting on something to make the case for re-electing them anyway.
Partisan gridlock no longer seems like a bug, but a feature as far as they're concerned. Actually passing a bill tends to mean people blame you for outcomes in the bill, and you have to write your bill or amendments to it, read the bills proposed by others, and have orderly, informed debates on them.
Why not pass off the writing part to think tanks, the reading part to your staff, and then you can just yell your list of talking points as the 'debate,' and then vote the way you were always going to vote all along.
Anyone reminded of the Senate during the late Republic?
The senate wasn't a legislative body and the republic was destroyed by a political yo-yo driven by the lack of checks and balances.
I'd say the Roman Republic was destroyed by a lack of political control over the military, not by the inability of one element of the political leadership to check and balance another. The key points of failure all seem to involve a general whose troops were more loyal to him than the Republic marching on Rome before he could be fired by the civilian ruling institutions.
My informed layman's view is that the system in the Middle Republic worked because the Centuriate Assembly weighted votes in rough proportion to the military utility of the different classes of citizen in the conscripted army, so the people who elected the consuls and the people who formed the consuls army were functionally the same people. Whereas following the so-called Marian reforms you have a long-service professional army drawn from the proles who are effectively excluded from the Centuriate Assembly and don't feel obliged to respect the consuls it elects.
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Officially it wasn't a legislative body but practically it had significant influence on the Praetors and the popular assemblies to the point that their edicts were almost always followed by the magistrates.
And what do you think is happening now in the modern US given the lack of checks and balances placed on the executive by either the legislative or the judiciary?
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Don't tease me with AOC having her hands and head nailed to the Senate podium.
"JD! Veto the motion!! JD!!"
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Trump is making the government increasingly "authoritarian" (here, meaning increasing the scope of the executive and disposing of useful norms--cultural, institutional, and legal). But it's wrong to view this as something unique to Trump. With increasing polarization, Democrats and Republicans have both been pursuing a tit for that strategy. Neither sees a reliable negotiating partner on the other side of the aisle--and they're both rational not to--so ever since at least Clinton politicians have pursued partisan and increasingly narrow strategies that undermine norms to achieve their short term goals. Trump has taken us furthest down this road, but he's just driving down the same road everyone else has and is.
Do I like it? Not at all. One might hope that, by driving us closer to the abyss, Trump will at least accelerate the reaching of some redemption at the end. That seems wildly optimistic to me. And it's not fascism or neo-Hitler we'll reach, but a level of stagnation and dysfunction that will make the past ten years seem Singaporean in comparison.
US government has become more centralized and thus more prone to authoritarianism since George Washington himself during Whiskey Rebellion, through Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lochner era of utilizing Commerce Clause to gain more power and virtually every single president ever. The Cthulu always swam toward more centralized power in hands of a few. We may talk abut lawful breaches of decorum or this or that norm being ignored, but this is an old story and nowhere near what happened in the past like Habeas Corpus Suspension Act or dozens more examples throughout the history and for sure in the future.
Although there is clearly a drift to centralisation, it isn't a ratchet. Clear reversals in US history include:
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In other words, the majority of Congress has sided with the President against a minority of Congress in a common dispute between the Executive and Legislative branches that depends on the Legislative branch to enforce its preferences.
In other words, the President has lawfully acted with the ascent of Congress via an act of Congress wherein Congress gave the President pre-emptive permission to do so.
In other words, the Supreme Court of the United States has maintained pre-existing procedural barriers to attempts to stop lawful acts of a President complying with Congressional law.
In other words, the Biden administration did not pass the FY 2025 budget during a non-trifecta, the Democrats did and are exercising their Senate filibuster rights to block a budget that would easily pass absent their filibuster, and Trump and the Republicans are choosing to respect the budget filibuster rather than dismantle it as Democrats previously did the judicial filibuster during one of their trifectas.
In other words, the Democrats have declined to pay the troops via a number of what would be mutually acceptable ways, such as the sort of clean continuing resolution they have previously and repeatedly insisted on when denouncing the very sort of government shutdown they are pursuing, but have also declined to actually try and stop the R&D transfer or private donations to troops they refuse to allow to be paid by current majorities in Congress.
In other words, the Executive is following the law in not spending funds not approved by Congress, by using funds not forbidden by Congress.
In other words, the President applied a legal tariff, did not do an export tax, using trade authorities granted by Congress. Congress, in turn, has not passed a budget to incorporate this revenue, in part due to the President's party respecting the blocking action of the minority party who refuses to permit a budget to pass.
In other words, Congress established processes outside of its discretionary budget cycle to raise and spend money, which falls into its purview of power of the purse to permit discretionary actions within Congressionally-approved scopes, or even non-discretionary expenditures (such as entitlement spending).
In other words, even you are not claiming Trump is wrong on this, or attempting to point towards a law of Congress that specifies how tariff revenues are to be spent.
No. Actually, big no. Congressional inaction is not the same as congressional action. Votes are required for action to take place for a reason. A lack of official and formal votes cannot possibly be construed to actually be the will of Congress for what I hope should be obvious reasons. Congress' actions are affirmative only, by definition! A law or expression of will, once passed, should not and cannot be ignored. It must be actually repealed.
But at any rate this is moving the goalposts (freely forgiven because of OP's formulation of the question) because Trump has done more things against the explicit will of Congress and its explicitly granted power over spending than just the ICA episode. And before you point to the vague SC decision about it, this also didn't come even close to resolving the issue because it was loosely hand-woven over foreign-policy adjacent powers, which other illegal and unconstitutional acts do not concern.
This is a bit weird overall and I'm not sure what to think. Congressional spending is, admittedly, often done in an infuriating pretzel-like twisty manner and so things aren't super duper clear cut in all cases. It's not totally clear what, if anything, can or should be done in the face of genuine inaction. I do tend to think that eventually and generally, absent any and all budget, the government should fully and completely shut down even if this results in critical services going undone as a matter of law if Congress truly does nothing to apportion funds, though, and that the President can't stop it even if like, pragmatically he probably could do something.
Some kind of SC reform is needed but it may need to take full amendment form for the deeper reforms. I personally believe that bureaucratically at least the SC's processes are dysfunctional. Their current pattern of handling things via incomplete orders, shadow dockets, being overly pedantic about standing, etc etc is bad.
See above for my objection regarding lack of action not being at all equivalent to actual affirmative action by Congress. Most of your comments here are playing a political blame game, but that's not the question at hand here, it's more a general constitutional question, and so of only minimal relevance.
However. Admittedly it feels icky and gross and probably bad practice at a minimum to allow private donations to substantially prop up core government sovereign functions (and there is I believe a Constitutional argument that certain functions are not permitted to be fully privatized) but going further back in history I'm pretty sure similar-ish stuff has happened without too much fuss. In theory however the Appropriations Clause seems to suggest that there is some limit, though the contours are probably poorly understood on this issue. My opinion here also applies to the ballroom thing. (As as practical matter though, this is uncomfortably close to legalized bribery and so combined with a turbocharged presidential immunity, I find concerning, though I'm trying to keep things relatively nonpartisan on these questions)
I am not currently qualified to opine on if it's an illegal export tax. I will say this: Trump is stretching and pressing powers explicitly intended for emergency use into more "normal" tariffs. I think that's terrible precedent and likely illegal (but on normal, not constitutional, grounds - the distinction matters). To his credit, some of these tariffs seem to be directly connected to foreign policy and trade deals, so that offers him some leeway (i.e. they in many cases do not appear to be intended to be permanent policy). But that latter point is the rub, right? Trump is not allowed to set permanent tariffs. Whether Trump's actions constitute a violation of, say, the Nondelegation Doctrine I'm happy to leave to the courts. Yet again however it doesn't matter if Trump is more proximately responsible for raising the money... it's not his to spend!! Only Congress can, via official vote, decide where and when to spend the Government's money. Period. Trump does not get special benefit of the doubt here. He's got some minor latitude within existing structures and programs, but Presidents of both parties have been playing way too fast and loose with this. The government is NOT one enormous slush fund, nor could Congress make it perform that way even if they tried, they are not allowed.
Maybe the more informative question in all this is - how wide do you consider the Nondelegation Doctrine? And what do you think the whole check/balance behind giving Congress explicit power of the purse and to tax is even for? Reading between the lines you don't seem to think it's all that important.
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He applied tariffs; whether they are legal or not is still in question. Several courts have ruled otherwise. But it's not a slam dunk either way. I'm fairly sure that provision has been used for tariffs before, but even if that is in itself legal (and the appropriate Court of Appeals has said not), at least some of Trump's are different in relevant ways.
I'd say he definitely did do an export tax. Telling Nvidia they could only do their exports if they paid the government 15% is an export tax. It's often said that the power to tax is the power to destroy; Trump is reversing that here by using the power to destroy in order to tax (which is a lot of what governments do). This would be likely be legal, except for the Constitutional prohibition on export taxes. However, it's unlikely to get to court for (ordinary, not Trump-special) procedural reasons (no one who objects has standing -- 15% is perfectly acceptable to both Nvidia and China).
He's doing approximately the same thing with the H-1B fee, only there there's no constitutional question and some people do have standing. I think that SHOULD get struck down under the major questions doctrine or a similar argument, but that's going through the courts as normal. There is a Congress-built structure to admit or refuse aliens, and Trump is using an "emergency out" clause to build his own regulatory and fee structure on top, out of whole cloth. Seems like exactly the sort of thing "major questions" should cover.
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Seems like a really shitty coup when the opponents can simply undercut the whole thing by voting with the majority to continue to fund government at pre-existing levels. Is your argument that Trump is tricking the Democrats? Maybe everything is going according to how Darth Trump has foreseen.
Or maybe your theory is wrong. I’m going with that one.
I would add some of your other arguments (eg recession) prove that Trump is in fact using Congress. Or your argument that failing to prepare a budget seems odious until you realize there hasn’t been a budget in the 21st century.
In short, I don’t think your argument holds water.
I am old enough to remember the times when MAGA were claiming that Trump is playing 5D chess and Democrats were saying he is gullible moron.
And both were silly. Trump isn’t dumb but he also isn’t playing 5D chess.
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Just according to keikaku*
*Translator’s note: keikaku means plan
Everything’s going to be daijyoubu…
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Yeah I suppose the fact that he's just increasing the power of the executive instead of actively trying to extend his own power after his term does sink a hole in this theoretical boat.
I have seen several debates regarding "increasing the power of the executive". The main dispute seems to be if president uses preexisting power due to circumstances or if he is usurping more unique powers outside of legal context. For instance president can achieve to increase budget for his executive and in practical sense he has more power, because he has more money under his control. On the other hand he did not create any unique legal power - he just utilized what he had before.
I heard similar argument regarding using National Guard even against wish of local governor. Of course it is not used often - e.g. when Eisenhower federalized local National Guard to force integration of segregated schools in 1957. If Trump used the same move that was not used for decades - is he increasing his power as it was quite rarely used, or is he just exercising power that was always available to him so there is no power increase going on?
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But is he? Again some of your evidence for “increasing the power of the executive” is not passing a budget. That hasn’t happened in this century. If so, why do we think Trump is increasing the executive power?
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There is lefty overreaction/derangement to actual issues. Just because they would complain at anything doesn't mean everything they complain about is nothing.
An unreliable source crying wolf doesn't actually give you a lot of information on whether there is a wolf one way or the other.
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
But when and how do you sound the alarm when a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime over a country? American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. Alarm fatigue set in, people became habituated to the steady erosion of democratic norms because there wasn't a single act to push them over the edge, just a slowly boiling of the frog of democracy.
American leftists and their transatlantic hangers-on have been warning everyone and their dogs against this since at least the days of G.W. Bush.
If that wolf eventually does come and eat us all, it'll be a welcome relief from the incessant and fraudulent and outright weaponized crying.
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Way to miss the whole point of the story. What enabled the wolf to come and eat everyone is exactly the fact that the boy lied so many times before. So the first step is to make really sure it's the wolf and only then cry, otherwise you are fucking it up for everyone. And if you are about to sound the alarm, you need to make really, really sure that it's indeed a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime, and not just an elected politician enacting policies you happen to dislike. You need to work extra hard if you already sounded multiple alarms which are on record as false. In fact, in this case it's better to just shut up and let somebody else, who doesn't have such a horrible record with alarm sounding, to do it.
American leftists falsely warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. That's the word you missed, "falsely". So your question is "how can you make somebody who lied many times before to sound believable this time?" And the answer is "you don't".
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They warned about it because they considered any possible policy that they didn't like authoritarian.
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Yes I recall the hysterical cries about how Romney was like a Nazi, going to put black people back in chains, etc. Endless warnings about the existential threat of Mitt Romney.
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You make the case persuasively.
Democrats cannot do this because Obama and Biden did their own, more authoritarian, things that are very similar to Trump's power grabs, and they just point to minor differences why this time its different, when it is not. The things often cited by his opponents are just not persuasive. Blowing up drug boats? Presidents have been blowing people up for decades at this point, Obama even added the "even people with American citizenship" flavor to that pie. Prosecutions that appear political? Biden is you #1, and in fact, Trump tried promulgating EOs in his first term that attempted to depoliticize the DOJ, particularly around its controversial methods of "Sue & Settle" wherein they would force people to payoff progressive NGOs in class actions. Biden, of course, reversed that. Tariffs? Nobody knows what they actually do. I dont like it, its most likely kinda bad. Serious people don't hang their hat there when shit like dishonorable discharges and court martials were handed out to soldiers over covid vaccines, killing a pipeline, attempting to cancel student loans, etc.
OTOH, Trump's pseudo-impoundment is much more timid. Firstly, I'm fairly confident that the Impoundment control act is unconstitutional under original meaning. The founders were basically penny pinchers, and they imagined that Congress's power over the executive was impeachment and refusing to fund him, not forcing him to fund things. In fact, the latter is impossible from a logical perspective because the executive cannot spend money that is not in the treasury, and if congress passed a bill in 1805 that said "the president shall give every American $100" that would have been impossible, so obviously he could have refused. Thus, again fairly obviously, all appropriations are discretionary because they cannot be guaranteed to be fulfilled.
And one of the other major complaints relates to ICE and the National Guard. What is the president to do, realistically, when local law enforcement is aiding and abetting persons impeding federal law enforcement. If the Iowa State police prevent FDA inspection of all Iowa corn fields would Barack Obama just give up? If they let rioters around the farms do the same? Obviously not. Trump has been much more measured than ole Barack would have been in such a situation, because in that situation the Governor of Iowa would have been in custody. Gavin Newsom amd Karen Bass are not in custody, thus the light touch of Trump is revealed.
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"American leftists" (I'm not sure exactly who you mean by this) warned everyone against this in completely bad faith while actively voting for and implementing the surveillance state required for any kind of authoritarian regime. Obama was out there drone-striking weddings and supporting the NSA's total warrantless surveillance system. Hell, he even turned it on candidate Trump in order to help out Hillary - and I'm not going to take people complaining about the executive being authoritarian seriously when they supported the use of intelligence agencies to surveil domestic political opposition and spuriously prosecute former opposition leaders. The left in no way has clean hands here.
I think that's uncharitable. I lived in Oregon at the time, where I also grew up, and I remember quite a few (though definitely not a majority!) of leftists quite upset at the drone-strike era Patriot Act stuff only getting worse under Obama. The problem here is that in general, privacy-minded people are small minorities in both parties (there's pretty notably only a single Rand Paul in the Senate, for example). In fact leftists were the ones most loud and annoying about hating the TSA stuff, as a smaller example, and leftists also the ones feeling more warm towards Snowden even though it also happened on Obama's watch, but again libertarians are a weird cross-axis group (almost a horseshoe theory thing)
J Edgar Hoover era stuff also doesn't map neatly onto modern political orientations, so I don't want to overemphasize it in that sense, but it's nevertheless worth noting that in that era the leftists also were eventually targeted the most by his apparatus (and which was far, far worse than the kiddie shit everyone gets worked up about regarding the like, two lower level dudes in the Trump campaign getting wiretapped. And I mean for heaven's sakes Nixon had people literally break into the Democratic headquarters). So maybe my more broad point is that I'm often confused by people being so accusatory about anti-authoritarians being too loud or annoying...
...because virtually the entire history of the United States is one giant concern about authoritarianism! Think what you will about the modern No Kings rallies, but the idea is super-duper-mega-American. Modern people are often very surprised at how passionately Americans often felt about the issue. Even now-beloved people like Lincoln were very, very often accused or suspected of being tyrants in disguise.
In that sense, it feels like a partisan psy-op that so many people are convinced that it's purely a partisan TDS thing alone. It's not. Sure, I absolutely and completely agree that Biden and Harris over-milked it as a talking point, to the detriment of their own ideas for governance. There is an element of chicken and egg too (is Trump's far more extreme second term a counter-reaction to alleged Democratic misdeeds, or was this his true character all along that Democrats were warning about? Even granting that binary presentation of the question, causality is not so easy to tease out). Yet still, saying it's all bad faith is a severe misattribution error.
I actually agree almost entirely with what you've said, save for the part where you accused my post of being uncharitable. I was one of the left wingers protesting against this sort of thing (though in a different country) - it's just that I took "American Leftists" to mean the DNC and actual politicians. Candidate Obama was actually really strong on all of these issues and made all the right statements... but then you look at President Obama and I don't feel like I'm being uncharitable at all when I saw that he and his campaign acted in bad faith.
I'm sorry for giving such a meager reply to such a nice post, but I think our actual disagreement here is largely on the basis of how we interpreted the term American Leftists. Hell, the one thing you brought up that I'd want to get angry and generate heat over was prefaced with "think what you will about them".
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They were crying wolf. Remember when he met with Kim Jong Un? It was supposed to be the start of WW3... And the rhetoric kept getting amped up after that.
You want to talk about authoritarianism, great! Can we talk about some of the things that happened during covid? Or are we just not supposed to talk about that... Or how about the overt lies about Biden's mental state? My point is that there are a lot of examples, and this has been the tactic for a while now.
How many times can someone get caught lying before people stop believing them? Until they own up to some of it, it's kind of on them for no one believing them.
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Alarm fatigue setting in wasn't a force of nature. It was created by the behavior of the American leftists observing how their alarm wasn't getting the alarmed response they wanted and then doubling down on the alarm in the apparent belief that the level of alarm of the response would be proportional to the level of alarm that they're raising. This, of course, led to a vicious cycle where they would keep doubling down on the alarm, which would further reduce their credibility, which would further lead to less alarmed responses, which would further lead to American leftists doubling down on the alarm, etc. As best as I can tell, we're still in this cycle.
I'm not sure how to break the cycle, but to prevent the cycle, presuming for the sake of argument that Trump is a dictator who had been slowly installing an authoritarian regime in the USA since his first presidency in 2017, I think preventing alarm fatigue by carefully calibrating the alarm raised to be exactly appropriate to Trump's behaviors would have done it, such that the odds of Trump succeeding in his quest to install authoritarianism in the USA with himself as dictator would be significantly lower now in this alternate universe. Unfortunately, we don't live in this alternate universe, but fortunately, we don't need to believe the presumption that we took for the sake of argument.
The alarm should be quieter because people didn't pay attention to it because it was too loud is an interesting way to say the "vicious cycle" was just a lot of rationalizing away the concerns.
The real problem isn't that leftists pulled the fire alarm, it's that your social media bubble didn't, your "epistemic bubble," from Nate Silver to Elon Musk, grew specifically around the narrative of the absence of fire.
Blaming the people who pulled the fire alarm for making it loud is one hell of a take.
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Define 'authoritarian'. Because Trump is ruling by decree outside of the normal separation of powers. Like that is literally what he's doing, yes Obama did some stuff along the same lines, but he didn't invent new taxes wholesale.
That being said, I don't really mind the rest of the constitution being treated like 'shall not be infringed'.
That was the exact issue that got Obamacare in front of the supreme Court. Individual mandate to buy insurance was a new type of tax or a very old one that hasn't been used in a while (a head tax).
IIRC, the issue was that the bill originated in the wrong half of the legislature, because the Democrats took a previous passed bill, replaced the name and the entire text, and then pushed it forward like it had already passed in the House once. Then Roberts waived that UNCONSTITUTIONAL NORM SHATTERING POWER GRAB FASCISM by saying that a tax increase wasn't a tax increase because please stop making me make hard decisions.
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It was passed by congress.
And? As you said Obama didn't create any brand new taxes, but he arguably did. And by arguably I don't just mean there is one loose interpretation where he might have done that. I mean it went before the supreme Court and it was a hotly contested issue by multiple states signing on to that case.
The point is that President Obama didn't create the new tax, Congress did.
There is an arguable case that Congress exceeded its authority under article 1 by regulating the absence of intrastate commerce, thereby usurping authority that properly belongs to the states.
There is a completely unarguable case that if Obama had enacted Obamacare by executive order, he would have been exceeding his article 2 authority, thereby usurping authority that properly belongs to Congress.
Trump imposing tariffs is arguably a case in the second category - the Trump tariffs are squarely within the article 1 authority of Congress, and uncontroversially illegal unless Trump is working within authority delegated by Congress. The tariff litigation has two strands:
I get that there is a legal difference, but the line is very thin when it is an Obama administration team proposing a massive bill to Congress and pushing it through so fast that barely anyone had time to read and understand it.
If Congress is going to rubber stamp anything the president puts in front of them (with maybe just a few pork barrel spending concessions added in) then it's not very different from going around Congress altogether.
I'm not saying this is ok. I'd prefer it if Congress would do their fucking job. But the imperial presidency has been a growing concern for decades at this point (or a even a century). I don't feel entirely comfortable blaming it on one party or even one particular president. If I had to I'd probably put the blame on 9/11 over reaction and George Bush. Obama was partly elected by people claiming he would reign in this sort of thing. Instead he just changed the flavor.
I just see this as less of a bright line has been crossed and more of a continuing escalation. I don't know where I'd put the bright line. If you'd asked me a century ago to place a bright line I'm sure FDR would have crossed it first. If you'd asked me anytime in the last three decades I'm sure that line would have been crossed about a decade later.
I don't think Congress rubberstamped Obamacare. There was a lot of negotiation between the White House, Pelosi's House leadership team, and the marginal senators who would be needed to get the thing through the Senate. The version of Obamacare that was rushed through without backbench House members having time to agree it was the result of that negotiation - it wasn't the administration's original draft.
That said, your basic point about the imperial Presidency stands. The non-US political science literature sees it as an inherent flaw of presidential democracy with strong political parties (and as something which has happened much faster in every presidential democracy, which isn't the US, usually ending in an autogolpe). In the here and now, the Trump budget shenanigans is a major escalation, and a particularly significant one because the budget is the main tool that a non-veto-proof Congressional majority has against a recalcitrant President.
I expect any attempt to discuss how bad the situation is is going to run into the ultimate scissor around the 2020 election and what it means for assessments of Trump's good intentions. "A president with a record of libertarian activism who stans Milei and poasts about the need to route around feckless Dems and Rinos is trying to partially usurp Congress's power of the purse in order to cut wasteful spending" is consistent with the long bipartisan history of drift towards an imperial presidency, including the general principle that each step on that road feels like a good idea at the time. "A president with a record of populist authoritarian activism who stans Putin, Orban and Bukele and poasts about his plans to attempt an autogolpe is trying to partially usurp Congress's power of the purse in order to defund his political opponents" stinks of burning Reichstag.
Who can forget the Lousiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback?
Man, we used to have great names for these things. Now everything is just -gate. We used to be a country.
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It's not very different in result, it's entirely different if you're talking about subversion of the system.
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I think to hear the administration tell it, Congress has: there are various laws on the books (for decades, in most cases) that allow the president to set tariffs for "national security" (that has never been a loophole before /s), negotiating trade policy, against countries that discriminate against US trade, and for generic "emergency" purposes (also a common loophole).
I'm not going to completely side with the administration here, but I don't think the claim that Congress hasn't at least intended to grant the authority is questionable (and I'm not going to take a side on whether Congress should have done this here). The delegation questions are interesting, but I don't expect a massive judicial rollback of "emergency" powers as the most likely outcome: I think the idea of giving the president this authority wasn't really questioned, and previous presidents have used them without as much controversy.
I don't think Congress intended to delegate the power to raise tariffs on anyone, at any time, for any reason (including, for example, to punish a foreign politician for telling the truth about Ronald Reagan), which is the power that Donald Trump is claiming. (Trump's lawyers argue that both the President's determination that an emergency exists and the President's decision of who to tariff in response to the emergency are unreviewable by the courts, and can only be overturned by Congress with veto-proof majorities).
If Congress has wordcelled themselves into delegating a broad non-reviewable taxing power to the President, this doesn't change the fact that the Trump tariffs are still an unprecedented usurpation of the traditional taxing authority of the Congress, just one that is technically legal, in the same way that it is technically legal for the President to sell pardons under Trump vs United States. And INS vs Chadha (which invalidated the clause in IEEPA allowing Congress to cancel an emergency declaration by simple majorities) would turn out to have been a Dredd Scott tier mistake by SCOTUS.
Certainly it is not unprecedented; tariffs have been put in place by the executive before.
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Re MQD I wouldn’t phrase it that way. Instead, the rule is that Congress does not hide elephants in molehills. That is, there needs to be clear intent Congress was giving the president the power to do X; an open ended grant is generally not clear intent. ACB had a concurring opinion that explained it well.
I don't think we disagree. In the instant case the point is that if "imposing 3 trillion dollars in tariffs" is a major question and the MQD applies to the interpretation of IEEPA, then the power to "regulate trade" should not be interpreted as including the power to impose tariffs, whereas under ordinary canons of statutory interpretation it is a close call.
I wasn’t making a comment on the application; just the articulation.
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Very big, if true. I don't have a lot of confidence in this forum's ability to evaluate these claims.
How would the situation be different, if the House GOP simply couldn't get its shit together? Aren't they generally unable to get their shit together and isn't Trump generally exceeding limits on executive power faster than they can be enforced?
The thing that gives me the most pause is the enduring mystery of how Johnson became Speaker. To the Christians: Are deals with the literal devil known for "monkey's paw" outcomes? That would be as good as any explanation I've ever seen for that circular firing squad.
This particular part is why I can't take the article in the OP seriously. The House HAS done its job and passed a bill to fund the government. This entire shutdown is in the court of like 8 Democrats in the Senate.
I'm modestly surprised the Republicans haven't pressed them to give a standing filibuster. I guess it would give them a pulpit to speak, but it also has the optics of "we're trying to reopen the government and they're standing up there reading children's books" (Ted Cruz once read Green Eggs and Ham during one), or even just rambling poorly at 3:00AM while the majority of the Senate is ready to end the shutdown (and go to bed).
But maybe there is a strategic reason to not do so. Or a long-standing gentleman's agreement not to.
The government being shut down doesn't hurt republicans, they're getting what they want.
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Apologies, but this is a personal interest of mine. "Filibuster" commonly refers to two different rules of the Senate, with different implications.
The "talking filibuster" comes from Senate Rule XIX 1(a):
Importantly, a talking filibuster can delay the business of the Senate no matter how large the majority of Senators that want to proceed.
The "filibuster" that blocks most legislation is not the threat of a "talking filibuster" but rather Senate Rule XXII. I am not going to quote the whole thing here (it's very long) but the short version is that to force the Senate to move to actually voting on passing a piece of legislation you need 3/5ths of Senators to agree to a motion to do so. Implementing a filibuster under this rule just means having two members present on the floor of the Senate and, like, move to adjourn over and over again. That motion would be privileged over any motion to vote on a bill and the only way to stop it being made would be it invoke cloture, which requires the 3/5ths vote threshold.
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The reality is that forcing them to do a real filibuster would likely kill multiple Senators.
At the very least, there are numerous prominent Senators in their 70s. Putting them through a real filibuster with 24 hour sitting and quorum checks would be humiliating.
I'm not seeing the downside there...
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No one will see the poor rambling, but the most glowing and positive 15 seconds will be on every morning show and news network.
Also, you'd have to listen to Hakeen Jeffries talk.
I figured the worst 30 seconds would get prominently featured in attack ads targeting federal workers, especially essential ones. "This is what [your incumbent] was doing while trying to delay your paychecks" would seem pretty effective: IIRC one (blue) federal union's leadership has already started complaining.
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The whole thing seems in lalaland for missing that key fact.
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"The House GOP" isn't a singular entity with a cohesive purpose and rational preferences. It is an agglomeration of representatives, and even if they are each individually cohesive and rational, Ken Arrow already told us that this doesn't translate to the aggregate.
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Trump is pulling a bunch of shenanigans, but they don't seem really different in kind from past shenanigans. The US hasn't passed a full budget since 1997. And that he's got Johnson on board means he's not actually leaving Congress out of it. The tariffs are going through the court system as normal. The Nvidia thing is an interesting reversal of "the power to tax is the power to destroy" (Trump can lawfully forbid the export), and is probably unconstitutional, but the trick is for someone to have standing. But all of this is pretty normal pushing of boundaries, combined with an especially dysfunctional Congress. It's not an overthrow of the system.
What is the bright line for you that would show an actual overthrow of the system?
Two federal judges being murdered is my freak the fuck out line.
In what time-span? Do the murders need any clear connection? (That's not a bad "freak the fuck out line," inasmuch as it's an indication of institution-threatening societal problems, but it's still susceptible to goalpost-moving)
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The wild applause in the about-to-be-dissolved Senate.
Why would the Senate be dissolved? Even the Nazis kept the Reichstag as a rubber stamp to give a veneer of legitimacy.
Heck, even the Roman Emperors kept the Senate around as a ceremonial body that gave authority to their decisions. It was pretty wild when I learned that the theoretical institution of the Roman Senate lasted long enough to be meaningfully involved in the disputed election of a Pope even after the empire fell in the west.
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I don’t think George Lucas gets enough credit for writing a pretty realistic government overthrow. The later stuff in the Clone Wars and other tv shows about the troops having mind control chips is annoying and unnecessary, because to an outside observer that’s not privy to the viewer’s secret knowledge, the Jedi really do look like they were pulling shady maneuvers. Look at the facts:
Palpatine actually did a pretty good job tricking the Jedi into looking like they were trying to overthrow the Republic, and I don’t think the rank and file would object to their orders based on what they know.
Six Guys? Did I watch a different movie than you?
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The Jedi were never pacificists, were they? They were always magical special forces but had been used to being used as swat.
They weren’t, but they primarily operated as diplomats before the civil war, and having them as full blown combatants and military officers was seen as somewhat weird and uncomfortable.
They were wizard cops. Having Jedi do actual combat was pretty common from what we know of them.
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The chips became narrative necessary in the Clone Wars TV show because the Clones and Jedi developed such a trust from working together that, in the above scenario, the clones would have sided with the Jedi over the political leaders. The clones also had evidence that the "evil witch coven" was alive and active, they saw Count Dooku slaughter many clones, fought Ventress, etc.
Absent all that development, it makes sense without the chips.
But the clones had no reason to believe that chancellor palpatine was part of the witch coven. As far as they knew, the witch coven was defeated and the Jedi immediately attempted to overthrow the republic by declaring the chancellor to be a surviving member.
Cody, specifically, became a problem. Cody doesn't seem like the person who would shoot Obi Wan in the back. Cody could rightfully assume that Obi Wan would be one of the good ones. He just took down Grevious in front of him! Sure, some Jedi were evil, that had been demonstrated elsewhere in the Clone Wars. But not Obi Wan.
They had the choice to give Cody an arc where he started distrusting Obi Wan, or they could do the chip thing instead. They chose the chip thing.
My headcanon is that clones tried a lot less hard to kill popular jedi commanders, and that 'yeah, he must've been dead' was because of that.
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Point of clarity: When Windu and the Dying Squad of Jedi arrived, they went to arrest the chancellor, not assassinate him. Thus the "I AM the senate" line, and Windu's "Not yet" (bzzzzzzzzwang ignition of lightsaber).
It was Yoda who went in with the intention of actually offing Sidious, who by then had been proven a sith lord.
Unless you're typing out the news as reported by the legacy Coruscant media, in which case yes, the masses can be tricked.
When Anikin and Mace Windu are arguing in front of the window, Mace specifically says that Palpatine is too dangerous to be left alive and that his corruption of the courts makes the justice system inadequate to deal with him. He’s definitely arguing for an impromptu extra-judicial killing right there in the office.
The Jedi are justified if you know everything that’s going on, but from a public perspective it’s all very suspicious looking.
I mean to be clear, the Jedi really do act like pompous jackasses. They happen to be correct, but they have plenty of bad press from being douchebags.
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True. But this is after the initial confrontation, where Sidious has murdered at least two jedi and shown clearly his darkside self. Yes from a public/filtered perspective it's dubious.
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Use of the federal security agencies to illegally gain partisan political advantage against the opposition seems like a fairly bright line.
Yeah, you make a strong point. I suppose ultimately the 2016 campaign with the FBI covering for Hillary, and then subsequent FBI involvement in the 2020 election and the Covid "misinformation" thing is evidence of utter corruption in our political process.
Nuts that it's all relatively out in the open, and yet half the country seems to not be aware or not care about it. Sigh.
Don't forget illegally spying on her opponents' campaign office. For completely unknowable reasons, including what happened to any intel thus obtained.
Wasn't the intelligence put into the PDB and distributed to the Clinton campaign?
I don't think there has ever been any public statement about the results or even purpose of the investigation. It's been acknowledged the FBI lied in order to obtain the warrant to surveil Page, but nothing else.
Of course, this is all going by memory. A cursory search results in lots and lots of whitewashed "fact checks" about how Trump was totally lying about the FBI spying on him; none mention Page. I found a few links purporting to lead to articles on the FISA court's condemnation of the FBI over the Page warrant, but they are all dead.
Speaking as someone who followed that whole episode closely enough that I once knew the details of why footnote 389 in the IG report meant that the FBI had been lying about when they opened their various investigations against their various targets, my memory of this says that the FISA court, being involved in signing on to an obviously false FISA warrant, played the IG report straight and sent it back to DoJ. The upshot of that was that Brandon Von Grack was removed as a prosecutor from the Flynn case, a new DoJ attorney was appointed, and what do you know, suddenly pretty much every single piece of evidence that Flynn's defense alleged existed and had been seeking, and that the DoJ denied existing, was produced and the DoJ was motioning to dismiss the case. The judge denied the motion, defense sought a writ of mandamus, appeals initially granted the writ but then convened a full panel, which allowed the judge to continue the trial, etc. etc.
Oh, and Kevin Clinesmith, the guy who falsified the CIA's answer that Page was an asset, was fined $100 for his crime.
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If that happens, users on this board will immediately defend it as not illegal, not partisan, not an advantage, and not as bad as something that happened in the Hillary campaign.
Consider this a sad, sad prediction.
You can see that right now in the thread where people dig out individual examples of "the other side" having done something as a reason why it's supposedly perfectly fine that Trump does that thing.
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Moderator, mod thyself.
What for?
I mean that sincerely. I’ve got a lot of respect for you, but I don’t think I violated any rules.
I'll chime in to say that I do find statements like this
To at the very least be toing the consensus building(negative consensus) line but more importantly just very irritating. if you added a "most" to users then it'd go over the line and without the most it's a kind of limp claim that would be true if two users did that at which point why even make the comment. I dunno, I'm taking it out on your but people have been doing this more recently and it has been contributing to a general rise in heat on the forum.
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Probably it's unfair of me to attach different expectations of posting to mods, but I do, and it's always discouraging to read mods generalizing about a Motte Ethos. You'd know the rules better than I.
Alright.
I’m sorry for painting with such a broad brush.
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Because you're sniffing your own farts.
Because I have a whole library worth of janny cracks if you're going to start insulting the users. I've been holding back, because I am a well mannered boy, but if you're going to break that gentleman's agreement then I don't have a reason to hold back. I assume that because of this precedent, I can volley back and make predictions about the moderators in general?
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For what it's worth, I also don't think you violated any rules.
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Do you think he's wrong?
I think whether I agree or not is irrelevant. I often generalize about the ethos of Der Motte in general and suspect by and large I'm not off by far. But maybe I am. Maybe we're all capable of surprising one another. Maybe there's no Motte hivemind, and we're not so very predictable. I'd like to think so. And the best modding I've seen keeps this hope alive.
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I don't appreciate you casting such an allegation to everyone here. Recently, magickittycat called me a fascist: what you're doing here is approximately N x (number of users) worse.
It is exactly what would happen on this forum, and if that prediction offends you, you should get off the internet.
If I was offended, you'd know it: I have a medly of mauve, a profusion of plum, a violence of violet for those who get my goat.
I'm tired of limp-wristed passive-aggressive talk from people that should know better. If you have an argument: present an argument. If not, fuck off.
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I wouldn't call it offensive, but there's something risible about this being a property specific to this forum, or that the people making the acvusation are exempt from it.
As others pointed out this has already happened in the past, and it was defended in the exact manner it was rescribed... just not by the people some might be thinking about when they originally read the accusation.
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It already happened in 2015. By the Obama administration, in conjunction with the Clinton campaign, against the Trump campaign.
It just didn't work. If Trump does something like that in the future, he'll be no worse than Obama in terms of "internal security agency coups".
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It has already happened, and other than the last item, they already did.
...For what it's worth, I think your prediction is probably accurate in the sense that you intend it. Buy as I asked last week,
Several of the effort-posts I don't have time to write any more are simple surveys of old discussions with links to the evidence answering the questions since. I have a pretty strong impression of how this has gone on balance, but it'd be better to have hard data to make the case.
A 'revisiting old questions' series would be an interesting contribution to the Motte, as long as it was done with an eye to parts of previous arguments that were wrong as well as right. It is often worthwhile to re-test old arguments, and if it can't be done without denials or dismissals that too is worth drawing attention to.
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