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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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