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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25118 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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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"?

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?

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

  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.

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!

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.

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 the republic was destroyed by a political yo-yo driven by the lack of checks and balances

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?

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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