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The words on paper have a certain power in the sense that if they are disobeyed too blatantly, we cross into this interesting circumstance that people call "constitutional crisis", and then anything can happen.
Had he a supportive enough congress to not overturn his orders and pass laws to codify the details that are needed, a President that would want to purge the executive totally could. Hawaiian judges can only stall you for so long. The anti-FDR could totally roll over the current administration with a more competent and organized minority.
The problem is that for anything meaningful to hurt the deep state, you'd have to gut entire agencies and retire large swaths of people, which is bound to fail if congress and the supreme court are not 100% in with you. Not to mention how everyone in those agencies would want you dead.
Trump is all the right has, so of course they go "maybe something nice will happen". But "why the fuck would anything nice ever happen?"
I don't see how it could have any outcome other than the 2 million plus executive bureaucrats finally making their reduction of merely-elected officials to entirely-powerless figureheads?
How so? If the executive bureaucracy is ignoring Trump, why wouldn't they ignore a Trump-aligned Congress too?
Because Congress decides who gets the money and because these organizations exist because Congress makes them exist through laws. You can't ignore your way out of a shutdown.
Of course if they decide they don't have to abide by laws anymore for their internal processes and the CIA just forces the treasury to print money at gunpoint we just default back to constitutional crisis mode.
I think you underestimate how much the administration is tied into the legal system. They make leeway for themselves but they need the rules to exist to some degree.
Every time their was a so-called "shutdown," I still got my SSI checks direct-deposit from the Federal government despite said "shutdown" and the unconstitutionality — again, mere words on a musty old parchment by dead slave-owning white men — of spending without House authorization.
Congress does not themselves write the checks, people in the executive do — like, as you note, the Treasury. So when Congress declares something "defunded," and the Treasury just ignores them and keeps sending the checks out anyway, no CIA gunmen needed, what then?
"Constitutional crisis" and so on, but so what? Nobody in DC really cares about that dead letter, nor have they for probably a century now, so what if this is made (more) explicit? The FBI, ATF, and other ordinary law enforcement will be enough to crush any — inevitably disorganized, sporadic, and aimless — "resistance" or "rebellion" from the citizenry.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/fleo20st.pdf
Most federal law enforcement is either fairly reddish or has jobs that do not include "chasing domestic extremists" which they can be expected to protest being pulled off(because being a security guard at NASA is both cooler and less likely to involve getting shot at than staking out some compound in Idaho that's drilling 1/8 inch holes in lower receivers, plus you get to go home every night) and/or simply can't be pulled off. The ATF, FBI, and US marshals combined simply do not have the personnel to carry out a meaningful crackdown.
Not according to the people I talk to IRL.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Consider the German Peasants' War. 300,000 pissed off peasants, who at least sometimes "were well-armed. They had cannons with powder and shot…" against 6,000–8,500 nobles, knights, and assorted mercenaries. A 35:1-50:1 numbers advantage…
…except it wasn't. Because it was several thousand organized and experienced knights and mercenaries against a thousand peasants here, then several thousand knights and mercenaries against twelve hundred peasants there, then several thousand knights and mercenaries against four thousand peasants over there, then…
And in the end, the peasants were crushed, over a third of them killed, and the losses on the other side? To quote Wikipedia's "Casualties and losses" box: Minimal.
It wouldn't take that large a SWAT force to take out your "compound in Idaho" with small odds of any losses. Any one out of "the ATF, FBI, and US marshals" could easily put that together. And after they take out the first such compound, then they take out the second, and then the third, and then the fourth., and then…. In each individual engagement, they'll have the superior forces. Because for the "rebels" to actually have superior numbers, all the little groups of five, or six, or a dozen guys would have to actually come together and coordinate. And as I noted, they are fundamentally incapable of ever doing so, and openly proud of it.
In the 90s, they did this with an isolated guy and his family, living in their cabin, and then they did it to a bunch of weirdo Christian types. It worked real well both times, and then a federal building blew up.
There is zero need for massed formations or mustered armies in such a scenario. You are basing your assessment off the idea of a campaign of pitched battles and clearly-defined fronts. There is pretty much zero chance that's what a future American civil war would look like. It's pretty unlikely that such a war would even be fought with AR15s, much less tanks and planes.
No, a future American civil war would inevitably involve significant state-to-state territorial disputes because the breakdown in federal authority necessitates big states establishing their regional hegemony to safeguard their own stability and non-isolation from both resources and markets. This process involves lots of conventional armies moving around because that’s what governments do.
For probably the most obvious example, California needs to engage in some level of adventurism against significantly smaller neighbors to ensure its water supply(no, it will not improve its water management, nor do citizens of wealthy and powerful regions accept rationing for the sake of the hinterlands) when the federal government can’t impose an acceptable solution from above.
Crunching some numbers to get a rough sense about potential Second US CW.
Compared to most of world's armies, US armed forces are enormous.
Compared to US territory and population, they are tiny, especially the high tech part.
Assuming US population as 330 million:
2,800 tanks = one tank/118,000 Americans
3,500 aircraft = one plane/95,000 Americans
760 helicopters = one chopper/435,000 Americans
And all these wonder weapons are dependent on supply from American and world economies, who would cease to exist when North America turns into Somalia on ice.
For comparison, in Syria in 2011 when the late unpleasantness began, the ratio was:
Counting Syrian population as 21 million:
4,800 MBT = one tank/4,375 Syrians
4,500 IFV = one IFV/4,666 Syrians
575 aircraft = one plane/36,000 Syrians
191 helicopters = one chopper/110,000 Syrians
Conclusion: Second US Civil War will be fought with pickup trucks and construction machinery with extra metal plates welded on.
And drones. Drones, drones, drones. Masses of 3D printed plastic drones swarming from horizon to horizon.
Yes, bikes too, our poster Kulak's dream coming true.
Interesting times for everyone involved(and the whole world will be involved).
edit: links set properly
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