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I find myself increasingly perplexed by the people who think a second Trump term would be any kind of a big deal; that there’s anything he’d be able to do in a second term he wasn’t able to do in the first. It’s primarily in fellow right-wingers that I find this attitude most vexing, but it also holds to a lesser degree for the people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”
Really, it’s not even about Trump for me, either. I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either. What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy? Giving “orders” to “subordinates” that prove as efficacious as Knut the Great’s famous command to the tides?
I hear about how the president can do this or that, according to some words on paper, and I ask “but can he, really?” Mere words on paper have no power themselves, and near as I can tell, the people in DC haven’t really cared about them for most of a century now, nor is there any real mechanism for enforcing them.
If I, a random nobody, come into your workplace and announce that you’re fired, of course you still have your job. Security will still let you in when you show up each day, you can still log in and out of whatever, your coworkers will treat you the same, and you’ll still keep getting paid. Now, suppose your boss announces that you’re fired… but everyone else there treats that the same as the first case? You still show up, you still do the work, you still get paid. Are you really fired, then?
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.
Which accomplished nothing, except getting our government to make their suppression of such groups quieter and less of a big media show.
Explain how "20+ man SWAT team takes out 4-5 'domestic terrorists' with no losses, then another 4-5 'domestic terrorists' with no losses, then another, then another…" ends in victory for the folks on the losing end of every single engagement, rather than being picked off, tiny packet by tiny packet, until none are left?
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