“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”Confucius
We are undergoing a silent Constitutional Convention, updating the work that took place in Philadelphia in 1787.
We are turning the U.S. from a republic into a democratic serial dictatorship.
The Constitution is being re-written because we have a president who is governing as a single decision-maker -- a strong man -- and he isn't being stopped. There is the written Constitution, the old pro-forma rule book, and there is the real Constitution, the actual day-to-day procedure for doing things. The new rule is that the president can do anything he wants so long as at least 34 members of the U.S. Senate allow it. The Supreme Court can delay things, but as we saw with tariffs, presidents can assert a workaround and start a new clock running at the snail pace of judicial appeals. The Supreme Court needs to walk on eggshells. They, too, understand the new reality. The court, like Congress, can be ignored.
The mechanism for unitary presidential power is the power to define words. The most powerful of words is "war." It is the "elastic clause" under the new Constitution, the word that provides flexibility and open-ended power.
By declaring that we were under invasion by immigrants,Trump said we were at war, enabling him to take control of immigration policy, the taxing power, and the power of the purse. He asserted that "war" triggered the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Moreover, since we were at "war" with other countries due to an asymmetric balance of trade, President Trump could impose and revise tariffs -- i.e. levy taxes -- at his personal pleasure.
This week Trump joined Israel in firing missiles at and dropping bombs on Iran, killing its head of state and much of its leadership. Our bombs killed some 160 schoolgirls. We "obliterated" Iran's nuclear facilities. The U.S. Navy sunk an Iranian naval vessel on the high seas, killing 180 Iranian sailors. U.S. embassies were hit by Iranian missiles. Trump says we have a goal: a new government in Iran, forced under compulsion of violence by a foreign state. That is the very definition of war.
But for the purposes of triggering laws enacted by Congress to protect its constitutional duty to declare wars, Trump is saying this is not a war. It is a "military operation." Congressional allies are going along. Senator Lindsey Graham (R - SC) says this isn't "technically" a war.
The United States is rewriting the Constitution through practice and accretion. When words can mean whatever a president wants, laws written with words have no power. A president can define tariff, tax, regulation, invasion, war, emergency, emoluments, bribe, or any other word however it serves his interests. Trump is doing so now. It is pretense and he is shameless about it.
Congress has the power to impeach and convict a president who flouts congressional power. The writers of the original Constitution presumed that congressional members' desire to protect their institutional prerogatives would be enough for them to insist that a president share power. That is no longer true. The situation will change if and when this president becomes such a political liability that Republican senators conclude that he must be removed. That will send the message that Congress is relevant, after all, acting as a stopgap remedy.
That action does not restore the Constitution. When Impeachment and conviction is, at long last, the tool Congress is willing to use to limit presidential power, it signifies that a new Constitution is in effect. A president is a temporary, elected dictator. Congress is a passive board of directors, an advisory panel, giving a veneer of legitimacy up until the president really screws up and needs to be fired.
We know this system of governance. It is the system in place in city and country governments, on school boards, and in nonprofit and corporate boards of directors. They hire a CEO, who runs things during his tenure. If a problem emerges and someone needs to take the fall to restore public or investor trust, the CEO is fired and replaced. The institution survives.
That system can work, but it is not the constitutional system we lived under for 245 years.
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7 comments:
Trump is a lawless president thanks to our Supreme Court. Our only hope is an election landslide for people who uphold democracy, which doesn’t seem to include many republicans. In the meantime Cuba will be invaded next.
We last declared war in 1941. There has been a long series of "technicalities" since then.
A "democratic serial dictatorship" surely sounds pretty bad. I guess we'll know it when we see it.
We are living through an unprecedented intersection of politics, finance and culture.
Our very successful economy, which created an unrealistic expectation of prosperity, has always had an uneasy relationship with money in our electoral system. Throw in a rich, megalomaniac cult figure who takes over one of the major parties and societal chaos ensues.
Wealth inequality destabilizes society, but in general the wealthy are ok with that. In machinery, a governor is a device that keeps the machine from destroying itself. Similarly, a government has the task of keeping the society from becoming unbalanced, through the transfer of wealth by taxes.
Republicans have lost sight of this fundamental value which is why they should be voted out of power, while we still can.
"That system can work..."
No it can't.
It all depends on what the definition of "is" is.
This started long before Trump. Obama in Libya, for instance. Trump is just doing it bigger..
The threat of nuclear war changed the power matrix. The President, as Commander in Chief, was vested with the power to launch nuclear weapons in response to an attack by the Soviet Union. Our safety depended on MAD, mutually assured destruction. In a sane world, the idea of committing your country to nuclear war seemed unthinkable. But total destruction fits into the end-of-times narrative of many religions. Killing appears to make more sense than cooperating! A prophecy foretold.
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