One would hope that at least Trump will help serve the purpose of showing why the federal government and instututions are important.
Or, demonstrate that government doesn’t work and can’t work because any asshole could come along and break it.
One of those.
No it’s not. According to SCOTUS he needed to be convicted on 18 USC 2838 - Federal crime against insurrection. They’re not wrong. Blame Merrick for that.
My wife brought an email to my attention this morning. It came from her employer, and was asking her to click ‘here’ in order to refresh her password for two-factor authorization (2FA).
The origin email and IP addresses looked good to me, but in the body of the text it mentioned that you could click on the following link for more information.
I hovered over the link, noted the website to which it referred, and looked into it. It doesn’t exist. I told her I thought she was right to be skeptical, and that I’d ignore it until she could run it by an IT person (or her supervisor) from work.
I think she felt differently and clicked on one of the buttons. She quickly received an email from the employer’s IT division, basically saying that this was an internal test, and that she’d just fallen for a potential phishing scam.
That’s an active internal security process that helps keep the system safe from outside attacks. It’s one guardrail of – I’d imagine – many.
But it’s one that addresses the all-too-fallible human element, and the well-meaning human element at that.
What are our guardrails this time around? Think about how close Trump came to possibly overthrowing the legitimately-elected government of the United States of America.
The cynicism and honor of Mike Pence, and – I still can’t believe it – the decency and patriotism of Dan Quayle were among the very few things that kept this autogolpe from possibly succeeding.
When we talk about the difficulty in implementing an agenda – no matter how unconventional, unconstitutional, unethical, or antithetical to the interests of the country writ large – it’s important that we ask ourselves what actually stands in the way.
And then – like my wife’s employer – we test our security measures and guardrails in any way that we conceivably can.
Personally? I don’t make a lot of predictions, but I am anything but sanguine that Trump and his cronies will be easy to restrain by any heretofore understood ‘conventional,’ bureaucratic, civil, procedural, and judicial means.
Like everything else about America, much depends on a handshake deal – on people acting in good faith and hewing to exceedingly well-established norms and conventions.
For any who inexplicably managed to ascribe good faith to Donald J. Trump through the end of 2020, I still can’t imagine how January 6th didn’t radically alter that view.
We have a good friend married to a lovely Filipino woman. She’s here legally, married to a US citizen, and works as a registered nurse in an assisted living facility. Both are traditional conservatives but both voted for Trump. They are very happy with the election outcome. They seem to have no inkling that the plan to deport all immigrants regardless of status would have any effect on them.
But if implemented as stated, it would. Doesn’t matter that she’s married to a US citizen, been here many years and works a skilled job in a field with high demand for her services. She’s an immigrant so she’ll be on the list to go. And yet they voted for him.
That leopard lurking around the corner there…it’s YOUR faces he’s eyeing.
Cite for the existence of a “plan to deport all immigrants regardless of status”, keeping in mind that that’s about 50 million people and would comprise the single largest migration that has ever happened in human history?
They’ve been talking about “turbocharging” their plans for stripping people of citizenship and expelling tens of millions.
And I expect they’ll simply start killing at some point, it’s faster.
They can talk about it until the cows come home. Where is the money and the manpower going to come from? Trump can’t just fire up the cloning tanks and breed an army of stormtroopers who are genetically hardwired to do his bidding and will work for free.
And BTW, I asked for a cite, not baseless speculation.
The federal government. Obviously.
Not on their budget. You’re talking a bigger investment than the New Deal and WWII put together, all at once. You’d need a draft to come up with enough manpower to execute it. Meanwhile, there are going to be riots in the streets, state and local governments declaring the federal government illegitimate, and whoops the California National Guard just took control of Naval Base San Diego and now Gavin Newsom has the Bomb.
On a local call-in radio show, someone said they voted for Trump because Elon Musk is going to cut the federal budget by 2 trillion dollars. I heard that promise as well during the campaign. I don’t know if it’s 2 trillion per year, or over the course of four years.
Personally, I’ll be surprised if Trump lowers the budget at all. If it goes down by 2 trillion I’ll eat my hat.
I think the question is if Trump does “unconstitutional” things, will SCOTUS stop him?
They stopped him dozens of times before. Is there some reason to believe they’ve suddenly decided to abandon their commitment to the rule of law, their personal philosophy, and their own authority, in order to enable Donald Trump to rule by fiat?
Hell, the “immunity” ruling everyone seems to think is proof of their sycophancy is in reality the largest power grab the court has made for ITSELF since Marbury v. Madison.
Remember, Elon Musk is the guy who makes random promises to deliver mostly vaporware and animations, and who bought Twitter because of an ill-considered joke-offer (at $54.20 a share; such a comic!). I don’t think Elon even knows what he’s actually saying half the time, and he certainly didn’t do any kind of even cursory fiscal analysis to come to a US$2T budget reduction. I would put more faith in Joe Isuzu than I would in Musk, with good reason:
The “commitment to the rule of law” had me rolling, and the “personal philosophy” of several members of the court boils down to what they can get for themselves and avoiding any accountability, but aside from that, the Supreme Court actually has no means to enforce their rulings—that is the Department of Justice function—and is under no obligation to hear arguments that they don’t want to rule upon. After two impeachments and failed removals, four years of essential non-action about inciting the January 6 insurrection, 34 felony counts that were essentially a slap on the wrist, and still no conviction on the crime of blatantly trying to interfere with electoral vote counting in Georgia where he was literally caught on tape trying to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him the specific number of votes needed to win the state, Trump has suffered basically no real repercussions or was in any way preventing from campaigning himself to a legitimate victory in this election. How far does one have to have their head up their ass to conclude that “the courts” and legal jingle-jangle is going to put the brakes on the Trump Train, either by conviction for his numerous crimes or for any action which his team can make some legal articulations to justify the Constitutional basis of his authority or otherwise just convince at least five members of the Supreme Court to refuse to address a complaint?
Stranger
Once again you’re conflating “Trump hasn’t personally suffered any criminal consequences for his actions” with “L’etat c’est Trump”. The Supreme Court doesn’t have to send him to prison to rule that it’s unconstitutional to deport people without a trial.
If Trump were as powerful as you claim he could just order Congress and the Supreme Court disbanded instead of working with them. Why didn’t he?
They don’t have to; they just have to refuse to hear a case. And it is not “unconstitutional to deport people without a trial” if they are undocumented immigrants or their visas have been revoked, and you’ll find that immigration is almost entirely within the purview of the executive. Hell, Biden has been deporting immigrants right and left, and almost nobody other than a few progressive journalists have really has made much of a fuss about it.
This is actually the end goal of “unitary executive theory”, but the reality is that he doesn’t have to, any more than Bush or Obama had to go to Congress to declare war and send the US military into two major invasions after the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 was enacted. Literally all a Republican-dominated Congress needs to do is cede their authority to remove that check, and the favorable majority of SCOTUS just has to sit on their asses and not hear cases to eliminate that balance. Even if they won’t do that, if they don’t stand up to Trump and his Cabinet of Creeps, it will effectively give the same result.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve read extensively on the late Weimar Republic and the rise of the NSDAP, and there are some very disturbing parallels. They aren’t exact because the US isn’t Weimar Germany and 2024 is not 1932, but it is close enough that those dismissals about how “the courts” will stop autocratic excess ring awfully hollow to my ears.
Stranger
The former head of ICE disagrees, but what does he know?
Which, yet again, THEY COULD HAVE DONE SEVEN YEARS AGO BUT DIDN’T.
So, some basic procedural information:
I think it is fair to say that the logistics of rounding up immigrants, processing them, and physically deporting them would overwhelm such an effort long before it gets to the “millions served” mark, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.
Your insistence that things will continue on the established basis of procedure, and that justices and appointees beholden to Trump will resist his worst impulses just because that is the way things are done up until 20 January 2025 does not inspire confidence in view of the history of autocracies, and even if Trump can’t actually get all of the power he desires, he and his cabal of Heritage Foundation cretins can certainly do a lot to undermine democratic norms and accepted Constitutional limitations on executive power.
Stranger
That’s not the stated plan, but I don’t think anyone’s under any delusions that the dragnet will be especially meticulous about figuring out who’s here legally. We’re after Martin Jimenez and we came up with Jim Martinez? Seems close enough, no passport on him, let’s book it.
All of whom showed absolutely no willingness to bend over backwards for him in 2020.
I don’t think Trump is suddenly going to become savvier or more comptetent than he’s ever been, or capable of selecting aides based on anything other than their willingness to kiss his ass, and I don’t expect those people to be any more competent than the people he surrounded himself with before.
Most of Trump’s promises are very nebulous. He’ll replace the Affordable Care Act with something better, you’ll see. He’ll end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, you’ll see. The economy will grow like never before, you’ll see. Never any details, just a promise that it will be wonderful. His followers fill in the details with their own desires, and convince themselves that Trump understands them.
That’s why I find this promise more interesting; there’s an actual benchmark associated with it. 2 trillion dollars, Trump promised it, his followers heard it. In one year, or four years, we can look at the U.S. budget and see if he kept the promise.
My prediction is he won’t. Trump won’t remind people of it, and his followers will probably be so consumed with day-to-day worries that they won’t remember a four-year-old promise. If people do start talking about this as a failure of Trump’s administration, he’ll blame Musk and fire him.
If someone wants to bookmark this post and come back to it in four years, please do.