County government here. My wife works in the ‘Court House’ (it does not house any judicial or law enforcement offices anymore)
But the Treasurer is there, the Clerk and recorder is there and the Assessor is there. So are two wandering Deputy Sheriffs. These people would get ONE chance to leave.
I work in another County building. We have upgraded with cameras, and locks that require anyone to have a county pass to enter a department (same with my Wifes). The main foyer can be entered by the public, and the library. Otherwise, you need to be escorted. The State Patrol facility is on our campus. I could hit it with a rock (not recommended).
Needless to say, anyone trying to force their way in, would be meet with… repercussions.
Please don’t mince words on our account. Spell it out. I’m into details.
Do you mean that if someone like one of musk’s guys entered and the receptionist/security person objected and said “you may not enter,” and the guys pushed past the receptionist/security guard, said guard would pull out a gun and shoot them dead? Short of that, other law enforcement types would be summoned and physically escort the musk-o-geeks out the front door and lock it? Or handcuff them and physically take them to the nearest jail and lock them up? What repercussions?
Others who responded to my request said that the question would be kicked up the ladder and if someone at the top said the musk-o-philes could come in, then no one would stop them.
You should be very alarmed.. This is unprecedented, unsupervised, apparently unfettered access to financial information that even if it is only read out could do severe harm to the public at large, and if Musk et al have write access and control of the payment system (which appears to be the case) they can literally cripple the government and any organization, public or private, which utilizes or depends upon that system to conduct business, purchase goods and services, and pay employees and contractors. This is literally a wholesale highjacking of the federal government at a core level that is fundamentally even deeper than replacing every member of Congress with their pod clone.
Scott Bessent has plenary authority to at least temporarily reassign or place on administrative leave any Treasury department employee who does not follow his direction, and even AFGE might back and win a hypothetical legal challenge, it would not change the fact that Bessent will sooner or later come to “career bureaucrats” with a kid in college, or a spouse in chemo, or one mortgage payment away from going red on their bank account, who will comply because they can’t afford to do otherwise; indeed, that the top levels of government have now been taken over by a gang of venal, mendacious, vengeful criminals and the only recourse is to rely upon these ‘gray’ men and women dutifully holding back the tide of devastating undermining of critical and basic functions of civil governance at peril to their own livelihoods describes plainly just how dire this situation has become. The entire notion that a court order is going to put the brakes on what is already an enormously illegal excess of unlawful executive authority as well for an utter failure to protect government record keeping systems per 5 USC § 552 is so far beyond risible and into pertinacious naïveté it is difficult to imaging an adult human being writing that sentence with honest intent.
Elon Musk, of course, has never given a wet fart for what any regulatory agency or court has said, freely violating laws and buying favorable judgments, and now that he has upped his game to literally buying the influence over a president and extorting Republican congresspeople through threat of being ‘primaried’, isn’t going to stop just because some judge said so. What he’s doing is already illegal (and no, it is not the ‘grey area’ that many pundits are claiming as anyone familiar with federal government procurement, payment, and information systems can attest; access to these systems is very restricted and misuse of the, even by authorized people is cause for termination and even legal repercussions) and Musk doesn’t care because he is doing it under the aegis of executive order by a president who have been giving an infinite stack of ‘Get Out Of Jail Free!’ cards by a Supreme Court majority which has zero interest in preserving the rule of law where it conflicts with their ideologies and personal fealty to Trump.
All of these people declaring that “The law is the sole source of Trump’s ability to do anything. If law means nothing then Trump has no power.” seem to be willfully obtuse to the fact that Trump regularly breaks the law with impunity and his ‘power’ comes from one-sided loyalty and fear of defying his populist base, not some deep legalistic skill wielding. Trump and his facilitators will do what they want with virtual assurance that there are no legal ramifications and even little enough in the way of adverse publicity beyond a few gadflies and soon-to-be redundancied journalists at the Washington Post and New York Times.
By your logic he has the same power today that he had before being elected. He had the same loyal idiots and disregard for the law when out of office.
The law gives him power, that’s an objective and completely inarguable fact. On top of that, he also evades consequences others might not, and disregards conventions that others wouldn’t. That adds to the power the law gives, it’s not a substitute for it.
There are two halves of the law… It has both authority and consequences. He enjoys the parts of the law that make people do things he tells them to, and ignores the parts that tell him he will suffer consequences if he does certain things he’s not supposed to. And he gets away with all of it far more than he should.
That doesn’t mean he can sign an executive order to replace Gavin Newsome with the sycophant of his choice, or tell his henchmen to make Scotland part of the US. He can’t.
But I agree with you on one thing; he’s not using adept legal skills. He’s using the strategy of throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. If he tries to get 300 things enacted and only a third of them survive legal challenges or other problems, he still gets 100 working. And he doesn’t care about the failures; he won’t suffer from them, has no shame, and avoids humiliation by spinning or just lying about things that don’t work. That’s not legal wizardry, that’s being an uncaring thug in office.
Donald Trump has the mantle of the President which gives him a patina of legitimacy even as he wields his executive warrant in ways that are inarguably so vastly in excess of Constitutional warrant that is so far beyond “an objective and completely inarguable fact” of his ostensible authority of the office that it is grossly understating just how overarching his effective control is and how little anyone who has even notional authority is doing to oppose it. Inserting Musk and his cabal of cudglers into the OMB and GSA, hacking into the Treasury Department payment system, cancelling 7,500 office leases for federal agencies, collecting lists of FBI agents involved in investigating Trump’s various activities and the January 6 insurrection, this bogus 8 month “Fork in the Road” severance deal that is in violation of federal employment statutes and departmental budget commitments, offering a blanket buyout of the entire staff of the CIA with a barely veiled threat of what they face if they remain are all massive oversteps in executive authority.
Even the unquestionably legal things he is doing, such as imposing sweeping, crippling ‘emergency’ tariffs in retaliation for countries not agreeing to accept deportees, ‘negotiating’ with Denmark to acquire Greenland, and pardoning 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed into the Capitol building four years ago with murderous intent to overturn the election are things that would have a normal Congress in broad bipartisan agreement to impeach and convict tout de suite because they are the actions of a literal autocrat, and yet Republican representatives are sitting on their hands and Republican senators are chugging along with confirmation hearings so ridiculous that they sound like a rejected SNL sketch or a bad Pauly Shore remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, perfectly happy to allow a self-proclaimed dictator to wholesale dismantlement the administrative portions of government under the transparent guise of ‘reducing waste’.
Your strawmen of “replac[ing] Gavin Newsome with the sycophant of his choice, or tell his henchmen to make Scotland part of the US” aside (as he hasn’t even threatened to do either) who is it you think is going to enforce any order or limitation that a court will direct? If a court says that Elon Musk and His Muskrats must be removed from the Treasury systems, who is going to direct the FBI or the US Marshals going to physically remove him? Scott Bessent? Pam Bondi? Kristi Noem? Even if someone like FBI Acting Director Brian Driscoll tries to implement such an order, how likely is it that you think he’ll continue to retain his job instead of being removed or put on administrative leave (especially given that he’s already earned the ire of Trump and his facilitators)?
One common factor in the rise of autocracies from formerly democratic states is the mass disbelief that it is actually happening even as it transpires in plain view. Another is how the courts become ineffectual, compliant, and ultimately irrelevant to governance. This is actually happening; it is happening out in the open, not by some kind of martial law and military coup, but through the electoral process, the geometric expansion of executive overreach, and hollowing out all of the elements of functional government which might oppose it or allow anyone sufficient control or resources to restrain it. Claiming that ‘the courts’ are holding him back just because Trump doesn’t have direct control over the states that he’s not consolidating power, hobbling any of the faculties of government which might successfully restrain his tyrannical impulses, and vengefully persecuting everyone who has or might oppose him is an absurd exercise in head-burying which just serves to normalize this situation as something that will ‘swing back’ once the courts weigh in.
Using a lot of words doesn’t make you less wrong. That “patina of legitimacy” is what lets him do any of this. If you can’t even agree with that much then there’s no way to have a rational discussion.
And trying to avoid the argument by declaring it wrong because it is verbose rather than engaging the substance of it doesn’t make your assertion that there is “no way to have a rational discussion” substantive.
That “patina of legitimacy” isn’t Constitutional authority; it is the basis upon which Trump effectively claims that what he does is legal because he is the president. This is quite literally his rationale for most of what he does, and while it didn’t work for him so well eight years ago because the federal judiciary wasn’t as packed with conservative justices and he hadn’t yet had the chance to pack the Supreme Court with three justices who owe personal fealty to him, it is likely to serve him much better now, especially as corporate leaders and mainstream media outlets are deferential to a point of obsequiousness while titans of technology and mercantile industries are vying with each other to kiss his ring.
If a federal court issues an order to remove Musk or stay a policy, and Trump responds by giving one of his lickspittle Cabinet secretaries or appointees of independent agencies an order to ignore the court and proceed, who is it that you think is going to step in and intervene? Trump literally controls the entire enforcement apparatus and is actively seeking to purge anyone who might oppose him, or even those people who have investigated or worked against his interest just because that was the direction they had from their management at that time. Do you think inspectors general are going to step in and freeze action, or one of his appointees is going to come to find a moral fiber, or that the Republican-dominated House of Representatives is actually going to impeach him yet again and then the Republican-dominated Senate will find the backbone to convict and remove him? Will a rogue judge with a sweeping mullet riding a vintage hardtail is going to take the justice to the street with tough talk and a hogleg shotgun?
Although I’m being hyperbolic here, I’m genuinely curious as to who you think is going to bell this cat without any law agency backing or independent enforcement. Trump has been quite busy both ensuring that all effective resistance within the government is neutered if not completely excised, even to the point of gravely harming the primary domestic investigative and counterintelligence agency, and oh-by-the-way clearly intending to completely gut our main human intelligence collection and analysis agency, and as much as I bash on the ineffectualness of the CIA, they are essentially the only government institution capable of doing the kind of intelligence work that would be critical of the effects of Trump’s policies or would alert to infiltration of the US interests abroad by foreign adversaries. Barring some kind of radical pushback from…who?…we are essentially going to have a government with no intelligence insight, no independent oversight, no law enforcement agency that isn’t utterly beholden to Trump, and a judiciary that can find against Trump all they want but no one to carry out their direction, facilitated by a Republican-dominated legislature so cowed that the very notion of Trump being held liable for anything more than making Susan Collins ‘extremely concerned’ is ludicrous.
Feel free to ignore those concerns, continue to declare me wrong without any substantive argument, and insist that the courts will restrain Trump in the end. But—and I’m quite serious—I would like to hear an actually convincing rationale of that that occurs in this current political environment where his party have become complete supplicants who have so abandoned all of their own principles that they immediately turn on anyone who evidences the slightest of dissension with censure and exile into the political hinterlands, and the opposition party might as well just be pissing into the wind for all that at least a handful of energetic participants are strenuously objecting while the rest keep their heads down and make mealy-mouthed speeches about finding common ground and extending a hand across the aisle.
Well said, Stranger (as usual). And yeah, sometimes you have to say it over and over.
(My bold.)
This, this, this, and this.
I’ve been asking this question, too, but no one has answered, because the answer is no one will step in and intervene. At least, that’s what it looks like so far.
In this horrifying video, George Conway is saying there is nothing stopping Trump/Musk from doing a complete takeover of the government. Judges may issue restraining orders against Musk but Trump’s people can fire anyone who tries to enforce the orders. Furthermore, Trump can pardon everyone at DOGE for all illegal actions.
Yeah, folks aren’t getting that this is on the verge of becoming the same problem you have when other folks declare by their actions that the rules no longer apply to them.
The most common solution to this problem is the enforcers of those rules using violence.
See: Police reacting to; criminals, rioters, SovCits, etc.
It’s a little funny, even now. Imagine Susan Collins becoming so ‘Disappointed’ that she collapses recursively into her own frown while still refusing to convict under the premise that Trump could still “learn his lesson”.
Frankly, all of these Republicans (and a not-inconsequential number of Democrats) in Congress should be held criminally liable for their utter failure to take effective action or speak out forcefully against an obvious despot and his Nazi-cosplaying ‘First Buddy’.
This is the term for efforts by sitting executives to enhance or retain power by overturning electoral outcomes or by unconstitutionally gutting the power of other branches of government.
All in the context of racism and eugenics. Marko Elez, the DOGE staffer who resigned after The Wall Street Journal reported on his prior social media activity, is not an importat person, only a symptom. Yes, another one. But I mention him because it increases his findability for future internet searches. I hope one day he regrets what he did, and be it for selfish, whiny reasons. Anyway, from the article (which is also a newsfeed and may therefore change, sorry for that):
Musk is a “special government employee.” The Justice Department defines the role as any employee expected to work for the federal government for up to 130 days, and they are prohibited from participating in matters that may have financial conflicts of interest or from using their role to influence an election or engage in political activity while on duty. The role of a special government employee is subject to most rules and guidelines that apply to federal employees, but they can be “less restrictive” because the role is temporary. (bolding mine)
My very first post after I left the Times and brought this newsletter out of dormancy was about DOGE, the not-a-government-agency created by Donald Trump and run by Elon Musk (Vivek Ramaswamy has been run out of DOGE.) The supposed goal of DOGE was to save taxpayers huge sums by going after “waste, fraud and abuse.” I argued that this effort was doomed to failure as Musk and his cronies appeared completely ignorant about how and why the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.
While everything I said was true, I would like to offer a mea culpa . What should have been clear to me even then, and is unmistakable now, is that everything Musk and Trump say about what they’re doing is false, including what they say about their motivations. The ignorance and chaos are real, but you should never lose sight of the underlying thrust of their actions.
For what’s happening in America right now is an attempted autogolpe.
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Anyone who isn’t subscribing to Krugman’s FREE Substack should do so immediately.
Hell, Trump just got all those classified documents back.
That’s exactly the conversation I had on this site not long ago. Someone was arguing that if the non-Senate confirmed chosen director showed up and started giving orders, the workers and senior staff would all tell them to suck eggs. I tried to argue that the guy with the President’s blessing has the upper hand. I guess we see which way that played out.
Give it a try and find out the differences between Putin and Trump.
Elections? Putin was elected by a majority as a democratic president at first, then he changed the system into what he called a ‘guided democracy’ and then it went south right into dictatorship. Sycophants surround him, no opposition allowed, courts hand down verdicts as ordered. Citizens live under continuous surveillance, reporting neighbours with presumed acts of opposition. Professional career depends on political opportunism.
Trump was elected as a democratic president, his first step was to change the system, to root out democratic features, sycophants surround him, no opposition allowed. It will not take long before courts hand down verdicts as ordered. MAGA supporters tend to have an eye on presumably not MAGA friendly neighbours. Professional career is not compatible with political opposition.
One difference remains: while in Russia a surprisingly high number of critical citizens fell out of their apartement windows from high floors by accident when police happend to call, this has not yet been reported to have happened in the US. Nevertheless Trump has withdrawn security for Fauci and remarked that he wouldn’t care if something happened to him.
No, this is not a hijack: it’s meant to show how close the US have become to go right into dictatorship by recent actions of Musk backed by Trump. Is there a way out?
Given the fact that so many people hold Trump and even Musk in high esteem I don’t think so. Will there be elections at all in 2028? I’am not sure.