As an addon to the “Trump can do anything. No one will stop him!” conversation, I was thinking about his executive orders, especially the new one dismantling the Department of Education. Why, with a majority in both of the House and the Senate, just have Congress pass laws to do what he wants to do? The only thing I can think of is anticipating failure due to a Senate filibuster but is there more at work here? Is Trump doing this way so that HE is doing it and not Congress? Is he worried his thin majority in the House won’t support it? Are there Pubs in Congress that are starting to break from MAGA ?
They’re following the premise of the absolute unitary executive. They assume not everything will fly, but enough will that they’ll greatly expand the authority and independence of the presidency.
My own take is he wants to be king, he wants the ability to issue orders that are unquestioned and don’t require approval.
Trump is doing it because this is his idea of how the world should work. After his visit with Kim Jung Un Trump openly said that he wanted a government that works like NK, where his word is law and everybody jumps when he speaks.
Congress is letting him get away with it because the GOP are afraid of losing their seats in the mid-terms. If they don’t do what Trump says, he will make sure they get primary-ed and Musk will dump money into their competition. If they do what Trump wants, then the sane members of their constituency will see the chaos and vote Dem against them. The only way they win is if Trump keeps on doing his thing extra-legally and they don’t have to get involved.
While they obviously support his ideas (or been paid off) the congress is quite OK with not going on record as voting for these draconian ideas of his.
Yeah, I don’t think local congressmen and women want to face their constituency after eliminating, say, funding for the local schools by dismantling the Department of Education. Also, this way the Senate doesn’t have to nuke the filibuster – there’s no way there is 60 votes to get rid of USAID or Education, so he couldn’t get what he wants from congress anyway.
Technically speaking, EOs do not make new law, they merely interpret how existing laws should be interpreted or executed. That’s why one president can simply revoke a previous president’s EOs.
At the same time, an EO can not violate existing laws. Normally, a president can’t tell an agency to stop spending money that Congress has appropriated. Only Congress can do that. Or fire people who have protection written into the law. Not even Congress can do that. Or shut down an agency or a cabinet department. It cannot tell the Judicial Branch how to rule on an issue or unilaterally declare an existing ruling void.
Many of the lawsuits that are slowly working their way through the system depend on those basic facts, which appear to have been systemically ignored. The advantages for Trump is that EOs are fast and easy and the damage done is quick and possibly irreparable except over much time. Lawmaking is supposed to be a slow, deliberative process and is designed to be stuffed full of compromises to satisfy all factions and parties. The, ahem, art of the deal.
A normal Congress would not allow this, but we don’t have a normal Congress. And the Supreme Court has been stuffed with loyalists; even though almost all the lower courts are ruling against him, Trump is confident that his pet court will uphold everything he does. Even if it doesn’t, he knows nobody can in our reality do anything to stop him writing EOs or take him to task for illegalities. What could be more ego-inflating to a supreme narcissist?
Most of trumps policies wouldnt get past the House- remember- DOGE is cutting funding that was approved by a GOP House. All it would take is a few stubborn GOPers to vote no or even present, and the bills would fail. Of course, it wouldnt be that obvious, the bills would just die in committee or be amended until they no longer resembled what trump wanted.
The answer to the thread title question is that Trump 47 is trying to consolidate power, rather than share it. Even if he had a comfortable majority in the House, and sixty votes in the Senate, he’d want to show he could go ahead without them. In as much as he cares about them, he would show them that he could get them to endorse his actions after the fact.
If there’s a problem with what I just wrote, it’s that it presumes his state of mind. I have no idea how he thinks about it. I’m just saying that he acts as if he thinks that way.
Besides what others have said, Trump is not on the side of the Republicans; he’s on his side, and only his side. He doesn’t care in the slightest about what they want or need; none of them are Trump, therefore none of their wants, needs or lives have any value whatsoever. He’d happily set them all on fire if he could somehow profit from it, just as he’d do to everyone else on the planet.
So why run anything past them if he doesn’t have to? And so far, he hasn’t had to.
It’s called a self-coup, initiated by Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon III: when the leader of the government seizes power from the elected legislature.
Depressing article on point:
I want to read that but it is paywalled.
How similar is this one?
There’s also the matter that what’s actually in all of these executive orders doesn’t actually matter. All that matters is that they’re happening just because Trump says so. Trump doesn’t want to destroy democracy so he can eliminate the Department of Education, etc. He wants to eliminate the Department of Education so he can destroy democracy. Being the Tsar is, itself, the end goal.
Cromwell initiated what is called the “barebones parliament.” And I believe Napoleon III did not try to permanently dissolve the Assembly.
Another example is that a weakened Senate still existed after the Roman republic fell. Continuing to have a legislature makes it easier to trick people into thinking that some sort of democracy still exists.
Trump has to sidestep Congress in order to consolidate power, but he still would want some sort of OK from capitol hill, just as Cromwell and Napoleon III wanted legitimization from a captive legislature.
Thinking about the self-coup concept, wasn’t January 6 a failed self-coup? One reason it failed was that Mike Pence refused Trump’s order to secure the self-coup. Another is that the Secret Service refused to drive DJT from the White House to the Capitol.
Even though the self-coup he desires requires side-stepping Congress and courts, Trump needs the partial legitimization that comes from allowing them to still exist.
Makes me wonder what ever happened to those agents. Have they been purged yet?
In both cases, Cromwell and Napoleon III used troops to shut down the Parliament / Assembly, and then substituted a new constitutional structure.
The Barebones Parliament (also the “Little Parliament”) was not elected; nominated purely by Cromwell and the Army Council. It only lasted 5 months, before it dissolved itself.
Bonaparte’s self-coup resulted in rioting and revoltes. The army was used to impose order, including shooting rioters and arresting Bonaparte’s political opponents. The new Bonapartiste constitution drastically reduced the power of the Assembly and expanded Bonaparte’s powers, particularly since it automatically made him president for at least 10 years. That constitution lasted less than a year before it was replaced by the Second Empire, making Bonaparte emperor for life.
So sure, both Cromwell and Bonaparte substituted new legislative bodies, but they were subordinate to the executive and the military.
It took Palpatine several years before he finally dissolved the senate, ending the last vestige of the Old Republic.
I look at it as the coup starting on Jan. 6. They then had four years to get everything in place to complete the coup on Nov. 5, with the help of their brain-washed masses. Mission accomplished.
The constitution does not provide any cabinets. They are an invention of the 1800s to early 1900s. The Supreme Court would allow Trump to remove all but the treasury, as that and congress oversight of it is somewhere in the laws. As an example, Nixon created the DEA (FDA is much older). A number of agencies are like that. A simple law passed. But funding has to be passed by congress, otherwise it can be shut down. Drug Enforcement Administration - Wikipedia
As others have suggested, I think it’s political cover.
A lot of Trump’s ideas are really dumb. But Trump’s popular with the base so Republican congressmen don’t want to oppose him.
But dumb policies are going to end up producing bad results. So these policies are going to end up being unpopular once the bad results start occurring. Republican congressmen, who will have to face re-elections, don’t want to be on record as having voted for the bad policy.