Democracy Is a Kitchen Table Issue

America can't afford an emperor

Kerrville, Texas, on Saturday, with the flooded Guadalupe, photo by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via NPR.

From the TPM Morning Memo, a little vignette of presidential lobbying:

During an interview with CNBC this morning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) alluded to an assurance he received from Trump — that the president would fix whatever issues Republicans had with the legislation he wants them to pass via executive action.

“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,” Norman said Thursday morning. “We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

Oh well, in that case. If he's going to use "his powers". Superstrength? X-ray vision? Spidey sense? Can he grow instant wolverine claws?

I imagine he was talking about Article II of the US Constitution, of which he said during his first term, "I have an Article II that lets me do whatever I want." That's legally as ridiculous as it sounds—the specification of the "executive power" in the oath doesn't really mention powers so much as duties (to "faithfully execute” the Office, and "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution), and the only explicit powers are those of making treaties, naming officers, and issuing pardons, all but the last with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's not even anything in Article II on the veto—that's in Article I, as a check on the Congress, as Article II has a congressional check on the presidency, in the procedure allowing them to be impeached and tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The way it really works in the system of checks and balances has traditionally been that each Branch can do whatever another Branch can't stop them from doing—Congress can stop the president through the impeachment process, the Supreme Court can stop him (if somebody sues) by examining the legality of his behavior, including whether it's constitutionally permitted or not. It's infuriating that we should even have to be talking about this, as if there were some possible universe in which Trump's assertion could be correct. But here we are.

Russell Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget (same job he held in 2020 in Trump 1.0), claims that the president has the inherent right to "impound" funds appropriated by Congress, refusing to spend the money in a project the president doesn't like, as he himself did as Acting Director of OMB in 2019, when he obeyed Trump's command to keep Ukraine from obtaining American Javelin missiles to defend itself against the Russian aggression going back to 2014, even though Congress had voted to supply them, unless Ukraine did him the "favor" of cooperating with him in cooking up a bogus criminal investigation. of rival presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Trump wasn't really charged with impoundment in the first impeachment, which I thought at the time was unfortunate, because the public was having some trouble getting a fix on what exactly the high crimes and misdemeanors were in the case, and that was the unambiguous lawbreaking at the center, Trump's and Vought's secret determination that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to deliver the quid pro quo before they would faithfully execute the law representing the will of the people that Ukrainians should have those missiles. Just as Richard Nixon, after his reelection in 1972, had openly refused to execute the laws by putting a moratorium on subsidized housing programs and community development activities, reduced disaster assistance, targeted farm programs for elimination, and, maybe more importantly, impounded Clean Water Act funds, all of which were the reasons why Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act in 1974 (Nixon, by then embroiled in the Watergate scandal, didn't try to fight it).

Vought was also instrumental in Trump's efforts in 2017-20 to divert up to $8.6 billion in congressionally appropriated funds from the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security, for his big beautiful border Wall (they don't seem to have ever believed that "Mexico will pay for it") in what's now a familiar pattern of dubious "emergency" declarations, injunctions in federal court, and reversals by the Roberts Supreme Court—ultimately, they made away with almost $10 billion from the Pentagon, with $4 billion from other sources, though the Wall still doesn't particularly exist.

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In 2023, his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, was a prime mover in assembling the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a collection of ideas, many of which he had tried to implement from OMB in 2020, for putting the Civil Service under absolute control of the presidency in the name of the "unitary executive" theory. And then, as the presidential race heated up in June 2024, it was issuing op-ed pieces and white papers arguing that the Impoundment Control Act is in fact unconstitutional. In fact, he had argued in a 2022 essay, the United States has already entered a "post-constitutional" moment in which the right's task is to ignore two centuries of precedent and tradition and begin a massive, radical reinterpretation of the Constitution, right from the top:

The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches. Originalism should not just be interpreting the words in their original meaning. It should be to understand the logic of the original Constitution and how these authorities should be used unencumbered by the scar tissue resulting from decades of bad cases and bad statesmen.

That is, making it up without reference to previous interpretations. And while he has an idea of the separation of powers in the three-branch government, it's a melodramatically violent one

the Founders designed our system for titanic struggle between the branches horizontally and between the states and the federal government vertically. They gave us a separation of powers which was absolutely essential to protect our freedoms and way of life.

in which the heroic individual, the president, bends the government to the will of the people, which only he can know, while the Congress is a majestic debating society but one that makes "tradeoffs" instead of conclusions—

The Left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to bend the executive branch to the will of the American people. They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people and the tradeoffs made there.

All the levers, in Vought's vision, seem to be in the hands of the president, and the faithful advisers, natch, with whom he has replaced the colorless meritocracy, are the only titanic combatants on view, facing not other individuals but a mass of gray anonymous forces.

And you know who else isn't involved? Voters, off somewhere rejoicing in their "freedoms" and "way of life", who don't really need to be consulted at all, thanks to the president's intuition, which gives him direct access to their "will". If they have any problems Daddy Trump will know what they are and fix them, as we heard from Rep. Norman.

One thing I want folks to recognize is the way democracy has been entirely written out of the picture. In the traditional civics class story, it's the legislature that is responsible for representing the demos, the people, and what they "debate and decide" is meant to be the closest approximation to the "will of the people", and if they get it wrong they'll lose their next election, which may be, of course, a little bit idealized or Sorkinized; but in current Republican thinking, it seems to me legislation as in the case of the One Big Beautiful should as much as possible approximate the will of the Leader, which epitomizes the will of the people, but cutting to the chase, as we've seen in recent weeks, really just trying to figure out what the big boss likes—so that when (not if) they get it wrong he needs to be entirely free to tweak it, by impounding funds or whatever, "using his powers" (the practical plan, to the extent there is one, is that Stephen Miller will write up executive orders, same as he always does, altering the bill in whatever ways, and Trump will sign them, and federal courts will issue stops on them, and the Supreme Court will dump the injunctions in the shadow docket, or whatever it is they do). The president in this theory is who effectively decides what the law is. The House and Senate exercises may be seen as a framework for making the decision, helping the president (and the faithful advisers), but it's less legislating than it is a ceremony.

Another thing I want folks to recognize, possibly more cheering, is that it can't possibly work out the way Vought and Miller and the others seem to hope it will. Don't ask eight-year-olds to make a plan. Terrible things may happen to the prisoners in the Florida Devil's Island, but no alligators will be eating them (I'm much more worried about dengue hemorrhagic fever from the aedes mosquitos that used to transmit yellow fever; and bad food, worse medical care, sleep deprivation, and a little light beating and rape). If there are titanic battles, they'll more likely be among the faithful advisers fighting each other, not the enemies. The economic program of the One Big Beautiful is as bad as the majority of economists are telling you; the Medicaid cuts won't cut fraud and abuse (because they're aimed at patients instead of the corporate providers who actually commit the fraud, like Senator Rick Scott's old company, which left him with $300 million as it fell into bankruptcy with its $1.6 billion fine), they'll just bring about hospital closures and leave people untreated, the victims of the SNAP cuts will include farmers whose markets are already being dried up by the stupid Trump tariffs alongside the hundreds of thousands who are just hungry. Weird defense of the fossil fuel industry against the assaults of wind and sun is not going to stop the change, just slow it down with possibly devastating human and environmental consequences—not creating one single coal mining job. The cuts to USAID are going to be hard on US farmers too, as well as the 14 million human beings they are likely to kill (14 million!); the main beneficiary will be China's Belt and Road projects around the globe, because cynical and exploitative as they may be, they still will do a lot more good than the US projects will after the US projects have been killed.

The tax provisions are entirely insane, hugely increasing the wealth of multibillionaires who have too much wealth as is while people earning less than $50,000 a year will see a net income loss with the Medicaid and SNAP cuts. Coupled with the tariff insanity in which the Emperor simply makes up numbers out of his head acting out his grievances, which don't even have any relation to the economic facts, with his fellow world leaders, it's hard to guess whether the policies will lead to wild inflation as the price of everything starts to reflect the prices American consumers have to pay with their overvalued dollars as US indebtedness rises to over 120% of GDP, or tumble into depression as consumers become aware of how utterly uncertain the situation is; who knows? The only crises of this kind of magnitude we've had to deal with—the Great Depression, World War II, the 1970s oil shocks, the 1987 financial crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID emergency—have in common that they are actual crises, not ambiguous little public relations slogans.

The immigration provisions, speaking of public relations slogans, are even crazier, seemingly determined to make us unable to harvest our crops, build desperately needed housing, staff our hotels and restaurants and hospitals and colleges—the industries, I may add, that are actually growing, as opposed to the ones like manufacturing that aren't (because the Trump administration, unlike the Biden administration, doesn't have any policy, just the tariffs, maybe, as Trump keeps changing his mind about that and the negotiations seems to be mostly happening in Never Never Land).

The building down of government services, so lovingly prefigured in the Project 2025 document and so hastily implemented in Trump's blizzard of executive orders and the rampages of the DOGEboys, now has its first domestic catastrophe, in the awful loss of life in the flooding of the Guadalupe River in central Texas, where it's starting to seem that Trump-induced personnel shortages in the National Weather Service may have compromised the agency's ability to predict the severity of the floods and get out the warning. The New York Times (gift link) is reporting:

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.

(I'm not saying the Weather Service did something bad (the county and state officials are another matter), I'm saying they may have been unable to complete something they would have completed if they were fully staffed.)

When Republican voters respond to some of these horrors by saying, "I didn't vote for that," it's no doubt a little self-serving and less than honest: they knew who Trump hates, and were given a pretty good idea of how another Trump administration would be acting his hatreds out. They just weren't thinking about how close to home it might hit (not my immigrants! not my National Weather Service! not my mom's Medicaid!—which they might not even realize is Medicaid, given states' habit of giving their program a local name and sometimes privatizing its administration through a company like United Health).

But I think it also must have something to do with a growing, if dim, realization that democracy at the federal level, as we understand it through the relationship between the presidency and the Congress, is basically no longer functioning at all, with Trump, Miller, and Vought intending basically to rule by decree, while the legislature turns the money over without any questions and the Supreme Court allows this situation (the latest outrage from the last, allowing Trump to disappear people into exile in South Sudan if that's what he wants, is just ridiculous).

And democracy in this case is what they like to call a "kitchen table issue", as Trump, Miller, and Vought seem determined to plunge us into deep recession or stagflation, depending how Trump's tariff wheel of fortune rolls, there will be serious job loss and ever increasing scarcity of food, housing, and healthcare, ever more sharply increasing economic inequality, etc. That's not what we voted for! Our families don't like it! We can't afford an emperor and his whims!