The Atlantic Magazine, in its most recent issue has published a series of opinion pieces predicting that a second term for Donald Trump may signal the end of American democracy.[i] While offering very little of real substance to back up their claims – other than Trump’s own inflammatory language – the entire enterprise ignores the ongoing abuses of power by the federal government; more importantly it ignores the central problem that is never addressed. The office of the president and the myriad departments of the executive branch have amassed so much unconstitutional power that whenever the opposition’s guy gets into office, he can effect sweeping changes with simple decrees issued from the Oval Office.
While no one can defend much of Trump’s rhetoric and petulant name-calling, the notion that his free and fair election to the office would “destroy democracy” is excessive. The reporters at the Atlantic argue that one man holding office at the head of one of three co-equal branches of the federal government can become a near tyrannical dictator. If they are correct in their premise, then there is a far more serious problem here than simply the prospect of a bumptious orange man being elected president.
What the Atlantic is saying – without actually saying – is that the office of president has virtually unchecked power to do whatever it pleases. In many ways that is correct. Every president since Truman in 1950 has perpetrated acts of war against other countries without the constitutionally required declaration of war from congress. As a case in point, President Biden has carried out eight bombing raids in Syria in just the past two months.[ii]
Congress ceded its war-making power to the executive 73 years ago, when it allowed President Truman to invade Korea and fight that country’s civil war without so much as a phone call to House or Senate leaders. Congress has also given away most of its lawmaking authority to the various executive branch departments. Instead of having to take the time to pass actual laws and go on record, they have simply delegated that authority to the FAA, FDA, FCC, ICC, OSHA, DOE, EPA, DOA, USDA, DHS, EEOC, HUD, DOI, DOL, DOT, and the list goes on. Together, these agencies have compiled an utterly incomprehensible and impenetrable 163,000-page volume of laws[iii] that no elected representative ever voted upon, and about which our congress knows nothing more than you and I – which is nothing. That is, until you run afoul of one of their enforcement agents.
As the head of these two million petty tyrants occupying the cubicles of this alphabet soup of agencies, the president can effectively create, alter, or abolish laws by ordering these agencies to change, ignore, or vigorously enforce whatever policy they intend to force upon the American public without any input from our elected representatives. For example, a president could instruct the National Highway Traffic and Safety Commission to raise fuel economy standards by ten percent, forcing automakers to lose $1.2 billion and costing American consumers $2.4 billion[iv]; without any people’s representative having a vote. On his first day in office, president Biden issued decrees that included canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline project, putting an end to the tens of thousands of anticipated construction jobs[v] and helping gasoline prices to increase 77 percent over the next fifteen months.[vi] If that doesn’t bother you, consider that in the opening days of his administration, President Trump approved the continued construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, signed an Executive Order to begin construction of a wall along the Mexican border, and ordered federal agencies to cease providing grant money to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities.[vii]
The governments of the states in our union were intended to be a bulwark against federal power taking away our rights, but the states have slowly succumbed to a kind of serfdom under the lord of the manner in Washington. First, in the 19th century, some states opted out of the union, whereupon President Lincoln invaded, starved, and burned those states, forcing them back into the union. Then, in the early twentieth century the 16th Amendment was passed, allowing congress to directly tax every citizen’s income with no set limits. This was followed by the 17th Amendment which took control of the senate away from the states and gave it to the people (the senate was created to give the states a say in the federal government and protect their sovereignty and interests). This created a world where the federal government vacuums up more than a third of every productive citizen’s earnings, leaving the states to beg the feds for funding in the form of grants or legislation. This in turn allows federal agencies to blackmail the states into complying with whatever mandates they dream up in the cloud cuckoo land inside the beltway. Ever wonder why all 50 independent states have the same drinking age, DUI blood alcohol limits, teach nonsensical “common core” math to their children, and require seatbelt use? It is because the federal government has all the money and if the states want to be able to maintain their roads and schools, they have to do as they are told. The 16th Amendment gave the feds all the money and the 17th made sure the states no longer had anyone to stand up for their rights as sovereign governments.
Congress too has expanded its power to encompass virtually every aspect of human existence. Beginning in the 1930s, the Supreme Court, under pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, made a series of rulings grossly expanding the strictly limited sixteen things congress was granted the power to do in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution. Using that article’s interstate commerce clause, “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States…” the court gave congress the power to pass laws on any human activity that could remotely affect interstate commerce. It’s not a big leap to recognize that everything a citizen does has an impact on the national economy – however slight. From buying a tube of toothpaste, choosing a career, choosing whether to go to college, to buying a home – everything has a minute effect on the economy and is within the power of congress to make law; but that’s another problem.
When it comes to the presidency, the real issue is not who sits in the Oval Office; it is the fact that the office itself and the agencies it controls have amassed power far beyond that granted in the constitution. That charter puts the president in charge of the executive branch, makes him the commander in chief of the army and navy, and grants him the power (with the advice and consent of the senate) to make treaties and appoint people to the various offices of the executive and judiciary – that’s it. Far from being the chief of a strictly limited federal executive, the president now has the power to initiate war against anyone at any time, make sweeping changes in law with a stroke of his pen or a simple phone call, and persecute his political opponents with agents of the FBI, IRS, and other agencies.
Our great nation contains many people who want to continue the march toward socialism, disarm the citizenry, and place the government in charge of every aspect of our lives. There are those who favor the opposite and a return to the government of a federal republic. There are those who wish to force their policies and religious values on others; those who wish to impose prison sentences for use of certain plants and drugs, and those who wish to see all such laws abolished; those who want to limit or outlaw abortions and those who would allow the procedure up to the moment of birth; there are those who favor continued military adventurism around the globe and those who want a return to our original orientation of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations.
We were provided with this system of a federal republic of independent states precisely to avoid the situation our country is in today. We are a very large and populous nation, made up of a mixture of peoples from all over the world. We hold differing opinions, beliefs, interests, prejudices, and values. People living in Maine were never intended to be told by an elected dictator that they must adopt the same law as those living in Tennessee.
Our republic can endure only if we return to operating as such. With so many differing viewpoints, it must be left to the states and, where at all possible, local governments to make law and set policy. In this way, people can live with much greater freedom, lower tax burdens, and much greater peace and harmony. When every aspect of existence is no longer a matter of national political debate, there will be much less to argue about. The presidency and control of the houses of congress has devolved into a truncheon that is angrily seized by one side or the other and used to crush and intimidate its opponents. No one cares about the truth or principles any longer; it’s us against them and every four years it’s the end of life as we know it if the wrong politician wins.
To survive, the people must take power back by educating themselves, and realizing that, despite our differences, we can live together harmoniously if we stop letting filthy politicians divide us by race and class and frighten us with boogeymen like viruses and terrorists; while they line their pockets and those of their corporate cronies with our money. I don’t know about you, but I’m far less concerned about a which bathroom a “trans” person uses than I am about losing my money and half the world wanting me dead because my government is bombing people all over the planet. Given the choice, I’ll share a unisex bathroom with any and all of my fellow citizens while we remain free and get to keep our money. Our federal government, under presidents and congresses of both parties, starts wars, takes whatever it desires out of our paychecks, and drains the value of our money by printing trillions of dollars and giving it to their donors in the banking industry. Electing Donald Trump or Joe Biden next year will not restore republican democracy to our nation nor end the endemic corruption in Washington. Term limits for congress, an end to global empire, and constitutional amendments to reign in the congress and the presidency should be the goal. End the imperial presidency and we won’t have to argue so vehemently about who holds the office.
-------------------------------------------------------
[i] The Atlantic. (2023, December 11). What Trump could do with a second term. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/donald-trump-second-term-policies/676176/
[ii] Biden, Joseph R. (2023, December 7). Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and President pro tempore of the Senate regarding the War Powers Report. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/12/07/letter-to-the-speaker-of-the-house-of-representatives-and-president-pro-tempore-of-the-senate-regarding-the-war-powers-report/
[iii] Crain, W. Mark. The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms. Rep. no. 264. Washington, DC: Small Business Administration, 2005. Small Business Research Summary. Small Business Administration. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
[iv] Austin, D., & Dinan, T. (2003). The Economic Costs of Fuel Economy Standards Versus a Gasoline Tax. In cbo.gov. Congressional Budget Office. Retrieved December 11, 2023, from https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/49xx/doc4917/12-24-03_cafe.pdf
[v] Keystone XL Extension Permit Revocation: Energy Costs and Job Impacts. (2022). In US Department of Energy. United States Department of Energy. Retrieved December 11, 2023, from https://www.daines.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/12.23.22-KXL-Pipeline-Job-Loss-and-Impacts-on-Consumer-Energy-Costs-001245.pdf
[vi] Laycock, R. (2023, December 7). US gas prices: 2018 to December 2023. finder.com. https://www.finder.com/gas-prices
[vii] Valverde, M. (n.d.). PolitiFact - Here’s what Donald Trump did his first week as president of the United States. @Politifact. https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jan/27/heres-what-donald-trump-did-first-week-president-u/
While no one can defend much of Trump’s rhetoric and petulant name-calling, the notion that his free and fair election to the office would “destroy democracy” is excessive. The reporters at the Atlantic argue that one man holding office at the head of one of three co-equal branches of the federal government can become a near tyrannical dictator. If they are correct in their premise, then there is a far more serious problem here than simply the prospect of a bumptious orange man being elected president.
What the Atlantic is saying – without actually saying – is that the office of president has virtually unchecked power to do whatever it pleases. In many ways that is correct. Every president since Truman in 1950 has perpetrated acts of war against other countries without the constitutionally required declaration of war from congress. As a case in point, President Biden has carried out eight bombing raids in Syria in just the past two months.[ii]
Congress ceded its war-making power to the executive 73 years ago, when it allowed President Truman to invade Korea and fight that country’s civil war without so much as a phone call to House or Senate leaders. Congress has also given away most of its lawmaking authority to the various executive branch departments. Instead of having to take the time to pass actual laws and go on record, they have simply delegated that authority to the FAA, FDA, FCC, ICC, OSHA, DOE, EPA, DOA, USDA, DHS, EEOC, HUD, DOI, DOL, DOT, and the list goes on. Together, these agencies have compiled an utterly incomprehensible and impenetrable 163,000-page volume of laws[iii] that no elected representative ever voted upon, and about which our congress knows nothing more than you and I – which is nothing. That is, until you run afoul of one of their enforcement agents.
As the head of these two million petty tyrants occupying the cubicles of this alphabet soup of agencies, the president can effectively create, alter, or abolish laws by ordering these agencies to change, ignore, or vigorously enforce whatever policy they intend to force upon the American public without any input from our elected representatives. For example, a president could instruct the National Highway Traffic and Safety Commission to raise fuel economy standards by ten percent, forcing automakers to lose $1.2 billion and costing American consumers $2.4 billion[iv]; without any people’s representative having a vote. On his first day in office, president Biden issued decrees that included canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline project, putting an end to the tens of thousands of anticipated construction jobs[v] and helping gasoline prices to increase 77 percent over the next fifteen months.[vi] If that doesn’t bother you, consider that in the opening days of his administration, President Trump approved the continued construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, signed an Executive Order to begin construction of a wall along the Mexican border, and ordered federal agencies to cease providing grant money to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities.[vii]
The governments of the states in our union were intended to be a bulwark against federal power taking away our rights, but the states have slowly succumbed to a kind of serfdom under the lord of the manner in Washington. First, in the 19th century, some states opted out of the union, whereupon President Lincoln invaded, starved, and burned those states, forcing them back into the union. Then, in the early twentieth century the 16th Amendment was passed, allowing congress to directly tax every citizen’s income with no set limits. This was followed by the 17th Amendment which took control of the senate away from the states and gave it to the people (the senate was created to give the states a say in the federal government and protect their sovereignty and interests). This created a world where the federal government vacuums up more than a third of every productive citizen’s earnings, leaving the states to beg the feds for funding in the form of grants or legislation. This in turn allows federal agencies to blackmail the states into complying with whatever mandates they dream up in the cloud cuckoo land inside the beltway. Ever wonder why all 50 independent states have the same drinking age, DUI blood alcohol limits, teach nonsensical “common core” math to their children, and require seatbelt use? It is because the federal government has all the money and if the states want to be able to maintain their roads and schools, they have to do as they are told. The 16th Amendment gave the feds all the money and the 17th made sure the states no longer had anyone to stand up for their rights as sovereign governments.
Congress too has expanded its power to encompass virtually every aspect of human existence. Beginning in the 1930s, the Supreme Court, under pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, made a series of rulings grossly expanding the strictly limited sixteen things congress was granted the power to do in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution. Using that article’s interstate commerce clause, “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States…” the court gave congress the power to pass laws on any human activity that could remotely affect interstate commerce. It’s not a big leap to recognize that everything a citizen does has an impact on the national economy – however slight. From buying a tube of toothpaste, choosing a career, choosing whether to go to college, to buying a home – everything has a minute effect on the economy and is within the power of congress to make law; but that’s another problem.
When it comes to the presidency, the real issue is not who sits in the Oval Office; it is the fact that the office itself and the agencies it controls have amassed power far beyond that granted in the constitution. That charter puts the president in charge of the executive branch, makes him the commander in chief of the army and navy, and grants him the power (with the advice and consent of the senate) to make treaties and appoint people to the various offices of the executive and judiciary – that’s it. Far from being the chief of a strictly limited federal executive, the president now has the power to initiate war against anyone at any time, make sweeping changes in law with a stroke of his pen or a simple phone call, and persecute his political opponents with agents of the FBI, IRS, and other agencies.
Our great nation contains many people who want to continue the march toward socialism, disarm the citizenry, and place the government in charge of every aspect of our lives. There are those who favor the opposite and a return to the government of a federal republic. There are those who wish to force their policies and religious values on others; those who wish to impose prison sentences for use of certain plants and drugs, and those who wish to see all such laws abolished; those who want to limit or outlaw abortions and those who would allow the procedure up to the moment of birth; there are those who favor continued military adventurism around the globe and those who want a return to our original orientation of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations.
We were provided with this system of a federal republic of independent states precisely to avoid the situation our country is in today. We are a very large and populous nation, made up of a mixture of peoples from all over the world. We hold differing opinions, beliefs, interests, prejudices, and values. People living in Maine were never intended to be told by an elected dictator that they must adopt the same law as those living in Tennessee.
Our republic can endure only if we return to operating as such. With so many differing viewpoints, it must be left to the states and, where at all possible, local governments to make law and set policy. In this way, people can live with much greater freedom, lower tax burdens, and much greater peace and harmony. When every aspect of existence is no longer a matter of national political debate, there will be much less to argue about. The presidency and control of the houses of congress has devolved into a truncheon that is angrily seized by one side or the other and used to crush and intimidate its opponents. No one cares about the truth or principles any longer; it’s us against them and every four years it’s the end of life as we know it if the wrong politician wins.
To survive, the people must take power back by educating themselves, and realizing that, despite our differences, we can live together harmoniously if we stop letting filthy politicians divide us by race and class and frighten us with boogeymen like viruses and terrorists; while they line their pockets and those of their corporate cronies with our money. I don’t know about you, but I’m far less concerned about a which bathroom a “trans” person uses than I am about losing my money and half the world wanting me dead because my government is bombing people all over the planet. Given the choice, I’ll share a unisex bathroom with any and all of my fellow citizens while we remain free and get to keep our money. Our federal government, under presidents and congresses of both parties, starts wars, takes whatever it desires out of our paychecks, and drains the value of our money by printing trillions of dollars and giving it to their donors in the banking industry. Electing Donald Trump or Joe Biden next year will not restore republican democracy to our nation nor end the endemic corruption in Washington. Term limits for congress, an end to global empire, and constitutional amendments to reign in the congress and the presidency should be the goal. End the imperial presidency and we won’t have to argue so vehemently about who holds the office.
-------------------------------------------------------
[i] The Atlantic. (2023, December 11). What Trump could do with a second term. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/donald-trump-second-term-policies/676176/
[ii] Biden, Joseph R. (2023, December 7). Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and President pro tempore of the Senate regarding the War Powers Report. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/12/07/letter-to-the-speaker-of-the-house-of-representatives-and-president-pro-tempore-of-the-senate-regarding-the-war-powers-report/
[iii] Crain, W. Mark. The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms. Rep. no. 264. Washington, DC: Small Business Administration, 2005. Small Business Research Summary. Small Business Administration. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
[iv] Austin, D., & Dinan, T. (2003). The Economic Costs of Fuel Economy Standards Versus a Gasoline Tax. In cbo.gov. Congressional Budget Office. Retrieved December 11, 2023, from https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/49xx/doc4917/12-24-03_cafe.pdf
[v] Keystone XL Extension Permit Revocation: Energy Costs and Job Impacts. (2022). In US Department of Energy. United States Department of Energy. Retrieved December 11, 2023, from https://www.daines.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/12.23.22-KXL-Pipeline-Job-Loss-and-Impacts-on-Consumer-Energy-Costs-001245.pdf
[vi] Laycock, R. (2023, December 7). US gas prices: 2018 to December 2023. finder.com. https://www.finder.com/gas-prices
[vii] Valverde, M. (n.d.). PolitiFact - Here’s what Donald Trump did his first week as president of the United States. @Politifact. https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jan/27/heres-what-donald-trump-did-first-week-president-u/
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