I’ve been pretty sad lately—things I’ve been warning about for a very long time are starting to happen.
I’ve been warning that failing to manage immigration into the United States prudently would eventually result in a reaction not unlike that in the 1920s. The reaction has started.
I’ve been warning that the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s which reached its peak after China was granted a “most favored nation” trading status and admitted to the World Trade Organization would come back to bite us. The reaction appears to be setting in fiercely. We’ll see what results the tariffs President Trump is imposing (see below) produce.
I’ve been warning that delegating its powers to the executive branch would return to haunt the Congress and in the excesses to President Trump’s second term, we’re seeing the fruit of that delegation.
There has been no declaration of war since 1942 but we’ve been at war for most of the last 80 years, the most notable of the undeclared wars being the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm, the War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, not to mention scores of other wars large and small.
Most of the pruning activities people are complaining about DOGE’s advising have little or nothing to do with what Congress has authorized. They are primarily the result of laws (and appropriations) written vaguely and enforced only half-heartedly or simply delegating the details to the executive branch. Some agencies (USAID) operated for decades primarily on the basis of an executive order and never received actual empowering legislation.
The Supreme Court will inevitably be ruling on the degree to which the president actually controls the executive branch.
Speaking of the courts, I’ve been warning that Congress’s delegation of its responsibilities to the courts would provoke a reaction. Perhaps the Supreme Court will curtail the scope of temporary restraining orders and injunctions issued by district court judges. Or maybe the Congress will do the right thing and act to do that or curtail it themselves. I’m not counting on it.
USAID, as we pointed out, was eventually made an official agency. Also, there are many agencies created by Congress where there has been spending set out explicitly but Trump is claiming he alone can decide if he will spend the money. To be sure, I agree that Congress writes crappy bills, one of the many reasons we end up with having so many agencies having to determine what those laws mean. After Chevron, now the courts, with barely any expertise in the issues on which they will rule, deciding what they mean. I am not expecting that to improve things.
Overall, I think this is largely all about the preeminence of parties and the dominance of special interests, especially ones with money.
District judges have always had the authority to overrule stuff, but their rulings have never been binding. The reason they are doing so many now is that Trump is doing so much stuff outside of norms that many people think is illegal.
Steve
This
is a pretty fair statement of my point.
IMO Congress should take one of two alternatives:
1. Write the laws defining what it wants done or
2. Limit what they want done to what they’re able to write
Query- If you take away the power of the courts to make judgments on the action of POTUS, what limitations on executive power do you have left? In our current situation Congress is supine and will support whatever Trump does for fear of getting primaried. But suppose you had a functional Congress or even the opposition in power what could they really do to put limits on? Trump is pretty much asserting he can spend or not spend any money Congress has allotted. Even if they stopped approving money he could spend directly what would stop him, considering what he has been doing, from taking money designated for military spending and putting it toward stuff he likes such as prisons? Also, he is doing a lot of this stuff under supposed Emergency Provisions. hat seems pretty questionable.
Steve
elections matter, candidates matter.
Indeed you have made all those points and have been correct Dave. I have followed you all these many years, not because I agree with everything you say, rather because on the major, over all world view issues, you offer rational, internally consistent points of view.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Democrats would like to believe that they have a better plan, but they don’t even have a view of Americans from the ground. And Americans matter, because flooding the country with welfare recipient voters didn’t work for them. So to maintain the profitable positions they have left they’re going to have to learn how to pretend to give a damn about them. Doubling or tripling the use of the word “folks” is dated and stale.
They should all fold up their Wall Street portfolios and go home.
Leave the seats open and see what happens, they’ve got theirs anyway.
Don’t be blue? Dave, it’s a new day.
And America will power through it come what may.
“IMO Congress should take one of two alternatives:
1. Write the laws defining what it wants done or
2. Limit what they want done to what they’re able to write”
Perfect. Have you read the book The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss? It was written in 1997 and predicted our current crisis period. It deals a lot with how society decays and we are unable to get things done that we used to be able to do. To resolve it, we need to go through a crisis period that reunifies the country. The crisis also clears out a lot of bureaucracy and government incompetence as a matter of necessity. Based on the timeline, the crisis period should resolve itself around 2028 to 2032.