“We’ve studied democratic erosion in countries around the world, and our research has found that the most important bulwark against an elected leader undermining democracy doesn’t come from opposition parties or pro-democracy activists. It comes from the ruling party — and particularly the powerful elites in that party — and their efforts to constrain their own leader.
The danger to democracy is particularly acute in political systems led by parties where leaders wield disproportionate influence relative to the political parties that back them — as is now the case in the Republican Party. Our data on all democratically elected leaders around the globe in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War show that where leaders dominate the parties they lead, the chances of democratic backsliding increase, whether it’s through gradual democratic decay or a rapid collapse.
In the United States, we tend to assume that constitutional checks and balances, including the powers vested in Congress or the Supreme Court, play the central role in constraining a rogue executive and any power grab they might attempt. But we’ve found that institutions can do so only if the members of the president’s party inside those institutions are willing to use their authority in the face of executive abuses or overreach.
The reason that often doesn’t happen is because when a political party becomes dominated by the leader as an individual, party figures view their political fates as directly tied to that of the leader, not to the long-term reputation of the party, and so they are unwilling to push back against the leader’s actions. In these “personalist” political parties, the party elite are even willing to go along with a leader’s abuse of power if they see that doing so is advantageous for keeping their jobs.
The impact affects more than just the political class. When prominent party figures tolerate — or indeed even support — a leader’s anti-democratic actions, it fosters public acceptance of those actions among party supporters, as people take important cues from their elected officials. High levels of polarization and the resulting disdain for the other side only make matters worse, as partisans are willing to accept abuses of power if it means keeping the other side out of office. Indeed, even when there remains a high level of public support for democracy, our research shows that societies can slide down a non-democratic path simply because they don’t want the other side to win.”
Trump fires top military lawyers so they aren’t roadblocks to anything Trump wants to do. But, the lawyers are supposed to be roadblocks! They are there to help the military follow the law and the Constitution.
“Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday night granted a respite to the Trump administration as it seeks to keep billions of dollars in foreign aid frozen, despite a judge’s order directing the administration to resume payments immediately.
Roberts’ intervention heads off the possibility of administration officials being held in contempt for failing to comply with the order from U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, who imposed a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Wednesday for the federal government to pay nearly $2 billion in unpaid invoices from foreign-aid contractors.”
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“Ali, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ordered the administration on Tuesday to pay the accumulated bills by the end of the day on Wednesday. The judge acted after finding that the Trump administration had essentially flouted earlier orders he issued requiring the State Department to lift a blanket freeze on overseas aid programs.
Rather than take steps to unfreeze that aid, as Ali had directed Feb. 13, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development found new legal rationales to keep it on hold, the judge said.
As a result, Ali gave the administration the midnight Wednesday deadline to send the payments for what officials have estimated is $2 billion-worth of unpaid work completed by aid contractors.”
LC: Basically, the Trump administration flouted the courts, the law, and the separation of powers, and Roberts bailed them out rather than forcing the issue. Under Trump, the U.S. constitutional system is deeply degrading.
Republicans in Congress are not acting like a co-equal branch designed to be a check on power grabs from the president. They are acting like a non-person character, or a non-person Congress.
“the lawsuit argues — in often dramatic terms — that the Appointments Clause of the Constitution calls for someone with such significant and “expansive authority” as Musk to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” says the lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez and officials from Arizona, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, California, Nevada, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. “Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron.” Two of the 14 states are led by Republican governors.”
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“The suit filed by the 14 states says the Constitution blocks the president from overriding “existing laws concerning the structure of the Executive Branch and federal spending.” As a result, the suit says, the commander-in-chief from is forbidden from creating — or even “extinguishing” — federal agencies, and from “slashing federal programs or offering lengthy severance packages as a means of radically winnowing the federal workforce,” in a nod to the Trump administration’s “deferred retirement” offer to government employees.”
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“”[T]he President does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally dismantle the government. Nor could he delegate such expansive authority to an unelected, unconfirmed individual,” Thursday’s lawsuit says.”
“Vance’s most comprehensive statement of this radical position came in an interview I conducted with him in January 2023 for a profile in POLITICO Magazine. During the interview, I referred to comments that he had made on a conservative podcast in 2021 suggesting that Trump, if reelected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
I asked Vance if this was still his view.
“Yup,” he responded.”
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“Vance’s rhetorical quibbling aside, his suggestion is radical. The course of action he is recommending — the president openly defying a Supreme Court order and then challenging the courts to enforce it — would amount to a full-fledged constitutional crisis of a different sort, one that would entirely upend the existing rules governing the separation of powers between the courts and the executive branch.”
“Still, only the most naive legal analyst would conclude right now that the US constitutional system will survive Trump’s second term intact, or that the courts have definitively ruled that Trump’s agenda is in jeopardy. It is certainly possible that, when all of this litigation is over, Trump will face loss after unambiguous loss and be forced to give up many of his attempts to defy the Constitution. But it is far too soon to predict how all of these lawsuits will play out — or even if Trump will comply with any court orders against him.
To date, no appellate court — the mid-tier courts in the federal system — has weighed in on any of these cases, not to mention the Supreme Court. Similarly, while some federal trial courts have ordered Trump to stop some of his illegal actions, many of these decisions are temporary stopgap orders that expire quickly, and that are intended largely to maintain the status quo while the judges hearing these cases get up to speed on the legal issues that they present.
It’s a lot to keep track of. And, in many of these cases, there are likely to be months or even years more litigation before the legal issues presented by these cases are fully resolved.
It’s also worth noting that, as these cases make their way through the federal appellate process, they are more and more likely to be heard by judges who tend to be sympathetic to Trump — including a Supreme Court that has held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.”
If Trump can act the way he is, breaking the law, taking powers clearly meant for Congress, and if he runs over the judiciary to do it, The United States will no longer be a Constitutional democracy.
“For over a week now, Donald Trump and the Justice Department have been flouting the law meant to shut down TikTok. The legislation was unambiguous and was passed by large, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress; it was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court less than two weeks ago. And for the most part, both Republicans and Democrats have sat quietly by as Trump has waved away their previously stated concerns, as well as the constitutional powers and institutional prerogatives of Capitol Hill.
The TikTok ban was supposed to be a critical national security response to the threat posed by the Chinese government and its control over an app with 170 million users in our country. Shortly before the law went into effect, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in a speech on the Senate floor that “without question, TikTok’s lethal algorithm has cost the lives of many American kids.” He announced that there would “be no extensions, no concessions and no compromises for TikTok.””
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“On his first day in office, Trump declared that he would effectively ignore the law, and so TikTok lives. He appears to have engineered a short-term bailout for TikTok — whose app should have gone dark in the U.S. by now — after a wealthy donor supported the move and amid some belief that TikTok helped him get reelected.”
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“he has created a precedent — that he can direct his own administration to ignore laws that he believes are politically or personally unhelpful to him — that ought to trouble Republicans and Democrats alike.
To start, there is no real question about the state of the law on paper: Trump is breaking it.”
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“His executive order was little more than a public declaration that he would ignore the law on the theory that it interfered with his ability “to assess the national security and foreign policy implications.” Not only did he direct the attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days, he also instructed the Justice Department “to issue a letter” to each TikTok service provider “stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct” during the 75-day period.
Some Republican China hawks, like Cotton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, had taken the position that state attorneys general could enforce the law anyway, but Trump unilaterally decided that they were wrong about that too. His executive order purports to prevent “attempted enforcement by the States or private parties” and to grant the Justice Department “exclusive authority to enforce the law.”
This is generally not how executive orders are supposed to work. They are not supposed to be vehicles for the president to pick and choose which laws passed by Congress he wants to enforce — or which ones he wants to change by fiat.”
“The Constitution’s text is clear that Congress must authorize appropriations and the president must “take Care” that those laws are “faithfully executed.” There is no basis in constitutional text or history for the president to claim open-ended power to impound funds in the manner of the OMB memo. In 1975, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s claim to be able to spend less than Congress had appropriated. That ruling would have had to come out the other way if the president had a constitutional power to impound. (Perhaps aware of this reality, OMB issued a later memo claiming the freeze was not, in fact, an “impoundment.” But this is just a semantic sleight of hand: For entities that need federal funds this or next week in particular, there is no meaningful difference.)”
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“If anything, the Supreme Court has tightened the constitutional leash on such unilateral claims of executive authority untethered from a statutory anchor. With Justice Neil Gorsuch leading the charge, it has stressed instead the need for clear authority from Congress for the exercise of any delegated power, including the power to write regulations. The OMB memo makes a mockery of those decisions by allowing the president to do with money what now isn’t allowed with regulations.
It is true that there is a scattering of past instances of impoundment. But these isolated cases largely concern foreign affairs and national security matters. In 1803, for example, Thomas Jefferson declined to spend funds for 15 gunboats for fear that they would upend secret talks with a foreign sovereign, Napoleonic France. Whatever unilateral presidential authority exists over foreign affairs cannot constitutionally be spread with reckless abandon to cover any or all domestic spending.
Past presidents have also confronted conflicts between a legislative command and Congress’ failure to appropriate funds to execute that command. There, presidents are forced to make a choice between dueling statutory orders. Courts rarely address these conflicts. But it is striking to note that in a 2012 case involving competing mandates, the Supreme Court rejected the executive’s claim to be able to withhold promised funds.”
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“The impoundment power Trump’s White House asserts would drive a stake through Congress’ constitutional authority.
Exactly like the line-item veto invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1998, the claimed impoundment power is de facto power to selectively edit duly enacted laws. This claimed nonenforcement should elicit whiplash among conservatives. After all, it was red states such as Texas, aided by Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller, that once excoriated the Biden administration for negating federal laws on immigration via nonenforcement. (The Biden administration, however, could point to statutory conflicts that don’t exist in this case.)”