In America, becoming a King is a process that Trump and his gang are busy working on.
Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday
First, it purports to abolish the independence of congressionally created independent agencies and subject the heads of all such agencies to performance (and by implication, dismissal) standards set not by Congress but by the White House Office of Management and Budget. This portion of the order is a bald power grab that plainly violates Supreme Court precedent.
Second, the order asserts as to independent agencies the claim Trump has already made about the rest of the executive branch—that he can ignore Congress’ statutory commands about how appropriated money shall be spent. The nonchalance of this declaration reflects Trump’s growing confidence that the Republican Congress will not protest his usurpation of the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse, and thus that the legislative branch already bows before the Führerprinzip.
In addition, the Feb. 18 executive order makes a breathtaking assertion that reaches far beyond independent agencies, declaring that the president (and the attorney general subject to the president’s control) “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch” and that:
If Trump opines, for example, that SEC regulations do not bind Elon Musk, then that is the authoritative position of the executive branch, from which no SEC commissioner may dissent.
If he opines that all the procedural protections for immigrants contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act and implementing regulations are no longer operative, his “opinion” is “authoritative” and no employee of the Department of Homeland Security—including presumably its immigration judges—can disagree.
If he opines that regulations governing the oil and gas industry or the discharge of toxic effluents into the water should be amended, or merely reinterpreted, to give special privileges to his campaign contributors, that, too, would be an authoritative declaration from which no dissent would be allowed.
If he decides that the FBI and the Justice Department may legally commence criminal investigations or prosecutions against his “enemies” without any factual basis, then that is the “authoritative interpretation of law for the executive branch.” And, as demonstrated by the forced resignations of multiple Justice Department prosecutors in New York and D.C. in the past week, anyone who disagrees publicly with such patently unethical or illegal “interpretations” of law will be deemed “disloyal,” forced out of government, and possibly investigated themselves.
One can, if willfully blind, ignore as a kind of twisted playfulness Trump’s social media quotations of Napoleon or the White House’s posting of an image of Trump wearing a crown. But there is nothing playful in the content of Trump’s executive orders or the behavior of his thuggish minions at DOJ. Having already subdued Congress, Trump has now openly announced that the Führerprinzip governs the executive branch and that he will crush any honest public servant who dissents.
Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday
First, it purports to abolish the independence of congressionally created independent agencies and subject the heads of all such agencies to performance (and by implication, dismissal) standards set not by Congress but by the White House Office of Management and Budget. This portion of the order is a bald power grab that plainly violates Supreme Court precedent.
Second, the order asserts as to independent agencies the claim Trump has already made about the rest of the executive branch—that he can ignore Congress’ statutory commands about how appropriated money shall be spent. The nonchalance of this declaration reflects Trump’s growing confidence that the Republican Congress will not protest his usurpation of the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse, and thus that the legislative branch already bows before the Führerprinzip.
In addition, the Feb. 18 executive order makes a breathtaking assertion that reaches far beyond independent agencies, declaring that the president (and the attorney general subject to the president’s control) “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch” and that:
In short, Trump is declaring that in all questions of either making law in the form of regulation or interpreting any law whatever—regulatory, statutory, or constitutional—the only executive branch opinion that matters is his.
If Trump opines, for example, that SEC regulations do not bind Elon Musk, then that is the authoritative position of the executive branch, from which no SEC commissioner may dissent.
If he opines that all the procedural protections for immigrants contained in the Immigration and Nationality Act and implementing regulations are no longer operative, his “opinion” is “authoritative” and no employee of the Department of Homeland Security—including presumably its immigration judges—can disagree.
If he opines that regulations governing the oil and gas industry or the discharge of toxic effluents into the water should be amended, or merely reinterpreted, to give special privileges to his campaign contributors, that, too, would be an authoritative declaration from which no dissent would be allowed.
If he decides that the FBI and the Justice Department may legally commence criminal investigations or prosecutions against his “enemies” without any factual basis, then that is the “authoritative interpretation of law for the executive branch.” And, as demonstrated by the forced resignations of multiple Justice Department prosecutors in New York and D.C. in the past week, anyone who disagrees publicly with such patently unethical or illegal “interpretations” of law will be deemed “disloyal,” forced out of government, and possibly investigated themselves.
One can, if willfully blind, ignore as a kind of twisted playfulness Trump’s social media quotations of Napoleon or the White House’s posting of an image of Trump wearing a crown. But there is nothing playful in the content of Trump’s executive orders or the behavior of his thuggish minions at DOJ. Having already subdued Congress, Trump has now openly announced that the Führerprinzip governs the executive branch and that he will crush any honest public servant who dissents.
