And the very worst may still be yet to come.
REBECCA GORDON in
theTomDispatch
Do they want to strengthen the government
in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,”
concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then
rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position.
Or would they prefer to destroy the
government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover
Norquist used to call for decades
ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to
reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the
bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.
You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party.
In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas.
That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he
deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his — and it is
increasingly his alone — GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little
invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point
and shoot in whatever direction they choose.
You might also wonder why, at a moment when horror is being heaped on horror in Israel/Palestine, when wars continue unabated in Ukraine and Sudan, I find myself focusing on some distinctly in-the-weeds aspects of the American political system.
Perhaps it’s
partly to distract myself from all the other nightmares around us. But even if
I believed (which I don’t) that the right response to the crisis in
Israel/Palestine involved sending more weapons and money to Benjamin Netanyahu,
Congress isn’t in a position to appropriate anything at the moment.
Just as we face so many crises globally, the legislative branch of the world’s (theoretically) most powerful country has ceased to function. Perhaps by the time you read this, Republicans in the House of Representatives will have stopped squabbling over which right-wing bigot should be speaker.
Maybe they will have opted for Jim Jordan, who has accused the Biden
administration of planning to replace white voters with
immigrants, or perhaps someone else entirely. Remember, too, that whatever
joker emerges as speaker from such a chaotic process will be second in
line to the presidency, should something happen to Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris.
Fearsome Power
Recently, I’ve somehow managed to end up on a few right-wing email lists. The strangest people (Ron DeSantis, for example) are writing to ask me for money.
My most recent supplicant was Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump and co-author, with Steve Bannon, of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address in which the new president inveighed darkly against the “American carnage” he saw defiling the nation’s landscape.
These days, Miller is himself a president of
something called the America First Legal Foundation, which bills
itself as “Fighting Back against lawless executive actions and the Radical
Left.”
Miller, it turns out, has written to let me know that “we are living in extremely perilous times and a truly dangerous moment for our Republic.” As it happens, I agree with him, though obviously not for the same reasons.
“The federal bureaucracy has turned against the American
people,” Miller’s missive continues. “It has been completely corrupted into an
ideological monolith of hard-left loathing for America. The fearsome
power [his emphasis] of the state is raining down on political
dissidents, while violent and vile criminals are released into our
communities.” The solution, of course, is to send money to America First Legal,
so it can get on with the business of “Fighting Back against lawless executive
actions.”
Miller, however, will likely be less concerned about the fearsome power of the state once it’s again in the hands of Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s part of a group of former and present Trump advisers engaged in planning for a potential presidential transition in 2025.
These include Russell Vought, who ran Trump’s
Office of Management and Budget, and former Trump White House chief of
personnel John McEntee. As the New York Times reported in
July,
“Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election.
The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative
politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the
personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan
presidency.”
The key thrust of Project 2025 is full implementation of the “unitary executive” principle — the view that the Constitution locates the power of the executive branch in a single individual, the president.
In its maximalist version, according to the Times, this theory also contradicts the long-held doctrine of the separation of powers, under which three co-equal branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — provide checks and balances on each other.
Under the unitary
executive principle, presidential power simply outweighs that of either
Congress or the Supreme Court. Project 2025’s backers know that Donald Trump
will agree and act accordingly.
By “long-held doctrine” I mean a blueprint for democratic government that goes back to two seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophers: Charles Montesquieu, who first wrote about the separation of powers, and John Locke, whose ideas about unalienable rights were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Like Montesquieu, Locke advocated for a
separation of governmental powers in which the legislative, not the executive,
would be supreme. In that view, the democratically elected legislature makes a
nation’s laws and — just as the name suggests — the executive exists to
“execute” them.
Despite their occasional homages to Montesquieu and Locke, the Heritage Foundation and its followers have flipped that thinking upside down by insisting that the Constitution considers the executive branch superior to the other two.
If that were the case, wouldn’t the
executive branch be described in that document’s first article? In fact,
Articles I, II, and III describe the legislative, executive, and judicial
functions in that order, suggesting that if any of these is superior, it is (as
Locke argued) the legislative.
Heritage, however, points to Article II,
which begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United
States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and,
together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as
follows…” What “follows” is a lengthy description of the very electoral process
that Trump and company tried so hard to suborn on
January 6, 2021.
While Trump was president, he delighted in explaining to
anyone who’d listen that he had “an Article II, where I have the right to do
whatever I want as president.” At the time, that suggestion of ultimate power
was met with widespread derision.
However, were Trump to be re-elected, the folks at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute have plans to, as the starship Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard would say, make it so.
As the Times reported in July,
their goal is “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s
authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by
either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political
interference by the White House.” Consider what follows a first step in exactly
that direction.
A (Schedule) F in Government
Okay, now let’s truly dive into the weeds: In his final year as president, Trump issued an executive order amending the regulations governing the federal civil service. That service was instituted by law in 1871 in response to what was then seen as rampant favoritism throughout the federal government.
Patronage jobs — positions granted, often to the
friends and family of powerful politicians or in return for money or favors —
were officially eliminated. Competitive processes designed to select qualified
candidates for specific positions replaced the old system.
Today, the Office of Personnel Management
oversees the hiring and firing of roughly 2.2 million civilian federal
employees, the people who keep the wheels of government turning. They
administer Social Security, Medicare, and the Internal Revenue Service, among
many other things. They make sure that your meat isn’t rotten and the alcohol
content of your vodka bottle is what it says on the label.
The vast majority of those employees are chosen through competitive examinations, but about 4,000 key positions are directly appointed by the president or other senior officials, including the leadership of many agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other government executives.
It’s not unreasonable for presidents to want to put their own policy stamp on
various branches of government through such appointments.
Those 4,000 positions exempted from
competitive hiring fall into five categories, delineated in five “schedules”
(lists) described in a subsection of Title 5 of the United States Code. To
be exact, Rule VI of Subsection A of Title 5 — I told you we were going to get
into the weeds! — lists in Schedules A through E the employees exempt from
civil service exams.
Or at least those were all
the exempt categories until October 2020. That’s when Donald Trump issued
an executive order creating
Schedule F, which exempted from competitive hiring all “career positions in the
Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or
policy-advocating character.”
Such a broad, ill-defined category could,
in fact, have come to include any junior employee in any federal department who
might in the course of his or her employment have cause to send a memo to a
superior advocating any action. It’s estimated that
implementing Schedule F would have sent the number of exempt civil service
employees soaring from 4,000 to roughly 50,000.
On taking office, however, President Joe
Biden immediately rescinded that executive order so, at the moment at least,
Schedule F no longer exists.
In fact, the feckless President Trump we knew wasn’t even vaguely prepared to replace 50,000 civil servants with his own people during his last few months in office or, likely as not, over the following four years had he been re-elected.
That’s where the Heritage
Foundation’s Project 2025 comes in. They are now spending millions of dollars
to recruit and vet political appointees who would toe the Trump line (a line
they hope to draw in a future Trump presidency).
Jokers to the Right of Me…
The rock band Stealers Wheel caught our current situation perfectly back in 1972 when they sang about “Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right.” The jokers to the right of me (and to the right of the majority of the people in this country) are the members of the House Freedom Caucus, their allies, and other MAGA followers.
They are the ones (de)constructing the house of cards that Congress is becoming at this very moment. To call them anarchists would be an insult to conscientious anarchists everywhere. They are, in fact, anti-government nihilists who believe in little beyond a kind of gun-slinging performative violence.
They don’t want to drown the government quietly in a bathtub but to strangle it
on live TV. And keep in mind that they have imagined nothing with which to
replace it.
Where to begin? Those Freedom Caucusers in the House are now walking weapons in search of a target. Yes, they threatened to shut down the government unless their demands were met, but then they couldn’t even decide what those demands were.
Did they want to cut Social
Security, Medicare, and other social service programs?
Impeach President Biden? Stop the prosecutions of
Donald Trump? Increase border security? Stop
funding Ukraine’s war effort?
When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to
cooperate with the Democrats to prevent just such a shutdown, they threw him
out. Then they couldn’t agree on a new speaker, even though the House of
Representatives can’t conduct business without one. Yet not a day passes
without a bomb-thrower like Matt Gaetz strutting around saying things like:
“My goal is to get the most conservative
Speaker of the House with broad trust across the conference. The Swamp of
Washington D.C. is going crazy right now because they are not in complete and
total control — this gives us a great opportunity to put the interests of our
fellow Americans first.”
All Together Now
Much of this would be funny if it weren’t
so deadly serious. However, recent polls suggest that a 2024
contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains a toss-up. As historian
Heather Cox Richardson recently told the Guardian,
“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The
re-election of Trump. she believes, will signal
“an end of American democracy. I have
absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at
Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal
government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net,
regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his
2024 campaign is retribution.
“I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what
we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.”
I can’t say it any better than she has.
They want to burn it all down so that they can rule over the smoldering ashes.
That would put us on a true Schedule F — for Failed State — a condition this
country now seems hellbent on achieving.
© 2023 TomDispatch.com
REBECCA GORDON is
an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Prior to teaching at
USF, Rebecca spent many years as an activist in a variety of movements,
including for women's and LGBTQ+ liberation, the Central America and South
Africa solidarity movements and for racial justice in the United States. She is
the author of "American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand
Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes" (2016) and previously, "Mainstreaming
Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States" (2014). She
teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. You
can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.