(C) Common Dreams
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Donald Trump’s Government Is One Where Congress Isn’t Needed [1]
['Eric Lutz']
Date: 2025-02-19 18:31:39.888000+00:00
Donald Trump sought to further expand his executive power on Tuesday, issuing a new order that would bring independent regulatory agencies under his control. Under the directive, which is likely to face challenges in court, agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission must “draft regulations for White House review,” “consult with the White House,” and abide by the president and attorney general’s interpretation of the law, “instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.”
According to the executive order, this would “rein in” the agencies and “restore a government that answers to the American people.” But what it actually does is create a federal government that is increasingly answerable chiefly to Trump.
Indeed, the president has moved quickly to consolidate power since returning to office last month, defying the separation of powers at the core of the American system and dismantling the federal government through Elon Musk, who, in a joint Tuesday interview with Trump on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, essentially framed himself as the president’s enforcer. “What we’re doing here, one of the biggest functions of the [Department of Government Efficiency] team, is just making sure that presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Musk told the fawning Fox host.
“If the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president…from implementing what the people want,” Musk continued, “then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”
It’s a slippery rhetorical trick from the DOGE leader: If the people elect the president, then anything that prevents him from doing whatever he wants is an ipso facto violation of the people’s will. But “the people” is a broad group that includes the 48.3 percent of voters who cast ballots for Kamala Harris, the millions who stayed home because they didn’t like either candidate, and more still who voted for Trump but not for his every single policy, prerogative, or political objective, and who perhaps bristle at the idea of, say, a 24-year-old Andrew Tate fan swaggering into IRS headquarters to access their personal financial information and Social Security numbers.
Musk and Trump’s idea of “efficient” government isn’t a democracy excised of waste; it’s a dictatorship in which the whims of a single executive are cast as the public’s aspirations. And whatever he says goes. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump wrote on social media over the weekend, invoking a sentiment attributed to the French emperor Napoleon.
It’s a dangerously expansive vision of executive power—one that Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect, Christian nationalist, and new Office of Management and Budget director, wants to realize. Under Trump’s new executive order, the once-independent agencies coming under White House purview would be overseen by Vought, a leading proponent of the “unitary” executive theory, a once-fringe legal framework that regards the president as having sole authority of the executive branch.
In the Trump budget chief’s argument, bureaucratic agencies have amassed excessive power at the expense of the presidency, injuring the government’s “responsiveness to the American people.” And the system must be righted by what Vought has described as “radical constitutionalism.”
Will the courts agree? And will Trump honor their decisions if they don’t? He has already openly thumbed his nose at rulings, with his vice president, JD Vance, going as far as suggesting the judicial branch is not “allowed” to check the chief executive’s power. And the Republican-controlled Congress has either looked the other way or cheered him on. “The courts should take a step back,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters last week. “What we’re doing is good and right for the American people.”
Johnson and his fellow Capitol Hill Republicans, of course, have given up on the separation of powers and ceded much of their authority to Trump—a reflection, as Ezra Klein recently observed, of both their devotion to their leader and the limits of their legislative capacity, mostly thanks to their slim majorities and internal divisions. Why suffer through the messy ordeal of drafting and passing bills—as they’re trying to do now ahead of a March 14 government funding deadline—when Trump can just issue orders and have his plutocrats enforce them?
The result of all this has been to give the presidency extraordinary powers. Trump now seems increasingly unaccountable to the courts, the Congress, and certainly to the people. He’s become a demagogic president pushing the limits further and further, daring somebody, anybody in official Washington to check him.
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[1] Url:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-elon-musk-government-where-congress-isnt-needed?srsltid=AfmBOoqXL5F4lHTheQFRiEDPpnVyKbzbh6ppbokSEYcLeQuPQHa8dBTw
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