Latest news with #Trumpists
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
America's famed ‘checks-and-balances' governance system is failing
It has been said many times, but saying it appears to have no consequences: our system of checks and balances is failing. The US supreme court allowing the president effectively to abolish the Department of Education only reinforces this sense; Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, explicitly wrote that 'the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave' – but she did not explain how to counter the threat. The picture is complicated by the fact that what critics call 'the stranglehold the checks and balances narrative on the American political imagination' has prevented positive democratic change. Hence it is crucial to understand where the separation of powers itself needs to be kept in check and where it can play a democracy-reinforcing role. Most important, we need counterstrategies against the Trumpists' usurpation of what should remain separate powers. While pious talk of the founders' genius in establishing 'checks and balances' is part of US civil religion and constitutional folklore, the system in fact never functioned quite as intended. The framers had assumed that individuals would jealously guard the rights of the branches they occupied. Instead, the very thing that the founders dreaded as dangerous 'factions' – what we call political parties – emerged already by the end of the 18th century; and thereby also arose the possibility of unified party government. The other unexpected development was the increasing power of the presidency; the founders had always seen the legislature as the potential source of tyranny; instead, the second half of the 20th century saw the consolidation of an 'imperial presidency', whose powers have steadily increased as a result of various real (and often imagined) emergencies. Some jurists even blessed this development, going back to Hamilton's call for an energetic executive, and trusting that public opinion, rather than Congress or the courts, would prove an effective check on an otherwise 'unbound executive'. The dangers posed by unified party control and a strong presidency were long mitigated by the relative heterogeneity of parties in the US; internal dissent meant that Congress would often thwart an executive's agenda. Less obviously, Congress's creation of largely independent agencies, acting on the basis of expertise, as well as inspectors general within the executive itself established an internal system of checks. It also remains true, though, that, compared with democracies such as Germany and the UK, an opposition party in the US does not have many rights (such as chairing committees) or ways of holding a chief executive accountable (just imagine if Trump had to face a weekly prime minister's question time, rather than sycophantic Fox hosts). Most important, though, the executive itself tended to respect the powers of other branches. But Trump: not so much. In line with his governance model, of doing something plainly illegal and then seeing what happens, Trump is usurping powers reserved for the legislature. He uses money as he sees fit, not as Congress intended; he, not Congress, decides which departments are necessary. The tariff madness could be over if Congress called the bluff on a supposed 'emergency' which justifies Trump's capricious conduct of slapping countries with apparently random levies. The most egregious example is his recent threat vis-à-vis Brazil which has nothing to with trade deficits, but is meant to help his ideological ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro, escape a criminal trial for a coup attempt. Trump is also destroying the internal checks within the executive. Inspectors general have been fired; independent agencies are made subservient to the president – in line with the theory of a 'unified executive' long promoted by conservative jurists. The US supreme court, occupied to 67% by Maga has been blessing every power grab. As the legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted, the court has granted Trump relief in every single emergency application since early April, with seven decisions – like this week's on the Department of Education – coming with no explanation at all. If this were happening in other countries, one would plainly speak of a captured court, that is to say: one subordinated to the governing party. As commentators have pointed out, it is inconceivable that this court would simply rubber-stamp a decision by a President Mamdani to fire almost everyone at the Department of Homeland Security. Still, the main culprit is the Republican party in Congress. There is simply no credible version of 'conservatism' that justifies Trump's total concentration of power; and anyone with an ounce of understanding of the constitution would recognize the daily violations. This case can be made without buying into the separation of powers narrative criticized by the left (though what they aim at is less the existence of checks as such, but the empowerment of rural minorities in the Senate and the proliferation of veto points in the political system, such that powerful private interests can stop popular legislation). Paradoxically, Democrats should probably make Congress even more dysfunctional than it already is: use every procedural means to grind business to a halt and explain to the public that – completely contrary to the founders' anxieties – the emasculation of the legislature is causing democracy's demise (it never hurts to slip in such gendered language to provoke the Republican masculinists). Of course, one might question what role public opinion can really play as a check, and whether there's still such a thing at all given our fragmented media world: it never constrained the George W Bush administration's 'global war on terror' in the way that Hamilton's self-declared disciples had hoped. But it's still the best bet. After all, there is a reason why some jurists see 'we the people' as the fourth branch that ultimately makes the difference. Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
America's famed ‘checks-and-balances' governance system is failing
It has been said many times, but saying it appears to have no consequences: our system of checks and balances is failing. The US supreme court allowing the president effectively to abolish the Department of Education only reinforces this sense; Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, explicitly wrote that 'the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave' – but she did not explain how to counter the threat. The picture is complicated by the fact that what critics call 'the stranglehold the checks and balances narrative on the American political imagination' has prevented positive democratic change. Hence it is crucial to understand where the separation of powers itself needs to be kept in check and where it can play a democracy-reinforcing role. Most important, we need counterstrategies against the Trumpists' usurpation of what should remain separate powers. While pious talk of the founders' genius in establishing 'checks and balances' is part of US civil religion and constitutional folklore, the system in fact never functioned quite as intended. The framers had assumed that individuals would jealously guard the rights of the branches they occupied. Instead, the very thing that the founders dreaded as dangerous 'factions' – what we call political parties – emerged already by the end of the 18th century; and thereby also arose the possibility of unified party government. The other unexpected development was the increasing power of the presidency; the founders had always seen the legislature as the potential source of tyranny; instead, the second half of the 20th century saw the consolidation of an 'imperial presidency', whose powers have steadily increased as a result of various real (and often imagined) emergencies. Some jurists even blessed this development, going back to Hamilton's call for an energetic executive, and trusting that public opinion, rather than Congress or the courts, would prove an effective check on an otherwise 'unbound executive'. The dangers posed by unified party control and a strong presidency were long mitigated by the relative heterogeneity of parties in the US; internal dissent meant that Congress would often thwart an executive's agenda. Less obviously, Congress's creation of largely independent agencies, acting on the basis of expertise, as well as inspectors general within the executive itself established an internal system of checks. It also remains true, though, that, compared with democracies such as Germany and the UK, an opposition party in the US does not have many rights (such as chairing committees) or ways of holding a chief executive accountable (just imagine if Trump had to face a weekly prime minister's question time, rather than sycophantic Fox hosts). Most important, though, the executive itself tended to respect the powers of other branches. But Trump: not so much. In line with his governance model, of doing something plainly illegal and then seeing what happens, Trump is usurping powers reserved for the legislature. He uses money as he sees fit, not as Congress intended; he, not Congress, decides which departments are necessary. The tariff madness could be over if Congress called the bluff on a supposed 'emergency' which justifies Trump's capricious conduct of slapping countries with apparently random levies. The most egregious example is his recent threat vis-à-vis Brazil which has nothing to with trade deficits, but is meant to help his ideological ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro, escape a criminal trial for a coup attempt. Trump is also destroying the internal checks within the executive. Inspectors general have been fired; independent agencies are made subservient to the president – in line with the theory of a 'unified executive' long promoted by conservative jurists. The US supreme court, occupied to 67% by Maga has been blessing every power grab. As the legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted, the court has granted Trump relief in every single emergency application since early April, with seven decisions – like this week's on the Department of Education – coming with no explanation at all. If this were happening in other countries, one would plainly speak of a captured court, that is to say: one subordinated to the governing party. As commentators have pointed out, it is inconceivable that this court would simply rubber-stamp a decision by a President Mamdani to fire almost everyone at the Department of Homeland Security. Still, the main culprit is the Republican party in Congress. There is simply no credible version of 'conservatism' that justifies Trump's total concentration of power; and anyone with an ounce of understanding of the constitution would recognize the daily violations. This case can be made without buying into the separation of powers narrative criticized by the left (though what they aim at is less the existence of checks as such, but the empowerment of rural minorities in the Senate and the proliferation of veto points in the political system, such that powerful private interests can stop popular legislation). Paradoxically, Democrats should probably make Congress even more dysfunctional than it already is: use every procedural means to grind business to a halt and explain to the public that – completely contrary to the founders' anxieties – the emasculation of the legislature is causing democracy's demise (it never hurts to slip in such gendered language to provoke the Republican masculinists). Of course, one might question what role public opinion can really play as a check, and whether there's still such a thing at all given our fragmented media world: it never constrained the George W Bush administration's 'global war on terror' in the way that Hamilton's self-declared disciples had hoped. But it's still the best bet. After all, there is a reason why some jurists see 'we the people' as the fourth branch that ultimately makes the difference. Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
San Francisco Chronicle
6 days ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Dear Kamala Harris, don't run for office. There's a far more important job for you
From: Joe Mathews Please don't run for governor in 2026. Don't bother running for president in 2028. Instead, take a job more important than either of those posts. It's a job that would fit you even better than the Chloé suits you wore during last year's campaign. It's a job that doesn't exist, but one that California will need to survive this awful moment. Madame Vice President, please use your stature to convince the state to establish the California Autonomy Authority — as an independent commission or part of the executive branch — with you as its founding director. California needs a new agency with broad powers to defend itself against the existential threat of a criminal, authoritarian American nation-state. President Donald Trump's regime has effectively declared war against Californians. Trump dispatched secret police to seize Californians off the streets, deployed troops to back up the secret police, canceled our environmental laws, and illegally cut off funding for vital programs. While Trumpists attack us constantly, we Californians have no full-time body to defend ourselves in this war. Instead, our officials are forced to split their attention between governing their own jurisdictions and defending against federal attacks. In Los Angeles, the federal secret police started arresting people before local leadership, preoccupied with fire rebuilding, knew they were there. Gov. Gavin Newsom has struggled to reconcile the monumental job of managing California's housing and climate crises with the new full-time job of fighting against the federal invasion. His shifting public stances (He's fighting Trump! He's reaching out to Trump!) and presidential ambitions sow cynicism rather than trust. Attorney General Rob Bonta is in a similar bind, juggling litigation against the U.S. with serving as the state's top law enforcement official. We need our public officials to focus on their actual jobs. And we need someone else to take charge of protecting our democracy and defending California against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Your whole career has prepared you for this urgent assignment. Your deep experience in local law enforcement — as San Francisco district attorney — should help you convince local governments, especially local police, to collaborate in defense against Trump. Your six years as California attorney general, representing the entirety of the state government, gave you visibility on state vulnerabilities that Trump might exploit. Your four years in the White House as vice president taught you how intelligence agencies, departments, the military and the U.S. government respond in crises — all lessons that can be applied now in defense of California. You also built contacts across this country (from your presidential campaign) and in world capitals (from your VP travels) that could support California in this moment. In this novel role, you'd combine your public service experiences. For starters, this is a crime-fighting job. Trump is a convicted felon who is violating the law and the Constitution, and his administration, which embraces corruption, has likely been infiltrated by criminals or foreign enterprises seeking advantage. Using the authority's subpoena power, you should investigate and expose criminality — because the Trump-controlled U.S. Department of Justice won't. You also could identify and seek prosecution or civil remedies against masked federal agents who violate Californians' rights. In the process, your authority would create a record of the U.S. regime's crimes to support future federal or international prosecutions, or even a truth-and-reconciliation commission. The job would also involve policymaking. You would determine which laws or governing structures offer California and its local governments the most protection against federal attack. To do that, you might end up creating new agencies in California and possibly other allied states, to replace the federal departments Trump is dismantling. To make this work, you must commit to a term of at least five years. That way, you can serve as the bridge between Newsom, who leaves office at the end of 2026, and the next governor — thus discouraging the Trump administration from exploiting California's transfer of power. And since your term would go to 2030, two years beyond the 2028 presidential election, you'd make clear that California won't stop defending its autonomy even after Trump is gone. Yes, taking this new gig would mean not running for governor or president. But that's not a big sacrifice. Your donors are unenthusiastic about the governor's race, and polls show California voters are at best lukewarm about you. And the Trump people are already busy making sure the 2028 presidential election won't be free or fair. (Betting markets actually give Trump better odds of winning an unconstitutional third term than of any Democrat winning the election.) So, stop debating between running to serve the state (in two years) or the nation (in four). Instead, and right now, start creating and leading a new authority to serve both.
New Statesman
08-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Netanyahu bends the knee for Trump
Photo by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images Those still cringing at the memory of Keir Starmer's supplication in the Oval Office in February should take heart in learning that he is not the only politician who packs a flattering letter in his jacket pocket on visits to the White House. While Starmer offered the President an invitation for a state visit from King Charles, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump's comrade-in-arms, handed a letter across the dinner table on Monday night in which he recommended to those august Swedes that the President be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 'It's well deserved and you should get it,' was the paternal encouragement he offered to Trump during his taciturn encomium. Perhaps it's understandable why the Prime Minister kept it brief. The Trumpists say world peace was served by America blowing up the nuclear arsenal of an Islamist death cult intent on killing millions of Israelis. The problem with that argument is that the administration's own intelligence suggests the US strikes on Iran only delayed Tehran's programme by one or two years, and now the mullahs have ejected the UN bomb watchers keeping tabs on their progress. Yet Netanyahu insisted that Trump was 'forging peace as we speak, in one country, in one region after the other'. In contrast to Starmer's forced guffaws, though, it's never clear during Netanyahu's meetings with Trump who is paying homage to whom. For all Trump's storied aversion to etiquette, he has mastered the famously difficult art of receiving a gift. 'Wow,' Trump cooed, pawing the letter with appreciation, 'coming from you, in particular, this is very meaningful.' The absence of laughter from his well-tuned and sycophantic staff suggested this was not a joke – though it should have been, albeit a very sick one, considering the International Criminal Court wants to arrest Netanyahu for 'war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare' and the 'crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts'. Collecting imprimaturs from international organisations is not something the Israeli leader usually prioritises. His forces continue to kill Palestinians and devastate Gaza even though his defence officials have thought for months that the mission to neuter Hamas's ability to attack Israel has been fought and won. And they reportedly think the war's second aim – the return of hostages – is only possible with a deal, one which has snagged on Netanyahu's refusal to agree to Hamas' demand for a complete end to the war. 'We'll work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always remains in our hands,' Netanyahu said at the dinner. To those who might complain that this version of peace doesn't offer much to the Palestinians by way of recognised statehood, Netanyahu had a simple answer: 'we don't care'. Dreams of a Palestinian state have lately been replaced by chatter about shipping Gazans out of the territory. The Financial Times reported this week that the Boston Consulting Group, with some help from Tony Blair's acolytes, drafted plans to turn Gaza into a 'Trump Riviera', complete with bribes to get Palestinians to leave and an 'Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone' (the BCG has disavowed any such work that was done on their behalf). As Samuel Moyn wrote in the Guardian, there could be no better symbol of Trump than as the great protector of the neoconservative and neoliberal consensus he promised to overthrow. The key here is that Trump now sees Netanyahu as a fellow strongman who also faces persecution by the Deep State. 'It is INSANITY doing what the out-of-control prosecutors are doing to Bibi Netanyahu,' Trump posted in June, referring to the prime minister's long-running corruption trial in Israel. The President's intervention surely annoyed those in the Maga movement who thought America First meant greater distance from Israel. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe For now, Trump seems happy chewing over a welcome hypothetical: which is better, tea with the King or a Nobel Peace Prize? [See also: The hunt for Iran's missing uranium] Related
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
William Buckley Jr: The American right-wing's original influencer
As the Trump era dawned, many felt Buckley would have stopped it. He had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites-and perhaps even created the respectable right NYT BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus Published by Random House 1,018 pages $40 By Jennifer Burns In the age of Steve Bannon and Bronze Age Pervert — the pseudonymous author acclaimed by young Trumpists — a biography of William F Buckley Jr seems almost quaint. Since his death in 2008, the aristocratic founder of the flagship conservative magazine National Review has been wreathed in nostalgia. Especially as the Trump era dawned, there was a sense that somehow Buckley would have stopped it, even as National Review's iconic 2016 'Against Trump' issue proved no match for the MAGA insurgency. At a moment without gatekeepers or even gates, it was said, Buckley showed how much we had lost: It was he who had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites; it was he who had defined, even created, the respectable right. Sam Tanenhaus's immersive authorised biography partakes of this nostalgia, even as his portrait of Buckley dispels it. The Buckley that emerges from his exhaustive, 1,000-page portrait is not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them. After all, Buckley made his name with God and Man at Yale, his slashing 1951 attack on his alma mater as a hotbed of leftism, complete with the suggestion that alumni withhold donations as a means of pressuring the university to remedy the issue. In his precocious youth, not only did Buckley realise that politics was becoming entertainment, but he helped make it so, branching off from magazines into television, spy novels and a stunt run for New York City mayor, all while befriending and advising the most powerful politicians of his day. More than a political journalist, Buckley was an unabashed activist who intuitively grasped the centrality of the media and the power of attention, and wielded both on behalf of his cause. American politics has never been the same since. As Mr Tanenhaus lavishly elaborates in the book's early chapters, Buckley was to the manner born. His oil speculator father had spent years in Mexico — where he was involved in various counterrevolutionary intrigues until he was expelled in 1920 — and he recreated the country's colonial aesthetic meticulously at Great Elm, his Connecticut estate. Drawing on family papers, Mr Tanenhaus provides a rich chronicle of this unusual family, a strange outpost of Spanish Catholicism uneasily nested amid a town of New England Protestants. He shows how the family's Southernisation went far beyond bringing Black staff members north to Great Elm. Buckley's 1957 article on the civil rights movement in National Review has become notorious for its assertion that the 'advanced race' should prevail in the South. A somewhat lackadaisical student early on, Buckley became a standout debater at Yale, stumbling into what would be his central innovation: Politics as entertainment rather than as policy or profession. After graduation, he stirred up controversy with two books — the first his attack on Yale, the second a defence of Senator Joe McCarthy — and then founded National Review, relying on family money and his already formidable reputation. From the start, Buckley understood the media as the primary battleground. In America, he wrote in a key memo, the 'ruling class' was the ''opinion makers' — newspapermen, publishers, commentators, educators, ministers and members of the various professions.' It was this group that the magazine would target, intending to shape the views of those who ultimately 'control the elected.' National Review conservatives would be serious, they would be smart, they would force the opinion makers to answer, if only to disagree. And the disagreement itself, Buckley realised, could be news. Mr Tanenhaus ably covers Buckley's central role in the emergence of postwar conservative politics. Less an intellectual than a convener, Mr Buckley helped weld together a conservatism historians call 'fusionism': A blend of aggressive anti-communism, traditional values and libertarian economics. Engaging if unsurprising as political history, as biography the book raises more questions than it answers. Mr Tanenhaus strives to distinguish between Buckley the ideologue and Buckley the friend, but neither persona is fully rendered. Positioning himself as the leader of an intellectual movement, Buckley produced no original thought, despite a lifelong effort to complete a serious book of ideas. (It never materialised.) In the end, less important than Buckley's particular views is the style in which he expressed them and the infrastructure he created for their propagation. Politics has always been a form of entertainment, of course; what Buckley did was to update the torchlight parades of industrialising America for a literate and white-collar world. Yet he did more than add conservatism to a pre-existing media establishment. He helped change the way that establishment operated. Mr Tanenhaus calls Buckley the 'intellectual leader' of American conservatism, but we might remember him more accurately as its original influencer.
