"But the Constitution says he can't do that!"
I know, he knows. That's why he is trying.
Unitary executive theory (advanced by project 2025): make potus able to rule through decrees. The Enabling Act in Germany in 1933 did this, lead directly to deaths of ~50 million and burning 2 continents down.
Technically German constitution from 1919 was “in effect” until 1949. Enabling Act made constitution de jure only (by law, not practice); it was technically there the whole time.
History can rhyme.
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@davidaugust A Constitution and laws are only as effective as 1) their interpretation (see SCOTUS 2A & Roe v Wade) and 2) their enforcement (see labor, environmental, etc during any Republican administration).
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@JGuz @davidaugust
They are following a playbook.
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@Scotter @JGuz yes, yes they are.
I wish they would stop.
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@davidaugust @Scotter @JGuz That would be nice.
The alternatives to them stopping are far less pretty.
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@mark @davidaugust @JGuz
It just takes one person to stand up to a bully. Hats off to Bishop Mariann Budde on her sermon yesterday. Hopefully, other religious people will also speak out
Her book sold out today. She was also interviewed on NPR (available at NPR.com.
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@mark @davidaugust @JGuz
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@mark @Scotter @JGuz truly.
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@mark @davidaugust @Scotter @JGuz
A junior officer's coup?
It's happened in other banana republics.
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@davidaugust history is going to yell and scream until it loses it's voice.
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@alpha1beta @davidaugust It's been yelling and screaming. It started to lose its voice years ago.
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@davidaugust I’m asking in good faith, I promise, where do I find in project 2025 that they want the president to behave that way? I started reading it to find it and fact check before sharing, but I’m seeing the complete opposite.
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@johnpeden fairly certain you are not asking in good faith as you failed to read the entire section on the executive in the document.
For those reading along: page 44, "...fundamental premise that it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority..."
page 45: "...policy-formulation procedures developed by the White House to serve the President..." and not the people or the country.
🧵 1/4
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@johnpeden page 51: "...NSC staff that is more responsive and aligned with the President’s goals and empowered to implement them..." not the goals of the nation, people or national security.
And on and on. Your failure to see the Unitary Executive Theory in project 2025 is willful.
"Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights."
🧵 2/4
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@johnpeden https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-destroy-the-u-s-system-of-checks-and-balances-and-create-an-imperial-presidency/
"Project 2025 is an aggressive and ambitious policy agenda, a blueprint for a vast expansion of presidential power."
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/dangerous-vision-presidency
"It is a 900-page policy "wish list", a set of proposals that would expand presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
"Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html
You came with a bad agenda and lied about it.
🧵 3/4
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@johnpeden don't do that.
Muting you for a week. Please do what I just did: use a search engine, your reading skills of the document itself and no disingenuous bad faith "but what about how I missed the entire point of a 900+ page document."
Here, from the horse's mouth: "...they have to be willing to stand up and be bold and recognize that they’re part of a broader executive branch that is controlled by the President..." (emphasis added, Gene Hamilton at https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/the-new-fight-freedom )
🧵 4/4
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@davidaugust @johnpeden Thanks for providing sources and quotes for me to read further.
For future reference, it’s generally not a good idea to assume someone who says “I’m asking in good faith” is not asking in good faith, at least on Mastodon. This isn’t twitter. I simply started reading project 2025 hoping to find this info, but read something that seemed contradictory, so I asked for clarification.
I genuinely just wanted to know where they said it before I shared it myself.
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@davidaugust If you can make something not be just by calling it something else, then it never was.
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@davidaugust "Unitary Executive Theory"?
We just call it "Führerprinzip", much shorter. Though, I guess, a little harder to type for Americans.
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@henryk ah. Somehow makes sense German would have a single word for this.
I get a machine translation of that as “leadership principle.” Does it mean that in German, or is it closer to the American unitary executive theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
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@davidaugust Yes, it's extremely singular and narrow in its meaning, because "Führer" on its own, in contemporary German almost exclusively means Adolf Hitler: The Führer.
(Technically a Führer could also be a museum guide or a crane operator, but that's always clear from context.)
The Führerprinzip was one of the core principles of the Nazi party: The sole and unitary power of The Führer above all and everything.
(And then applied recursively, each subdivision having its local leader.)
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@henryk that makes sense.
Through the events of WW2 it seems Germany has a sounder understanding of this sort of centralization of power and what it truly, unavoidably, means.
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@davidaugust Just to demonstrate the kind of prescience you can expect: This is what our "The Onion"-equivalent had four weeks ago: https://www.der-postillon.com/2024/12/musk-sprung.html ;-)
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@henryk oh that is great, inspired satire. Thank you for sharing this with me.
I do some writing for a sketch comedy show that covers the week’s news, and coming up with good premises for satire, and then executing them as well as they have here is impressive; it is not easy.
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@henryk @davidaugust ..."Wie lange Musk an dieser neuen Choreografie festhalten wird, bleibt abzuwarten. Insidern zufolge bereitet er bereits eine vereinfachte Variante des Sprungs für Kurzauftritte vor, bei der lediglich der rechte Arm gehoben wird." wow, that prediction was right on target...
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@davidaugust And while we're on the topic of relevant German lessons, the next word Americans might want to know is "Gleichschaltung". Slightly hard to translate directly, but it means something like "make equal" but applied to systems of control and administration, so that they all obey the central principles of the uppermost authority.
As embodied by the Schedule F provisions of Project 2025.
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@davidaugust US presidents have been allowed to rule by decree since the executive order was invented
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@aapis sort of. Not quite like this.
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@aapis @davidaugust Emphatically not. You will want to reference the history of Trump's first EOs.
The tl;dr is that the President has very few unreviewable powers for EO. He can order whatever he wants; both Congress and the Supreme Court may countermand those orders by their own means. The recent SCOTUS ruling on criminality of Presidential behavior did not change this (SCOTUS isn't going to put the President in jail for EO'ing someone to be murdered in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, but they definitely retain the authority to take one look at his EO and declare "Execution without due process is Unconstitutional; this EO is void.").
Aguably the most famous trumpfail of his first administration was his attempt to block immigration by declaring a terrorism emergency which disrupted air travel. The Courts basically said "What? No there isn't. Are you high? There is no rational basis for barring legal entry to the country right now" and vacated his EO.
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@mark @davidaugust when trump’s brown shirts come banging on your door, definitely point out how SCOTUS hasn’t made it legal yet or whatever point you think you’re making. I’m sure that’ll stop them.
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@aapis @davidaugust When Trump's brown shirts come banging on my door, what is and is not legal is irrelevant.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make precisely; apologies if I've misunderstood you. I think we're on the same page that Trump 2024 is not like previous US Presidents; I interpreted your comment to mean that he was because Presidents have always had fiat ruling power via EO. That isn't true; Obama, Trump, and Biden all had EOs blocked by the Courts.
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@mark @davidaugust Do us both a favour and don’t walk yourself into Auschwitz 2.0 just because SCOTUS said you should, ok? Your laws and norms are a bad joke that, literally, do not matter.
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@aapis @davidaugust If you're already black-pilled on the topic of American government(s), I don't think we'll have constructive discussion on it.
Meanwhile, I'm over here looking at a country that is incredibly complicated, with multiple layers of government that are already signalling they don't care what the fat man in the white house says because he's not a state governor or a judge, etc. I don't trust them to fix it or to protect me, but we over-simplify the problem we're trying to survive if we pretend they ain't there.
Even if my enemy's enemy is only my enemy's enemy, it's useful to know who they are. You know what happens to revolutionaries with no allies.
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@davidaugust
There was a legal theorist called #carlschmitt who provided justification for this. He survived after 1945 but chose to live in #spain under #franco . His thinking bears a resemblance to unitary executive theory.
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@djr2024 interesting. Clearly the concepts have lasted and have supporters. Not sure how to change those folks minds.
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@davidaugust
True. Although there are limitations to the legal efficacy of executive orders.
Things may change if congress, due to an „existential threat“, makes a law which incorporates aspects and spirit of the Ermächtigungsgesetz. Make no mistake: the Patriot Act of 2002 had been a step in that direction.
The Trump Show is way from over.
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@kiwi2002 Agreed, sadly "limitations to the legal efficacy of executive orders" are precisely what he seeks to shatter. The Patriot Act was not and is not a great law.
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@davidaugust
He's going to do what he wants until someone tries to stop him, and in anticipation of that moment, he is lining up excuses for why he should continue.
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@CassandraVert yup. It is awful.
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@davidaugust I’ve been warning people who were talking about "the next four years" that they were not nearly frightened enough and therefore not going to be prepared for what happens.
Pessimists hate being proven correct.
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@beasom @davidaugust I suspect that as bad as we expected them to be, they'll be magnitudes worse.
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@CStamp @davidaugust Maybe. I knew Cambodians who made it out after Pol Pot took power. My floor is probably several levels lower than most people’s.
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@beasom @davidaugust I can confirm. I am a pessimist, bad things I predict keep happening, and it pissess me off more every time.
https://mastodon.circle.lt/@dmitry/113749488730604034
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@davidaugust When someone explained EOs to him last time, after he was paralyzed with inertia from the shock of winning and having no clue what to do in the job for which he was unqualified, he just started making things up, letting courts settle it. He had no idea what was legal or not at the time. This time he has more of a clue, but thinks he's king, so will just start making things up again, and the country needs to hope the courts do their job because the president won't be doing his.
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@CStamp @davidaugust I think it's worse than that. I think #Trump's consciously doing illegal stuff in hopes his pet Supreme Court will let him rewrite the constitution.
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@BruceMirken @davidaugust Huh. I'm not sure he's that smart, though those around him might be. It's really hard to gauge how evil versus just stupid he is. I imagine that he will expect that court to support his corruption. RGB is rolling in her grave.
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@CStamp @BruceMirken @davidaugust It's more that he's surrounded himself with advisors that want this to be how it works (because it's the only way their ilk could possibly win; they see the winds of history blowing and they know if they don't succeed now, their white ethnostate dream is probably dead for another hundred years. Demographics will smother it under a fuzzy blanket of sheer irrationality, like someone waking up one day and declaring England should all be Viking territory by right of history).
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@mark @CStamp @davidaugust That's the problem. Trump himself knows almost nothing, but this time he's surrounded himself with a team that includes people who actually know how stuff works, and that makes them dangerous.
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@BruceMirken @mark @CStamp @davidaugust
Yes all true they have had time to learn a few things.
But governing, administering policy, does require some substantial competence to get it done: they do not have it, too selfish, greedy, power hungry. They can destroy but not build anything new....
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@yuhasz01 @BruceMirken @mark @davidaugust That's why the damage they will do will take decades to recover from. Kicking down a sand castle is a lot faster and easier than building it. :(
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@yuhasz01 @BruceMirken @mark @CStamp oddly a kind of nice silver lining that they are not great at this.
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@davidaugust @yuhasz01 @mark @CStamp But let's not get cocky and assume they're too incompetent too do real damage. People are going to get hurt.
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@BruceMirken @davidaugust @yuhasz01 @mark They've already done damage by withdrawing from WHO, muzzling scientists, cancelling NIH funding...
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@CStamp @BruceMirken @yuhasz01 @mark and yes, part of what will hurt people is the incompetence with which the new admin does things. You are quite right.
Ill intended and accidentally messy while breaking things presents a different sort of harm than deliberate, capable and malevolent action, but both hurt people.
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@davidaugust @CStamp @yuhasz01 @mark The Trump team, I fear, will manage to achieve the worst of both.
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@BruceMirken @CStamp @yuhasz01 @mark that is my thought too. They’ll willful and accidentally ruin so much.
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@davidaugust Ukraine is Spain in 37, Greenland is Anschluss in 38, and Canada is Poland in 39. Ryme indeed...
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@davidaugust I may have mentioned it before, but I have an acquaintance who's quite fond of saying that the UK is a Constitutional state, but their Constitution isn't completely written down. The closest thing to a written Constitution they have is the Magna Carta.
And at the end of the day, what enforced the Magna Carta wasn't paper, or legislature, or learned men sitting in dour rooms debating the finer points of habeas corpus.
It was that any time the king stepped too far over the line, as judged by the people of the time?
He paid with his life.
The Magna Carta is written on parchment. With blood.
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@davidaugust Its probably the complacency of people who think authoritarianism, thats something that happens to poor people. Democracy is a gentlemens agreement and the constitution a piece of paper - at the end of the day, it's the guy with the guns who has the power. That lesson can be learned one way or the other.
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@davidaugust
Clarence Thomas: I'll be on cruise control...baby!
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@davidaugust Right now we are seeing a charade, some Reps pretending to follow rules/laws. When The Head Criminal acts criminally, it’s up to Congress to reel him in. SCOTUS in his pocket, not happening.
How long before the curtain falls and the agenda becomes absolutely clear even to the slugs, this is a serious Constitutional crisis. We might see Reps being detained for standing in the way of T-Decrees. In the worst case we might possibly see a military coup. 😔☠️🔥
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