Politics: Is Trump precedency creating a Constitutional crisis? None of the checks & balances are working (NYT)

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Constitutional crisis?

In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful.

President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.

The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.


In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked. Today’s newsletter looks at why — and where things could go next.

What went wrong

The framers wanted to avoid crowning another king. They believed that no one person could truly represent the whole country. (Consider that Trump won less than half of the vote.) So they dispersed power among the three branches. The president is just one person, Yuval Levin, a conservative analyst, told The Times. In a vast country, representation “has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.”


But polarization has made it harder for Congress to play that role. For much of American history, the two parties were made up of broad coalitions of voters. Seventy years ago, liberals, minority groups and racial segregationists were all part of the Democratic Party. A president could not always rely on members of his party to let him do what he wanted, because they were genuinely divided. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, for instance, he wanted to privatize Social Security. His own party helped quash the plan.

Today, the two parties are more homogeneous. The Republican Party has adopted Trump’s views — against foreign interventions, “wokeism” and immigration. And the G.O.P. controls all three branches of government. So the conflict that’s supposed to drive interactions among the branches is muted; Congress, and potentially the courts, are less likely to rein in the president. Now he can impose drastic changes even without a majority’s mandate.

How this ends

This is about the separation of powers, not a specific policy. Maybe you think that TikTok should remain online or that the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown makes sense because the government should spend more on Americans and less on foreign aid. But other government branches’ lack of pushback sets a precedent that Trump can act like a king.

Maybe next time he’d undo the Education Department, vaccine programs or food stamps. Or his administration could repurpose federal funds to imprison unauthorized migrants in detention camps. It could, in a far-fetched scenario, take possession of the Gaza Strip. Normally, these are policies on which Congress must get a say.

Nyhan’s research team has surveyed political scientists at American universities about how worried they are right now. During most of Trump’s first term, the respondents’ opinions about the health of our democracy were largely stable. But their confidence has plunged since Trump’s second inauguration.

ADKq_NaWQw9ZIlp8NIUXEjNTXTBLi2bRNQh3gqxkl_eg_u6nHYRcSTNhF_aSyoaB34BwyMAJcBrO4yeqhPrhbQ7r6n3fMKW3_7LPWWBYNidKgODFVAXhPBjZgjVcXOa29eQ7w6TcikcUZIYBpmQavFbfwDnN08mLeQSGGpNWLYtMzPwBPg=s0-d-e1-ft


A chart shows expert ratings of U.S. democracy on a scale of zero to 100 at various points from February 2017 to February 2025. At the start of the first Trump term, experts rated U.S. democracy at around a 68 out of 100. At the start of the second Trump term, the rating has dropped to 55 out of 100.
Source: Bright Line Watch | By The New York Times

The courts may still intervene, as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer to pay federal employees to quit. The courts might not reverse every action; several U.S.A.I.D. programs have already stopped dispensing food and medicine abroad, for lack of funds. But the courts could stop Trump from taking similar actions in the future. Maybe the conservative Supreme Court would hold the White House to account.

Nyhan worries about another scenario: What if Trump ignores the courts? Before he was vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump should do that if the court blocked efforts to remake the federal government. “Stand before the country and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, referring to an apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote. Perhaps Trump is already flirting with that kind of defiance. Some federal loans and grants remain frozen despite court orders against Trump’s freeze.

“We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.”
 
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Thing is, the checks and balances have never fucking worked. Never. We've just never had anybody to fucking check the checks and balances. Now, this dumb orange motherfucker wants to check the checks and balances and now people are realizing the checks and balances aren't fucking working and never fucking have.

Now people are saying, "Oh shit. The checks and balances are not working."

While most of us are saying, "No Shit"

The only thing that stands in the way of corruption is a piece of paper and that piece of paper doesn't mean a thing to someone who DGAF about a piece of paper.
 

@easy_b @Camille @DC_Dude

Yeah I mentioned this before the election that there is this concept called "The Dark Enlightment" that I heard someone explain on the Carl Nelson show probably back in like September (Mark from Anaheim who was good friends with Dick Gregory and has revelaed alot of things over the last few decades and ex-military). It really is a sick ideology that Vance and his people are in love with.
Start at the 2:14:40 mark






“Dark Enlightenment” (DE) is a theory dreamed up by self-styled Internet philosophers who claim to trace modern-day problems to the end of the Middle Ages. According to DE proponents, the Enlightenment’s humanism, democracy, and quest for equality are responsible for the decay of Western civilization. DE gurus write long, self-aggrandizing online screeds that dabble in just enough science, philosophy, and political philosophy to be dangerous. They promise to “cure your brain” of Orwellian leftist propaganda by giving you a “golfball-sized red pill” that will “sear your throat like a live coal” (!)

Swallowing that massive rhetorical pill is supposed to urge the reader toward the following conclusions:

Democracy leads to the zombie apocalypse.
DE manifestos sometimes use zombies as a metaphor for mediocrity, or sometimes for devouring each other in the name of capitalist self-advancement. And, once in a while, they actually seem to be talking about real zombies. What the West needs to save itself is a return to good, old-fashioned monarchy.

Political correctness—by which DE means indulging in any pretense of human equality—is killing Western civilization.
As an ‘antidote’ to the poisonous infection of equality, DE manifestos posit an alternate theory they call “Human Biodiversity” (HBD). But while “Human Biodiversity” sounds like some kind of lovely futuristic plan for a colony in outer space, exploring the Dark Enlightenment subreddit will wipe that pleasant illusion away:

“Individual humans and human groups,” their page explains, “differ in ability, psychological disposition, intelligence, and other traits for genetic reasons. Genetics can explain 50% or more of the differences in lifetime outcomes within and between human groups. Other factors are minor by comparison.”

This, DE proponents argue, is not racism, but what they call “racial realism”: the idea is that biology and genetics endow us with different behavioral traits, and therefore we should all play different roles in the world.

“Racial realism” is, of course, a fantasy that has been thoroughly debunked by geneticists. If that 50% figure they quote sounds made up, that’s because it is. But interestingly, the attempt to separate ‘racialism’—attributing behavioral traits to different races based on biology, genealogy, geography, or environmental influences—from racism actually echoes a debate among medievalists held at the beginning of this century. Scholars asked: can we really talk about “racism” in a time before modern concepts of race existed? Some medieval white people believed that sin was associated with darker skin, but is that the same as “racism,” or was that technically religious discrimination? What about medieval adaptations of classical geographical theories, which posited that different climates invested the races with different strengths and weaknesses? Germans, according to Caesar, were tall and strong because they wore little clothing in cold environments and bathed in cold rivers; unsurprisingly, Caesar believes Romans like himself sprang from a climate perfectly conducive to martial and intellectual excellence.

Most medievalists have long since moved past the debate over terminology, which seems like rather dubious hair-splitting when even seemingly “neutral” racialisms impose hierarchies, usually with whiteness at the top. And white supremacy is the same conclusion Dark Enlightenment ‘thinkers’ draw when they use the Middle Ages to make their case.
 
Thing is, the checks and balances have never fucking worked. Never. We've just never had anybody to fucking check the checks and balances. Now, this dumb orange motherfucker wants to check the checks and balances and now people are realizing the checks and balances aren't fucking working and never fucking have.

Now people are saying, "Oh shit. The checks and balances are not working."

While most of us are saying, "No Shit"

The only thing that stands in the way of corruption is a piece of paper and that piece of paper doesn't mean a thing to someone who DGAF about a piece of paper.
I actually slightly agree with you because if checks and balances work, Trump would not have went back into the White House for the first place
 
Constitutional crisis?

In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful.

President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.

The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.


In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked. Today’s newsletter looks at why — and where things could go next.

What went wrong

The framers wanted to avoid crowning another king. They believed that no one person could truly represent the whole country. (Consider that Trump won less than half of the vote.) So they dispersed power among the three branches. The president is just one person, Yuval Levin, a conservative analyst, told The Times. In a vast country, representation “has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.”


But polarization has made it harder for Congress to play that role. For much of American history, the two parties were made up of broad coalitions of voters. Seventy years ago, liberals, minority groups and racial segregationists were all part of the Democratic Party. A president could not always rely on members of his party to let him do what he wanted, because they were genuinely divided. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, for instance, he wanted to privatize Social Security. His own party helped quash the plan.

Today, the two parties are more homogeneous. The Republican Party has adopted Trump’s views — against foreign interventions, “wokeism” and immigration. And the G.O.P. controls all three branches of government. So the conflict that’s supposed to drive interactions among the branches is muted; Congress, and potentially the courts, are less likely to rein in the president. Now he can impose drastic changes even without a majority’s mandate.

How this ends

This is about the separation of powers, not a specific policy. Maybe you think that TikTok should remain online or that the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown makes sense because the government should spend more on Americans and less on foreign aid. But other government branches’ lack of pushback sets a precedent that Trump can act like a king.

Maybe next time he’d undo the Education Department, vaccine programs or food stamps. Or his administration could repurpose federal funds to imprison unauthorized migrants in detention camps. It could, in a far-fetched scenario, take possession of the Gaza Strip. Normally, these are policies on which Congress must get a say.

Nyhan’s research team has surveyed political scientists at American universities about how worried they are right now. During most of Trump’s first term, the respondents’ opinions about the health of our democracy were largely stable. But their confidence has plunged since Trump’s second inauguration.

ADKq_NaWQw9ZIlp8NIUXEjNTXTBLi2bRNQh3gqxkl_eg_u6nHYRcSTNhF_aSyoaB34BwyMAJcBrO4yeqhPrhbQ7r6n3fMKW3_7LPWWBYNidKgODFVAXhPBjZgjVcXOa29eQ7w6TcikcUZIYBpmQavFbfwDnN08mLeQSGGpNWLYtMzPwBPg=s0-d-e1-ft


A chart shows expert ratings of U.S. democracy on a scale of zero to 100 at various points from February 2017 to February 2025. At the start of the first Trump term, experts rated U.S. democracy at around a 68 out of 100. At the start of the second Trump term, the rating has dropped to 55 out of 100.
Source: Bright Line Watch | By The New York Times

The courts may still intervene, as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer to pay federal employees to quit. The courts might not reverse every action; several U.S.A.I.D. programs have already stopped dispensing food and medicine abroad, for lack of funds. But the courts could stop Trump from taking similar actions in the future. Maybe the conservative Supreme Court would hold the White House to account.

Nyhan worries about another scenario: What if Trump ignores the courts? Before he was vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump should do that if the court blocked efforts to remake the federal government. “Stand before the country and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, referring to an apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote. Perhaps Trump is already flirting with that kind of defiance. Some federal loans and grants remain frozen despite court orders against Trump’s freeze.

“We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.”
In two years during the next midterms, the Republicans are going to get wiped the fuck out unless they fly out cheat. The biggest problem that the Republicans got right now is they own base starting to see the bullshit?
 
Yes.

Thanks to Democrats fuckups and poor planning every branch of government leans right.


Oh....and the military too. You can argue the media as well.

So....yeah.
 
Yes.

Thanks to Democrats fuckups and poor planning every branch of government leans right.


Oh....and the military too. You can argue the media as well.

So....yeah.
No, this is not all Democrats fault. This is stupid people thought the grass was greener on the other side because they was white fault. If we want to redo the election right now, Kamala will “win without no interference”. The fucked up thing about all of this is Democrats told everyone what was going to fucking happen and yet they still sort of lean towards the criminal. Who’s in the White House now
 
I actually slightly agree with you because if checks and balances work, Trump would not have went back into the White House for the first place
You're right. If the checks and balances worked he wouldn't have even qualified and the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election back in 2020 would not only have been kicked out of office, they would have been labeled traitors and not allowed to run for any public office for the rest of their lives
 
I actually slightly agree with you because if checks and balances work, Trump would not have went back into the White House for the first place
I would say had they worked, he probably wouldn't have been elected the first time.
 
The way things going right now they have to really do some hard cheating because this is something they can overcome
They cheated to win this election. Whatever they did, whether it was Defiance, Ohio or something else, but they cheated. They were way too comfortable. Way too comfortable. And for the record numbers that were supposed to happen it wasn't even close to record numbers

 
They cheated to win this election. Whatever they did, whether it was Defiance, Ohio or something else, but they cheated. They were way too comfortable. Way too comfortable. And for the record numbers that were supposed to happen it wasn't even close to record numbers


Two weeks ago they didn’t cheated on a district in Iowa that went 20 points for Trump a couple months ago but swung 24 points over to the Democrats on a special election so like I said they are going to have to do some heavy cheating
 
Thing is, the checks and balances have never fucking worked. Never. We've just never had anybody to fucking check the checks and balances. Now, this dumb orange motherfucker wants to check the checks and balances and now people are realizing the checks and balances aren't fucking working and never fucking have.

Now people are saying, "Oh shit. The checks and balances are not working."

While most of us are saying, "No Shit"

The only thing that stands in the way of corruption is a piece of paper and that piece of paper doesn't mean a thing to someone who DGAF about a piece of paper.
It only worked because of a good guy hand shack but they never planned for that one mofo who ain’t give a fuck about a hand shack
 
I would say had they worked, he probably wouldn't have been elected the first time.
He was always going to win. Where we are right now, is where we were back in 1860. Except we can defend ourselves and at its conclusion, we aren't going to force Mississippi to sign anything. When this is over we wont let this generation’s Nathan Forrest linger around.
 
Yes.

Thanks to Democrats fuckups and poor planning every branch of government leans right.


Oh....and the military too. You can argue the media as well.

So....yeah.
Yeah you can also argue that non voters and those who voted for Trump (or only voted for local politicians) are to blame.
 
It only worked because of a good guy hand shack but they never planned for that one mofo who ain’t give a fuck about a hand shack
Well one of the reasons that Trump loves Andrew Jackson is because he defied the Supreme Courts's decision that said the Indian tribes were a sovereign nation and thus began the Trail of Tears.
 
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We are going to come to a terrible fork in a row in this country. Right now, Trump is pissing off his own base. They are going to be the linchpin on what happens next. Or the military is going to rough in the White House and grab him a lot of middle class. People are beginning to hurt right now and something is going to have to happen.
 
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