Befuddling optimism
From
Noah Sombrero@fedora@fea.st to
alt.buddha.short.fat.guy on Wed Aug 20 20:13:12 2025
From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy
An amendment that can help save our democracy
By David French
On Nov. 8, 1787, a pamphleteer who wrote under the pseudonym Cato
published one of the most prescient warnings in American history.
Cato looked at the proposed Constitution and declared that it might
well turn into a vehicle for tyranny.
He didnAt see a Constitution of enumerated rights that sharply limited
the power of the president. Instead, he saw a Constitution that
granted the president such sweeping authority othat if the president
is possessed of ambition, he has power and time sufficient to ruin his country.o
In other words, Cato could see a man like Donald Trump coming, and he
knew the Constitution could not prevent his rise.
WeAre not sure who Cato was u some historians believe he was George
Clinton, then the governor of New York. But we know he was an
antifederalist, and the antifederalists are remembered as the losers
of one of the most important arguments of the American founding, the
argument over the ratification of the Constitution.
In some respects, however, the antifederalists were right, and itAs
important that we remember their words and heed their warnings.
Like many Americans, I find myself in the curious position of both
revering the Constitution as a world-historical document that advanced
liberty and justice and also recognizing that it contains a number of
flaws. Many of the ConstitutionAs flaws remain hidden when America is
governed by decent men, but that become obvious and dangerous when it
is not. Poor character creates a constitutional stress test, and it
can reveal fatal defects in much the same way that a physical stress
test can expose flaws in your heart.
And nowhere are those flaws more apparent than in Article II, the
article which created the American presidency. We should consider a
change.
The fundamental goal of the first founding of America was to discard
the British monarchy, to establish a republican form of government. We
see this in Benjamin FranklinAs famous response to Elizabeth Willing
PowelAs question: oWell, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a
monarchy?o
oA republic,o Franklin replied, oif you can keep it.o
Can we keep it? ThatAs the concern that preoccupied antifederalists
such as Cato. While Franklin himself said the Constitution, for all
its flaws, was as onear to perfectiono as we could reasonably expect,
the antifederalists saw it as inherently dangerous. It lacked a Bill
of Rights. (The antifederalists were instrumental in persuading the
states to ratify the Bill of Rights after they ratified the
Constitution.) It gave too much power to the central government and
ruling elites. And the presidency, in the hands of a bad man, could
produce despotism.
The problems with the presidency, according to Cato, began in the
first words of Article II. oThe construction of the first paragraph of
the first section of the second article,o he said, ois vague and
inexplicit.o
He is exactly right. ItAs so vague and inexplicit, in fact, that itAs
hard to discern what it actually means. Ambitious leaders are eager to
fill the vacuum created by ambiguity.
Here is the key sentence: oThe executive Power shall be vested in a
President of the United States of America.o That sentence immediately
raises two questions: What is executive power? And, crucially, what
are its limits?
When President Trump entered office in his first term, he didnAt have
a clear theory of power. Trump isnAt a constitutional scholar (to say
the least), and initially he was surrounded by more or less
traditional Republicans who were far more wedded to longstanding
American constitutional traditions than he was.
This time, however, heAs surrounded by a different breed of Republican
u people who possess a theory of power, declare that itAs found right
in the text of the Constitution, and then press that power to its
limit and beyond.
The best description of TrumpAs theory comes from Jack Goldsmith, a
law professor at Harvard, who says that it has four distinct elements:
(a) the Constitution vests all of the executive power in the
president; (b) all subordinate executive branch officials are
removable at will by the president; (c) the presidentAs Article II
duty to otake care that the laws be faithfully executedo entails an
exclusive presidential power to decide which laws to enforce or not to
enforce; and (d) the president can thus direct and control all
subordinate executive officials.
We see each of these elements at work in countless Trump actions and
decisions in his second term, from his mass terminations of executive
branch employees, to defunding executive branch agencies established
by Congress, to refusing to enforce the law that effectively bans
TikTok. Trump is turning Congress into an advisory committee. It gets
to pass the law, but he decides which laws to enforce.
Taken together, these four principles turn the constitutional order
upside down. IAm not a big fan of trigger warnings, but I must confess
that there is a phrase that triggers me every time I see it: ocoequal
branches of government.o
Um, no. Our nation is not supposed to have coequal branches. Congress
is supposed to reign supreme. Yes, the other branches have the power
to check Congress (presidents can veto legislation; courts exercise
judicial review), but Congress alone possesses the power of the purse.
Congress alone is supposed to possess the power to declare war.
Congress can impeach and remove members of the executive and judicial
branches of government, including the president and justices of the
Supreme Court.
I donAt know about you, but I tend to call the person who can fire me
oboss.o
There is a very good reason for that congressional supremacy. Congress
u particularly the House of Representatives u is our most democratic,
most representative branch of government. ItAs Congress more than the presidency (or any court) that makes our country a democracy.
But now Congress is our weakest branch of government. ItAs wholly
defined by the president. When itAs controlled by the presidentAs
party, itAs entirely supine. When itAs controlled by the opposition,
itAs defiant. But itAs never truly independent. It is not exerting its
own will.
Nothing IAm saying is original. Lots and lots and lots of people from
all over the American political spectrum recognize CongressAs
weakness. The American people despise Congress. According to Gallup
polling, itAs the least-trusted governmental institution in the United
States. Americans can see clearly that Congress is almost entirely
partisan, and the president defines the contours of that partisanship
more than anyone else.
This concern doesnAt originate with Trump. If the problem were only
Trump, then it could be solved when he leaves office. In reality, his presidency represents the amplification and culmination of a
longstanding bipartisan trend. Presidents from both parties have
stretched their power u at a lesser scale than Trump u but the
executive had become the most powerful branch of government well
before Trump became president. Arthur Schlesinger had most likely
never heard of Donald Trump when he first wrote about othe imperial presidency.o
WeAre living in the miserable reality that our presidents have made
for us. Every four years, Americans go to the polls to elect the most
powerful man in the world u at the helm of the most powerful branch of government u yet most of us donAt cast meaningful votes. Unless we
live in one of the half-dozen or so true swing states, we donAt have
much of a voice in selecting our nationAs true u and sometimes only u
real leader.
Most solutions to this problem amount to little more than moral
exhortation and public shaming. oBe better,o we tell Congress. oExert
your authority.o We have different admonitions for presidents.
oRestrain yourself,o we tell them. oDonAt try to push too far.o
How long must we struggle before we realize that the system itself
needs to change? When the antifederalists looked at the scope of
presidential power in the Constitution, from the vague and sweeping
first sentence of Article II, to the presidentAs broad authority over
pardons and his control over the military, they had a warning for us u
a king is coming, an American king is coming to replace the British
one.
As IAve written before, the federalist answer to the antifederalist
complaint came in the form of a legal principle (impeachment) and a
virtuous person (George Washington).
This moment reminds me of the Virginia ratification debate, when
George Mason and other antifederalists sounded the alarm about the
presidentAs pardon power and his sweeping authority over the armed
forces.
James Madison rose in response.
oIf the president be connected in any suspicious manner with any
persons,o he said oand there be grounds to believe he will shelter
himself; the House of Representatives can impeach him u they can
remove him if found guilty.o
Impeachment, Madison said, was a ogreat security.o
It is not. It took more than 230 years for a senator to vote to
convict a president of his own party. That senator was Mitt Romney in
2020, and he stood alone. After the president of the United States
helped foment a violent attack on the Capitol and attempted to reverse
the results of a presidential election, only seven members of his
party broke ranks u far too few to convict.
And then, when the president pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters, connecting
him in a osuspicious mannero with people who attempted a violent coup
on his behalf, Congress did nothing.
Compounding the problem, WashingtonAs influence has waned.
As the most revered American of his time, he could have grasped
near-absolute power and governed the nation as long as he lived.
Instead, he term-limited himself. In contrast with modern politicians
who can sometimes pursue the presidency with an almost maniacal zeal, Washington was the reluctant president, and at every step was
conscious that he was setting a precedent. He lived to create a
legacy.
The antifederalists admired Washington, but they knew that his example
would not endure. An antifederalist writing under the pseudonym An Old
Whig said it well, oSo far is it from its being improbable that the
man who shall hereafter be in a situation to make the attempt to
perpetuate his own power, should want the virtues of General
Washington,o he wrote, othat it is perhaps a chance of one hundred
millions to one that the next age will not furnish an example of so disinterested a use of great power.o
We are in the next age, and we are governed by a man who shuns
WashingtonAs example and grasps for power with both hands.
There is a constitutional answer to this national challenge. We can u
at long last u heed the warnings of the antifederalists, and we can do
it simply enough, by changing the first sentence of Article II.
Instead of declaring oThe executive power shall be vested in a
president of the United States of America,o it should read, oA
president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.o
This simple change has sweeping implications. It removes the president
as the chief executive of the nation and turns him or her into a
steward of the laws passed through the democratic process. In this
formulation, the Department of Defense and the Department of Education
arenAt his agencies, theyAre his to run according to the rules and
guidelines established by Congress.
No longer would the president possess a free-standing oexecutive
powero that would grant him the authority that Trump seeks, including
the discretion to decide which laws to enforce and which laws to
ignore.
Revising the executive vesting clause isnAt the only necessary or
prudent constitutional change (the pardon power should be revisited,
for example), but it would make explicit what the Constitution makes
implicit: Congress is the supreme branch, and at a stroke the
Constitution would no longer enable, in CatoAs formulation, an
ambitious president to oruin his country.o
This new presidency wouldnAt be powerless. The president would still
command the armed forces, for example, and he or she would still
nominate judges and make treaties.
Nor would this amendment permit Congress to run amok. The president
would still possess the veto. Courts would still possess the right of
judicial review.
But the balance of power would shift, and the populist project of
maximum executive authority would come to an end, and only another
amendment would make it rise again.
If history is any indication, unless the next president has
Washingtonian character and foresight, then it is quite likely that he
or she will imitate Trump and wield all the power that he or she can u
though in service of their own ends, rather than TrumpAs. In fact, in
the absence of congressional action it will take a Trumpian exercise
of power to simply undo all the worst excesses of his second term.
But there is another path. Our nation can look at our escalating
political conflicts, at the hysteria that engulfs the country every
four years as we elect a quasi-monarch, and decide that enough is
enough.
This will take time. Americans are so divided that any constitutional
amendment thatAs seen as partisan is dead on arrival. But itAs also a
mistake to believe that our present polarization is permanent. When
this terrible political moment does end, wise men and women will need
to step forward and propose the changes that will prevent the next
American demagogue from grasping for power that threatens our
republic.
When this terrible political moment does end. Oh hah.
wise men and women will need to step forward and propose the changes.
Oh, hahaha.
Repair nonfunctional impeachment? No we don't really want it to be
easy to impeach a president. If it were, how ever would we keep one?
Ammendmend the constitution? Oh, my clouds in the sky. As if 3/4 of
congress and 3/4 of the states could agree on anything.
Wise men and women. Oh, we have those, but they simply cannot gather
the political traction to get elected for much of anything. And
knowing the hounding, struggling, and persecutions involved, they are
wise enough to refuse to be politicians almost always.
Wise men and women. In the end, the rest of us are not wise enough to recognize their value, and so deserve that they should do anything but
pursue well being for themselves. That much is fairly guaranteed for
smart, comptent, talented people.
And we do not deserve better from them.
Sorry, David, solution has not arrived. Please try again. You do
think rather clearly about stuffnjunk.
--
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian shrinks in horror and warns others away
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From
Pluted Pup@plutedpup@outlook.com to
alt.buddha.short.fat.guy on Sat Aug 23 23:39:13 2025
From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy
On 8/20/25 5:13 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
An amendment that can help save our democracy
By David French
On Nov. 8, 1787, a pamphleteer who wrote under the pseudonym Cato
published one of the most prescient warnings in American history.
Cato looked at the proposed Constitution and declared that it might
well turn into a vehicle for tyranny.
He didnrCOt see a Constitution of enumerated rights that sharply limited
the power of the president. Instead, he saw a Constitution that
granted the president such sweeping authority rCLthat if the president
is possessed of ambition, he has power and time sufficient to ruin his country.rCY
In other words, Cato could see a man like Donald Trump coming, and he
knew the Constitution could not prevent his rise.
You did not bother to state this is from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/trump-constitution-unitary-executive.html
(which I just learned that anyone can read by selecting
Reader View in a web browser and clicking Reload Page.)
I buy that paper sometimes and find it has the
same political line as every other news source,
but comes out cheaper than my local newspaper;
the same stuff but more of it.
We've been hearing this line for about ten years, that
Trump was elected and therefore the constitution is
a failure, voting is a failure and so must be radically
changed.
The real crime is monopoly journalism, of what the New York
Times surely is part of, illegally colluding against
competition. But no laws will change the ever increasing
monopolism in journalism, industry, politics, commerce, trade,
advertising and education than an ideological change away from
trusting the mendacious tabloid trash that is the monopoly
media to get the basic facts right.
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