The statement I have placed at the end of my commentary, today, comes from a column in The Wall Street Journal, "Trump Tries To Tip The Balance Of Powers." Those who read my daily blog postings are probably not, for the most part, subscribers to The Wall Street Journal. That means that clicking the link that I have just provided won't, actually, let most of those reading this blog posting know the entirety of what William A. Galston has to say.
Hopefully, the excerpt I am providing will be sufficient to make the point, because what Galston has to say is important. And correct.
If we want to continue to have the kind of "self-government" that American revolutionaries established almost 249 years ago, WE (the people) are going to have to take action ourselves.
No shortcuts! We aren't supposed to have a government that takes its direction from "Executive Orders."
oooOOOooo
Since taking office this year, President Trump has forcefully asserted control over the federal bureaucracy and administrative agencies, backed by the “unitary executive” theory developed by conservative scholars since the 1980s—the idea that the president has complete authority over the executive branch.
This alone would be a massive expansion of presidential power. But Mr. Trump demands more: an executive that’s not only unitary but plenipotentiary, dominant over the other branches of government. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be,” he told reporters at a Covid-19 press briefing in 2020. Stephen Miller, one of his most powerful aides, recently said that the president is “the only official in the government that is elected by the entire nation” and that “the whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.”
The whole will of democracy. Ponder these words. What about members of the House and Senate, elected by the people? Doesn’t Congress represent a part of the people’s will? What about federal judges, who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate?
It verges on embarrassing to restate Civics 101, but our sorry times require it. The Constitution creates three distinct, coordinate and equal branches of government. Each represents the people in a different way. Legislation involves all three branches: Congress votes a bill up or down, the president signs or vetoes it, and the Supreme Court interprets it and tests its constitutionality. Presidential orders are subject to judicial challenge, and sometimes Congress can overrule them by changing the law. If Congress or the president are sufficiently aroused by what they see as judicial overreach, they can respond by altering the court’s jurisdiction—as we see in the current effort to curb national injunctions (emphasis added).
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