The Emergency
There may be no exit.
The latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “The Emergency Is Here,” is simultaneously alarmist and hopeful. It features a longer-than-usual prelude by the host, followed by an interview with Asha Rangappa, a former F.B.I. special agent and now an assistant dean at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
I don’t have time to do a lengthy set of excerpts and analysis but the key takeaways are:
- The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists
- The Trump administration holds the view that anyone they send to El Salvador is beyond the reach of American law — they have been disappeared not only from our country but from our system — and from any protection or process that system affords.
- If President Donald Trump decides that you are to rot in a foreign prison, then that is his right. And you? You have no rights.
- There’s nothing the courts can do to stop this, since Trump holds the enforcement power
- Congress has the power to stop this, by impeaching and removing Trump. But in an era of nationalized, polarized political parties, impeachment is a broken power.
I doubt many regular OTB commenters strongly disagree with this assessment of the situation. But my interest is in the hopeful part (boldface is Klein; standard font is Rangappa):
You can imagine a world where we sort of muddle along in these horrors for a year and change. But then Democrats have a significant midterm victory.
And I keep saying — only half as a joke — that what might save American democracy is that Donald Trump has the dumbest possible views on the global economy, and in absolutely wrecking 401(k)s and prices and the ability of small businesses to import, he is handing his opponents an incredible midterm opportunity.
So say, in this scenario, the Democrats take the House. The Senate is unlikely for them, but it’s not completely impossible in a wave. And they’re not going to have the power to impeach him. They would not have the numbers in the Senate to attain conviction.
But they would all of a sudden have a lot of power. They could take money from all kinds of areas of the government. They could hold all kinds of members of the government in contempt.
All of a sudden, there is not necessarily the power to end this but a huge amount of leverage.
That is, I think, the actual pathway that is open.
I’m glad that you mentioned the appropriations authority because one thing that remains very unclear in this is where the money is coming from to transport these prisoners. What was that money originally appropriated for? What are the terms of this agreement, by the way?
Under the law, there’s something called the Case-Zablocki Act, which requires the executive branch, the secretary of state, to notify Congress of executive agreements that it reaches with foreign nations. So this is something that technically they need to disclose. They’re supposed to publish it on the Department of State website.
But to your point about withholding funds, to go back again to Sept. 11, Congress actually prohibited the use of funds to transfer detainees from Guantánamo to the United States to be tried in criminal courts. So they were just stuck there.
So it seems very clear to me that if Congress wanted to, they could prohibit the use of funds to send people to El Salvador.
They could also take a lot of things that the Trump administration wants to keep away from them.
So again, imagining the admittedly unlikely scenario of unified Democratic control of the House and the Senate: Democrats could simply decide to carve out more exemptions on the filibuster. And they could take the tariff power away from Donald Trump. They could take the tariff power back for Congress, which is originally where it sits. And all of a sudden Donald Trump doesn’t have his favorite tool of international economics.
Then everything then becomes a negotiation. There are a huge number of powers Trump is using right now that are working off of old pieces of legislation that were not built for today.
Now, Congress does not like going back and revisiting old pieces of legislation ill built for today, because they have trouble legislating on anything. You don’t get a lot of political victories for going back and closing old loopholes and authorities. But they could.
And in a world that becomes a showdown between the branches, it’s not impeachment or nothing. It is leverage over functionally everything.
The president of the United States does not have a magic wand that puts tariffs on other countries. That has to be enforced and done through U.S. law. That is power given to them by Congress.
The things that DOGE has been doing, the efforts they’re making over spending, that is all power that Congress is functionally granting them. They could take it all back.
Yes, absolutely. And in a bigger sense, it’s reimagining the kind of person we imagine to be in the Oval Office.
After Watergate, there were all these reforms that were done because all of a sudden we had to reimagine: What do you do if you have a president who’s going to push all these boundaries?
So we get the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. We get the Independent Counsel statute. We get restrictions on how tax information can be used by the president. Because all of a sudden, we had all these examples.
Frankly, we’ve known this for a while — that these things should have been done. That pendulum should have swung already. But there’s a reckoning that is going to have to happen in terms of: You can’t grant this much authority to the executive branch.
This strikes me as wildly optimistic.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we hold free and fair elections in November 2026 and that the Democrats take majority control of the House and Senate. Why would anything change?
To be sure, the House could impeach Trump for a third time. But, unless Democrats get a 67-vote majority in the Senate—which isn’t going to happen—it’s an irrelevancy. There won’t be enough votes to remove him from office, so another impeachment will just embolden him.
Trump is already violating all manner of laws. He’s ignoring Congressional intent in shuttering agencies created by law and arrogating to himself the ability to decide which Congressionally-allocated funds to spend. What difference would more laws and a new budget make?
Trump is operating under the Unitary Executive Theory. So long as is funding for a Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce, etc., Trump can pretty much order them to do whatever he wants, Congress be damned.
So what if Congress takes away the tariff power? If the President declares tariffs, the appropriate executive agencies will collect the tariffs.
Klein gets at the reality when he observes:
I remember a political scientist I really respect said to me during Trump’s first term: There is no design of a political system that works well for electing terrible people.
To design a political system under the theory that you elect terrible people is to make the system unmanageable. Because you are, by nature, tying their hands because they’re terrible.
But then if you elect leaders who have tyrannical impulses into a system that assumes a fundamental level of good faith on the part of the executive, then you’ve given an ill-motivated person a terrible amount of power.
And I would add that the landscape has changed. If you’re also looking at two big assumptions that maybe existed back in Nixon and before — which is, A, that the president is not above the law, and, B, that Congress would be willing to use its ultimate weapon if it has to — which is impeachment — if both of those are off the table, then we’re in a whole new landscape. And we have to accommodate that reality.
There is simply no imaginable system that works under these circumstances.
Given the situation and upon reflection of this published viewpoint, there seems to be little left in the offing for those of us who hold to the hope of our democratic-republic. Is there truly no course action left within the American experiment other than Jefferson’s fevered prescience of a necessary bloody rebellion?
I kept shouting “veto” out loud when they were talking about things like taking away tariffs.
They aren’t going to have a veto-proof majority, so taking back Congress would have advantages, but won’t allow them to take any powers away.
Maybe if they constantly forced him to veto laws it would have a political effect, but nor a direct one.
It is, nontheless, very much worth listening to.
As has been pointed out numerous times on this site, the US has made the longest go of preserving an effective republic under the strong-president model. “One out of N” has never been reassuring.
One sliver of optimism is that there is no going back to the status quo ante, where the Republican Party is a respected legitimate political party.
We are in a fight to the death for democracy and the GOP needs to be destroyed on every front- Trumpism needs to become as toxic as pedophilia, something where people erase their MAGA profiles and delete old photos of them in red hats out of shame and embarrassment.
What happens after we win is open to question- it will be similar to people standing in the rubble of Berlin in May 1945. The future may be a lot of things but it will never be again like it was in 2016.
Old saying:
No matter how bad you think Trump is, he is worse.
Not just worse, but getting more worse, he is decompensating, and the dementia is progressing.
Again,
Other than that, I have no pearls of wisdom to add.
The Unitary Executive theory seems to presume a figurehead type of president whose expertise, as Grover Norquist once put it, is the ability to sign his name. The heavy lifting was done behind the scenes by guys like Dick Cheney, Russ Vought, and Stephen Miller – ideologues who know how to work the levers of government. Unitarians also presume a supine Congress and a judiciary that can be brought to heel (“Nice decision…now try to enforce it.”). Is it coincidental that the UE theory gets its most traction when egotistical dimwits like Trump and George W are in office? Guys who like to campaign but have no interest in governing are happy to have someone else doing the actual work.
I read a few weeks ago that margin calls are going out and the bond market has gone weird because people are desperate for cash. Enough rich people get burned, things can change. If we get a majority in the House we start investigating everything. I commented yesterday my opinion that if Trump’s approval drops below maybe 35%, impeachment and conviction are on the table. If we get to 51 senators, the filibuster can be eliminated. Trump may just die, or become so visibly gah gah JD can try the 25th Amendment. I hold myself second to none in my contempt for JD, the fake hillbilly, but I don’t think he’s nuts. Which is all not to say I have a lot of hope, but it’s not completely hopeless.
In theory Congress can take back spending power. In reality Trump has declared he gets to decide what to spend on and so far SCOTUS has yet to rule against him. Frankly, I think it unlikely they really oppose him. As to passing legislation we would need a real wave so filibusters and vetoes could be outvoted. Not happening. Our system simply is not built for this. I would lightly dispute that no system could handle this. I think a parliamentary system all the UK or France could avoid this. Could be wrong.
Steve
There may be a chance the GQP itself will remove the felon, if he tanks the economy badly enough.
The downside is he has to cause a massive amount of misery first. Think something that makes the Great Recession of the late 2000s look like a great time. And even then, I doubt the felon would go quietly.
How big a chance? Not big at all.
Relax. Trump has only been in office for 91 days. You have fifteen more 90-day periods to weather in his current term. And the career bureaucracy spent decades cultivating slow or no compliance with reports to Congress requirements. I doubt we are past any initial timeframe yet.
And the stock market always goes down in May. This year, they moved it up into April in hopes of creating a pushback on Trump.
Of course, a lot of Democrats and career government grifters are struggling. They apparently didn’t build any “emergency” funds to cover if their USAID or other grants scammed off the taxpayers were disrupted. Astroturf isn’t free, you know.
Let’s come back at the end of July to see how things are after the second 90 day period in office.
@JKB: what about disappearing people to a torture prison with no due process? Are you going to say that’s not a big deal too?
@Gustopher:
you know that he agrees with lil Stevey Miller about the people disappeared getting more due process than anyone convicted of J6 shenanigans.
@Gustopher:
He’s going to say “people always get disappeared in May” and “the Deep State disappeared paper clips for decades” and other things equally deflective and fatuous. Why do you ask?
@JKB:
One of the things I have found both amusing and infuriating is the way in which so many GOP voters have become utterly blasé about the stock market. Like they would have been utterly calm if the same had happened under Harris.
And WTF does “they moved it up into April” mean?
@Steven L. Taylor:
“And WTF does “they moved it up into April” mean?”
It means that the stock market is controlled by the Illuminati and manipulated for their own ends. Or maybe by the Tri-Lateral Commission or the Gnomes of Zurich.
The lesson form the felon’s second term is that the system needs radical reform. not just political, though that’s big, but economically as well. It’s well past time to impose crippling taxes on wealth, on large unrealized gains, to enforce antitrust laws, to prop up unions, etc. The goal should be more competition, less capital accumulation (especially by few individuals), a living wage, and a full set of ancillary benefits like paid parental leave, child care, healthcare, etc.
How to do it is the big question. Biden did some of it, but not enough of it and not quickly enough. But unless something gets done about it, we’ll keep seeing authoritarian leaders with simplistic, unworkable “solutions,” with sides of repression and oppression to stay in power and distract attention from their own incompetence.
That was an interesting discussion and I’m glad you highlighted it. I don’t think it’s the only thing that might happen, though. Here are a few more of my scenarios:
1. Trump could have a heart attack or a stroke. Or who knows, maybe liver failure. He’s old, this stuff happens. I don’t think continue on the same path with Vance as President. He was picked because he didn’t pose a threat to Trump. The MAGA just aren’t going to unite behind him.
2. Trump has an unmistakable mental break. Kind of like a friends mother getting lost and spending an entire night on the street.
3. Trump’s approval drops below 30 percent because tariffs, etc. I think this puts him in impeachment territory. When 70 percent of the country wants something, it generally happens.
4. The chaos increases at the Pentagon and the White House and somebody gets killed. Not a quiet assassination, either. Something nasty and backbitey.
5. Trump declares martial law, the military declines to enforce, and turns him into a prisoner (at the White House? Bedminster? MAL?)
I will probably think of other scenarios. I’m not predicting anything. People are kind of vested in thinking of non-crazy scenarios, but I think some of the more crazy ones are on the table.
I don’t really see anybody just rolling over for Trump at this point. You can see the backbones stiffening already.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Much like for Climate Deniers, all temperature measurements stopped one a warming outlying year so they can ask “why have temperatures dropped since X year,” for Trump tariff supporters, the last day of the Stock Market was Wednesday April 2nd. Everything since then is just a mirage.
@JKB that’s how I’m supposed to quote Sowell, correct? Or am I only allowed to use Sowell speaking on topics of Politics, Academia, or Race… not, you know, his core expertise as an Economist? Or wait, does that quote not count because it’s not from a decade or more ago? Just trying to figure out why you don’t quote Sowell when he says something that is contrary to your priors.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think by “they” he means the
Jews… I mean the global elites who rig the stock market.Or possibly the deep state.
@Moosebreath: Ayup! That’s the reference there.
And institutional traders. Mustn’t forget them.
@Kathy:
Given that this is “the lesson” of every Republican administration since Reagan (and most Democratic administrations for that matter), the real lesson from Trump’s second term is that Murkans ain’t learned nothin.
@Moosebreath:
I have for a while wished the dictionaries would recognize the conspiratorial they (ironically a favorite of the very people who claim to hate pronouns), alluding to some sort of unnamed cabal secretly pulling the strings of world affairs (in short, the Jews). It’s what you find in the classic sentence, “That’s what they want you to think.” They not only control the stock market, but the weather, the outcome of elections, and whether I get passed over for a promotion to an unqualified DEI pick. The fact that you doubt its existence proves that you are one of the sheeple, whereas I am one of those independent-minded individuals who figured out we live in the matrix and can now take control of it with my stash of guns and crypto gold bars.
@Kathy:
Kill the procedural filibuster and raise the number of Supreme Court seats to match the number of circuit courts.
@ Chip Daniels
The America of mutual accommodation and compromise is over, dead. The Republican Party killed it. Zero sum rules.
The danger now, is that the growing number of young adults, our future, have been socialized into a world of chaotic, short term, transaction driven politics. They have no corporate memory of the “golden age” of functional democracy, as we are dragged backwards by a coalition of intolerant, selfish people hiding behind a veneer of jury-rigged b.s. ideological rationalization. Yes, this is war.
Hey, what happened to the “reference” function when responding to commenter’s posts on OTB?
@just nutha:
Not quite.
Yes, the stagnation and decreasing living standards (and not just in monetary terms) goes back a long way. But thus far no other administration has conducted itself with contempt for the rule or law, nor engaging in blatantly illegal actions, nor gutted the government, nor tried to implement disastrous economic policies.
@Rob1: Tap the comment you want to respond to, and the “Reply” function appears.
@Kathy: Okay. The Trump administration is nothing we’ve ever seen before. Happy now?
These ten Trump years, what have I learned?
Well, I’ve been strongly reminded that there is no such thing as an enduring “Wisdom of The People.” It comes and goes; sometimes We The People collectively have wisdom, and sometimes We don’t. We’re in one of those ‘We don’t’ times.
@DK:
I am working to fix that
@gVOR10:
It’s liable to get a lot weirder right quick if Trump both pursues his mounting petulance about Powell and the Fed, and stretching executive legal shenanigans to extremes.
If you are a foreign bond investor, how happy will you be to hold Treasuries if the President pursues interest rate meddling to the point of really crashing the dollar?
And moots things like forcing bond conversion to long dated lower rates, etc?
In other words: partial default.
And what’s adding insult to injury, likely doing so to attempt to provide headroom for tax cuts.
At the same time, the impulse to exit dollar-denominated assets is working against the normal bonds/stocks “see-saw”.
As are tariffs and inflation expectations from said tariffs, and currency depreciation.
There is also the possibility of, if the nonsense continues, that overseas dollar earnings will drop enough to cut overseas purchases of US goods and services.
There are now multiple potential “doom loops” in play, and the Administration is merrily capering along a cliff-edge.
Who even said we’re having midterms?
@mattbernius: Thank you for your efforts to keep this rickety old site functioning. Each day feels like a modest miracle.
Does “rickety” mean “having rickets”?
@JohnSF:
I suspect most Americans don’t understand this. At. Fucking. All. Including most Republicans. I mean, a few of them are nominally smart enough to get it, but they don’t because they are fanatics. There isn’t waste, fraud, or abuse like they claim and whatever they cut 1. Won’t be enough to cover the tax cuts and 2. Will actively hamper things the economy needs but doesn’t produce cause it’s fundamentally not profitable. Hella socially useful, but not profitable.
I don’t see how foreign investors are going to accept cheap bond auctions that they know might not survive Trump or GOP bullshit/default and, in any event, are really payments to rich Americans. That’s gonna go over like a wet c-Diff fart in church. What are they gonna do with what is essentially junk paper? Force the Fed to buy it? Seems dicey.
Also, as an aside, as someone who is interested in this from an amateur economist perspective, is there an easy way to track the “bond” market that we’re all talking about. I was messing with the settings in the iPhone stock app and a little light googling and I couldn’t figure out a, let’s say simpleton version of a tracker.
@Beth:
My go to for quick overview is the FT markets pages.
https://markets.ft.com/data/bonds
An headline on adjacent pages:
“German bonds rise with euro as investors head for Europe’s haven”
@Franklin: I never gave midterms except in the business communication class. It was a department requirement.
@JohnSF:
@Beth:
What I wonder is what happens to government bonds from other countries. Even less highly rated ones, like Mexico, may have far more stable governments, far more committed to meeting their debt obligations. And pretty much all countries issue debt bonds.
@Beth: Well, I thing @JohnSF made a suggestion that is likely better than my suggestion, but I’m going to give you mine anyway:
Look at charts of 3 month, 2 year, and 5 year treasuries. When you look at that remember that there is a direct inverse relationship between price and yield. If prices are down, yields are up. Too much of that is very, very bad for the US when it comes to financing its debt.
@Kathy:
Euro bonds are rising.
The problem with the bond markets is that few others have the sheer scale of the US one.
The Euro bonds are NOT from a single issuer, but from every state Treasury.
Plus some from the EU and the ECB.
The ECB was not originally set up a a general lender of last resort, though it is evolving to become so.
After the euro, the other big ones are Japan China, and the UK.
But Japan is mostly domestic held, and China has its own problems re legal oversight.
Hence there is currently a lot of liquidity sloshing around looking for places to park.
Hence the market volatility, and the gold price increase.
@JohnSF:
Thanks. That’s good to know.
I suppose you can’t just take the major player off he market without adverse consequences.
@JohnSF:
Thanks, that’s close enough to what I’m looking for to be useful.
@Jay L Gischer:
Thanks, yeah, I was mostly looking for a quick and dirty chart to see where things are at.
James, I think we’re seeing the rotten tree finally bloom. I think we’ve seen a series of Administrations since Clinton who have enshrined the Unitary Executive, and we’ve had legions of smart and thoughtful people who believed that was an excellent idea – until now.
The salvation comes, not from out-Trumping Trump, but from a re-recognition that the job of the President is political, not administrative, and that we need to restore functional politics at the Federal and State levels.
@Chip Daniels: I agree with your assessment of what the future will likely look like. I don’t LIKE your assessment, but it seems accurate. I wonder if there will be enough of a sense of shame to effectuate the process…..
I see four possible exits from the emergency. None is particularly desirable, but at this stage of the crisis, these are what we have. In descending order of desirability, they are:
1. As the result of a crisis (either foreign or domestic), the GOP grows enough of a spine to push ahead with an impeachment.
2. Trump’s craziness becomes so undeniable that young JD mounts a successful palace coup via the 25th Amendment.
3. Trump’s diet and lack of exercise permanently punch his ticket.
4. Another Lee Harvey Oswald decides to make his/her mark in history.