Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter revisited, Part IV: Congressional deference to executive action

In Part III of revisiting the Trump-Carter comparison, I observed that Trump deviated from the Carter path through his use of extensive executive orders.  While Carter faced legislative defeat with mere acknowledgement that he failed, Trump has consistently responded by overstepping his constitutional authority in ways that... yeah, the "if Obama had dot-dot-dotted" thing is old hat, but it is still worth saying.  Trump's executive orders have ranged from sketchy to way over the line.

Yet, congressional Republicans have acquiesced.  This leads to a rather strange observation.  Trump failed to convince even the Republican majorities in the House and Senate from the 2017-8 term to pass things like his wall, or the tariffs he wanted, much less "repeal and replace," which had been a Republican slogan predating Trump, empty of any "replace" plan, making it unsurprising that the party could not write a replace plan when finally put on the spot.  Nevertheless, Congress wouldn't pass any of Trump's vanity legislation when it conflicted with basic Republican goals.  The wall was stupid, and they knew it.  So, they didn't fund it.  Tariffs are not just stupid, they run contrary to everything the Republican Party had believed, prior to Trump.  They are taxes.  And contrary to what our illiterate president seems to believe, they are taxes on US actors.  Not taxes on the Chinese government-- taxes on US business who import Chinese goods, passed along to US consumers in the form of higher prices.  Donald Trump is simply an idiot, who doesn't know what a "tariff" is.  This cannot be emphasized with enough vehemence:  Donald Trump is the most illiterate, uninformed, terrifyingly stupid political figure ever to reach national prominence.  Yes, he's worse than Sarah Palin.

Congressional Republicans, though, do know what a tariff is.  Even the dumbest of them, mostly.  So Congress never gave Trump the authority to raise those tariffs for his vanity trade war.

So how the hell did Trump do it?  Why do we have new taxes?  Article I gives Congress the power to tax.

Here we get into a murkier area of law.  While Trump's use of a phony emergency declaration to fund his wall was clearly unconstitutional, he probably did have a case for the legality of his tariffs.  Long ago in the before-times, Congress delegated power to the president to set tariffs when "national security" is at stake.  Of course, it is the president's discretion when "national security" is at stake, so it's the same stupid loophole as Trump's phony national emergency declaration.  The difference is that a national emergency declaration does not expressly give the president the authority to move funds from one appropriated project to another.  Hence, he overstepped his constitutional authority interpreting the national emergency declaration to say that it did.  Article I wins.  However, if Congress expressly states that the president can play around with tariffs, then he can.  When national security is at stake.

One can take the interpretation that Congress can't give away that power because the Constitution gives it specifically to Congress.  Article I says that Congress, not the president, has the power to set taxes.  And in fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that there are powers of this kind that Congress can't give away.  It ruled that the line item veto is unconstitutional because Congress can't give away its spending power.  So, this really isn't that cut and dry, but at least Trump could point to something in statutory law.

He did, of course, have to stretch the definition of national security.  For example, he raised tariffs on Canadian goods, like Canada was a national security threat.  With... all their... beady, little eyes, and all their... hockey hullaballoo.  Translation:  he stretched the national security thing way beyond any reasonable definition.

And what did Congress do?  More specifically, what did congressional Republicans do?  They knew the wall was bullshit.  OK, some of them were stupid enough to buy into that wall thing.  (Literally.  Y'all know about Steve Bannon, right?  I bet Louis Gohmert liquidated all of his possom-based assets to get in on the ground floor of that Bannon "opportunity."  You stay you, Louis!)  Basically, though, they knew the wall was bullshit, they knew that Trump's scheme was grossly unconstitutional, many of them openly mused that setting the precedent would come back to bite them under a Democratic president, yet still, they were mostly cowed into obedience.

And with respect to Trump's tariffs?  What did the nothing-is-more-evil-than-taxes, and we-love-commerce party do?  A few squawked some empty noises of protest, but mostly, they caved.

Behold.  A party that would not pass its president's legislative agenda, that views that agenda as not just harmful, but sees its implementation through executive action as a dangerous precedent that will come back to bite them under a future Democratic president.

Assuming they allow that to happen... That's an open question right now, which is better than the definite "no" I was giving you before Trump was hospitalized for potentially lethal stupidity.  More on that later.  Back on track...

How does this happen?  How do we get to a point at which Sen. John Cornyn looks with contempt at Trump's idiocy and ideological apostasy, stands with McConnell in blocking Trump's policies from even getting a real hearing under unified government, and then quietly bites down on how much he hates what Trump is doing while the President blows past constitutional lines to enact policies that Cornyn probably really does detest?  Staunch opposition, followed by quiet acquiescence.

Followed, eventually, by murmuring of distance when everything starts to fall apart around Trump.  Trump ain't done yet, and this is not time to relax, but Cornyn has had it with that... thing in the White House.  Cornyn.

Yet neither he nor anyone else in any kind of a leadership position lifted a finger to oppose Trump in any real way.  Justin Amash did, and he was drummed out of the party.  In fact, he was being pushed out of the party long before then.  You probably don't remember this, because you don't write about Congress, but that's actually my day job, as opposed to my weekends and early mornin's job.  Way back in the Obama era, Amash was a thorn in John Boehner's side because he's an intransigent ideological purist.  Boehner was trying to cut deals with Obama to, you know, keep the federal government from shutting down and defaulting on payments to bond holders because Boehner wasn't a teabagging flamethrower, trying to burn the country to the ground in a fit of rage because his party lost an election.

Hmmm.... Maybe we should keep that in mind.  I'll be bloggin' 'bout that!

Back on track.  Boehner was the good guy, surrounded by wingnuts and psychopaths.  Amash fit into the former category.  "Wingnut."  He wouldn't back any deal to keep the government open.  So, when Boehner needed to do the prison thing and make a few examples, Amash was among the people he targeted.  He stripped a few wingnuts of their committee assignments for their refusals to back the deals to keep the government open.  Amash was one of them.  To Amash's credit, at least he was a sincere, true believer, but it meant that long before Trump, he was on the outs with the party.  And when Trump came along, Amash wasn't going to play nice.  He may be a wingnut, but at least he has some principles, and he wasn't going to sell them out to an idiotic, psychopathic wannabe dictator who didn't even believe in basic capitalism.

That's Amash.  He got the boot from the GOP.  Then there was... um... Mitt?  Sure.  OK.  Yeah.  Didn't see that one coming, but he hasn't been fully consistent.  Whatever.

Mostly, though, we have seen token opposition from the GOP to Trump's expansion of executive power.  There have been a few votes, but the party as a whole has been remarkably quiescent.  They won't pass his legislation, but they'll stay quiet while he tears down the separation of powers in the Constitution to impose them by unconstitutional executive action.

How does the congressional GOP get to that paradoxical point?  Extreme cowardice combined with refusal to pass his legislation?  I mean... why not just pass Dear Leader's bills?  OK, for the last two years, that hasn't been an option because they haven't had a majority in the House, but they had two years.  If you are going to be such spineless, weak-willed, base and debased, unprincipled, useless, worthless un-lanced boils on the body politic, why not just pass his damned bills?  The resulting policy would be the same, and at least it would have preserved the separation of powers in some probabilistic wave form kind of way.

From a social scientific perspective, the common element is that when faced with Trump's idiotic deviations from conservative orthodoxy, the GOP responded with passivity.  They responded with passivity by not acting on his legislative goals, and they responded with passivity by not checking his unconstitutional actions, thereby eroding the system of checks and balances upon which the American system once functioned.  Passivity has been the consistent predictor.

But... why?

One element of this process is structure.  Time.  Trump proposes a wall?  Ignore it.  What's the idiot child gonna do?

Oops.  It turns out that the dumbass is gonna do something.  He threatened a shutdown under unified government, because he's the most idiotic president ever.  He shut the government down over fucking Christmas.  Cue Alan Rickman.  He shut the government down with a new Democratic majority coming into session for the 2019-20 session.  Did you even remember that?  And there was no way Pelosi was going to give him money for his stupid wall.  Which... Mexico was supposed to fund, for anyone who was stupid enough to believe the most idiotic lie in presidential history.

Read:  Trump voters.  Yeah, I said it, and I'll keep saying it.

Of course, Pelosi wasn't going to cave, so Trump pulled one of the more unconstitutional acts in presidential history.  And here we have the complication of structure.  By first ignoring the psychopathic child, the GOP found itself in a position of having to confront the constitutionally dangerous temper tantrum.  They didn't appease him before he broke out the matches and kerosene, so they had to decide how to handle the ensuing constitutional fire.

And they responded with precisely as much passivity, allowing a fire to rage across our constitutional system, destroying the basic separation of powers in which Congress is the branch that appropriates money.  And if you don't think this is going to be abused to even greater degrees in the future, you are as stupid as the fools who believed that Mexico would pay for that idiotic wall.

But knowing that, why do nothing?  Even with the fear that many Republicans have, why do nothing?  We can, of course, turn to Levitsky & Ziblatt, but the Levitsky & Ziblatt answer would have us search for something within the concept of ideological collusion, and the point here is that Trump's worst abuses of the constitutional system are deviations for Republican orthodoxy.

So here we get to the biggest difference between Trump and Carter.  The personality cult.  Somehow, Donald J. Trump has, and maintains a bizarre personality cult among core Republican voters.  Jimmy Carter never had that.  To a significant degree, a cult developed around Ronald Reagan, but much of that has been in the post-Reagan period.  It is the concept of Reagan, the idea of Reagan, the abstraction of Reagan, the word, "Reagan," that has captured and animated so many within the Republican Party more than the man himself during his presidency, when he was popular among Republican voters, to be sure, but no more than presidents tend to be.  Carter, of course, faced divisions, but many presidents faced divisions.

Yet Donald J. Trump, for whatever reason, has a personality cult that is different.  And that scares even people like John Cornyn.  Is he being sincere when he says that he has been uncomfortable with things Trump has done?  I think so.  I think a lot of them have been.  After all, I predicted that Trump would be Carter, back in 2016 because of this!  Yet instead, Cornyn and the rest were cowed.  They were cowed by the existence of Trump's personality cult, and the fear of their own base voters.

So congressional Republicans refused to pass Trump's legislation.  Much like congressional Democrats wouldn't pass Carter's.  Yet unlike Carter, Trump responded by seizing powers that go far beyond the Constitution, and the GOP has been cowed into passivity by Trump's personality cult, which Carter did not have.

So this is where we need to go next.  The Cult of Trump.  That'll be Part V.