By David K. Shipler
While
President Trump has gilded the Oval Office in gold, he has sullied the crown
jewel of the Constitution. He has done so with the collaboration of his
Republican allies in Congress and the Supreme Court. The latest example is his
White House ballroom, a superficial symbol of his deeper dictatorial passion.
There are many things wrong with Trump’s
self-indulgent ballroom project: Its gargantuan bad taste (in Soviet-style
scale). Its elitist, flamboyant luxury when millions of Americans barely make
ends meet (“Let them eat cake,” scoffed Marie Antoinette). Its gateway for
corrupt private contributors seeking presidential favors (“an offer he can’t
refuse,” said the Godfather). Its deceptive use of public funds for the private
pampering of the leader (Putin, Orban, Marcos, etc.)
But most significantly,
the ballroom is his latest hammer blow to the precious gem of the American
constitutional system: the separation of powers, the checks and balances so
ingeniously designed by the Framers who feared, presciently, the concentration
of authority as they formed a central government. They created legislative,
executive, and judicial branches (in that order in the Constitution) to watch
and restrain one another.
Trump has bulldozed through those
bulwarks. He did not deign to seek the legislature’s required approval before
demolishing the East Wing of the White House, as if he were the owner, when it actually
“belongs to the American people,” as Jacqueline Kennedy noted. He solicited
“donations” to build an enormous ballroom but did not bother seeking
congressional appropriations for the balance of the estimated $600 million cost,
which will evidently be paid from the pockets of unwilling taxpayers. Neither
of the other two branches of government is stopping him, not the
Republican-controlled Congress nor the Republican-controlled Supreme Court,
whose chief justice ruled last week that construction could continue for the
time being.
One wonders
if the Framers had imagined how supine the legislative and judicial branches
would become, how readily they would abdicate their roles.
“All men having power ought to be
distrusted to a certain degree,” James Madison told his fellow delegates to the
Constitutional Convention in that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. Defending the draft of the Constitution the
following year, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47:
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the
same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed,
or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
And so we
arrive at the edge of tyranny as the legislative and judicial branches combine
their acquiescence to award Trump’s executive branch the power to remake
government.
As if the Constitution had never
been written, the president and his collaborators, including Elon Musk and his
so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), unilaterally slashed the
legislature’s appropriations for foreign aid, domestic spending, and scientific
research. By cutting off funds and firing employees, Trump and Musk effectively
eliminated agencies Congress had created, including the US Agency for
International Development; the US Institute for Peace (dwarfed and renamed for
Trump); the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and the US Agency for Global
Media, which ran the international broadcasters, Voice of America and Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty. The legislative branch, under the thumb of Trump’s dominion
over his fellow Republicans, slept through its constitutional duty.
No peep was heard from the
Republican-led Senate to defend the body’s authority to confirm presidential
appointees under the Appointment Clause of Article II, Section 2, which
requires the Senate’s “advice and consent,” even for a temporary figure like Musk,
given the extent of his power, as a lawsuit argued. A federal district court
judge agreed,
noting that without going through the Senate, “the Appointments Clause would be
reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.” But the judge’s
preliminary injunction was swept away by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Such has been a pattern in the
judicial branch, where many district judges have temporarily blocked Trump’s
actions, only to have their injunctions overturned in the appeals courts and
the Supreme Court, which has acted hastily in its “emergency docket” where
rulings are not justified by citing law, precedent, or the Constitution.
Emboldened by the higher courts’
acquiescence, Trump and his officials frequently ignore lower judges’ orders,
especially in immigration cases. At least 31 flagrant violations of court
orders (about 1 in 8 cases) involving widespread layoffs, funding cuts, and the
detention of immigrants were tabulated
in an Associated Press survey.
The administration’s defiance had
immediate consequences. Even after a judge ordered the Education Department to
retain mental health funding, for example, the Trump administration continued
to block the money, forcing the dismissal of mental health professionals from
the school system in Eureka, California.
Similarly, Trump officials refused
to comply with a judge’s order to restore the longstanding practice of allowing
immigration detainees to post bond and be freed pending the resolution of their
cases. Judge Sunshine Sykes, a Biden nominee, accused the administration of
trying “to erode any semblance of separation of powers,” as if “in a world
where the Constitution does not exist.”
The Supreme Court has blocked one
method Trump has used to exact tariffs, but he’s using alternative means. It
has blocked his executive order barring birthright citizenship for anyone born
in the US. But it has put few other obstacles in the way of Trump’s march
toward autocracy.
The six Republican-nominated
justices, three of whom were selected by Trump, have enhanced the powers of the
executive to the detriment of both the legislative branch, and even of their
own. For while district court judges who have ruled against Trump have
conducted full fact-finding procedures, considered briefs and held oral
arguments, many of those carefully reasoned findings have been dismissively
brushed aside by the six “conservative” justices, often with one-sentence
orders vacating injunctions and allowing the unprecedented onslaught by the
White House to proceed.
Some of those right-wing justices
have long supported a stronger executive. They have long questioned the ability
of Congress to create regulatory agencies whose commissioners could not be
fired by the president without cause. Now they have ruled that such
replacements for no reason at all are permitted—except at the Federal Reserve,
whose politicization would delegitimize US economic policy, bringing disruption
for the wealthy, i.e., themselves. This guarantees dramatic swings in
regulatory schemes from administration to administration, as in undemocratic countries
that see repeated transfers from dictator to dictator.
The label “conservative” is a
misnomer. What is it that the Republican justices and the Republican
legislators seek to conserve? Not the separation of powers, obviously. Not the crown
jewel of the Constitution. Had they lived during the American Revolution, which
side would they have been on?
