So, the Supremes have decided, without even bothering to write an opinion, that the Department of Education can be massively reduced without Congressional approval:The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration may fire more than half of the Department of Education’s workforce — mass terminations that, in Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s words, are “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the entire department.
The Court’s decision in McMahon v. New York, was handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices often decide without full briefing or oral argument. As is often the case in shadow docket decisions, none of the Republican justices explained their decision.
This is, in my opinion, and in line with most lawyers, 100% unconstitutional.
The McMahon decision is particularly unnerving because it suggests that President Donald Trump is allowed to “impound” federal spending — unilaterally refusing to spend money or to continue federal programs that are mandated by an act of Congress. While McMahon does not explicitly authorize impoundment, it allows the Trump administration to fire so many federal workers, in so many key roles, that the practical effect is to cancel entire federal programs.
Most of the creep of imperial presidency has been Congress giving its powers away: war acts which make it so the president can go to war without Congress, for example, or giving the President tariff authority (which Trump has misused, pretending everything is “national security”) and so on. Some have been unilateral grabs, such as using “signing statements” to change the clear intend of laws.
But this is a Presidential grab that the Supremes are waving thru. Even if they later rule that some stub of the Education department must remain, it’s clearly allowing the President to over-ride spending that Congress has mandated. I am unaware of any reasonable reading of the Constitution that allows this: the President is to execute Congress’s directives and does not have the authority to say “nah, we’re just not going to do that any more.”
Especially of interest here is that the Republicans didn’t bother to explain the ruling and didn’t give it a full trial. They know it’s completely indefensible on legal grounds, and they aren’t even going to try.
Ever since Citizen’s United I have told Americans to get out if they can and if not to prepare for horrific times. Children, we are now at the start of the collapse. Before this it was mostly gradual, but this is the real thing.
I mention Citizen’s United (which allowed unlimited cash into US elections under the proposition that money is speech) because, of course, smashing the Department of Education while it’s something that Christofacists want, so they can ban books and write fantasy textbooks and fire teachers and Professors for saying things like “gay sex might not be bad,” or “American slavery was terrible” and so on, it’s also about privatizing as much of the education system as possible.
Remember that Trump’s main act, amidst all the Kabuki, was his budget, which slashed four trillion in taxes from rich people while cutting health care for poor people to partially pay for it. Trump’s #1 priority, as per his actions, is to make the rich, richer. (His tariffs, while real, have been TACO: Trump chickens out when rich people start screaming.)
Make the public education shit for poor people, let the middle class have vouchers for some shit “charter” school and the upper class, as always, will send their kids to elite private schools.
A Republic, If You Can Keep It – Benjamin Franklin
Kept it for almost 250 years, but if this stands, if Congress loses its last real power, it’s over. A Republic is something rather specific, a divided form of government. And if one of the three branches has no effective power left, it’s not a Republic, especially since the Supremes, in other orders, are gutting the Judiciary’s power. The end of nationwide injunctions is particularly instructive. And let’s not forget the President’s Gestapo force, ICE, arresting Judges who try to interfere with immigration snatches.
Nothing is over till it’s over. But no one with sense would offer good odds that the US is going to come out of this era as the sort of place anyone with sense would want to live. Say what you will about China, but it’s light authoritarianism and actually delivers prosperity. At this point everyone not in the top 1% is seeing declines in wealth in America, plus you’re losing your civil liberties (citizenship revocation is very likely), plus you’re losing your Republic.
I consider it my duty to try and give a clear picture of the world to my readers so they can make good decisions. Other than the necessity of eating and not dying of exposure, it’s why I write. So… If you can get out. Get out. If you can’t, make preparations for Hell.
If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.
Jan Wiklund
I have always maintained that the Supreme Court is US’s equivalent to Iran’s Assembly of Experts. A body that can annul any legislation and apparently invent new ones at will.
bruce wilder
why worry?
Hakeem Jeffries will save us! I am sure of it.
david lamy
I think the slippery slope to the demise of our republic started in my childhood. Our congress no longer declared war but would in some cases authorize use of military force. Presidents successfully extended the scope of these authorizations to kill foreigners very much not like us at whim.
So here we are, the Supreme Court finally granting post hoc, Reagan’s dream of dreams: the line item veto — on steroids.
Eric Anderson
Death by a thousand uninformed vote for the elite little cuts.
Daniel A Lynch
There is nothing preventing Congress from re-asserting its authority — regarding the Department of Education, war powers, or whatever. But Congress works for the rich, and the rich do not believe in democracy. Therein lies the root problem.
Certainly Trump is a bad guy, and it is fair to call him out, but if not Trump, it would be some other tool of the rich.
“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ~ Louis D. Brandeis.
StewartM
The ability to impound funds for programs a President doesn’t like was one of Nixon’s claims. So you see, the movement conservative playbook has always been about setting up a pro-capitalist dictatorship.
Why should this be any surprise, when its very founders were those who trusted capitalism and distrusted democracy (as Tony Wikret has pointed out many times).
bruce wilder
Congress maybe could reassert itself, if there were any Congress critters left who knew how to bind the Executive legally and procedurally, but there are no such creatures left. The once tightly-controlled, fine-grained processes of budgeting, authorization and appropriation, backed up by accounting and auditing — these have been eroding steadily under myriad assaults since Nixon and impoundment. The continuing resolution farce has a regular feature of the fiscal cycle since Bush the Younger, just to highlight one point of leverage and erosion. Every time executive discretion to reallocate has to be broadened because Congress cannot function well enough to properly budget and oversee mandated programs. The Office of Management and Budget under the President arrogates authority that Congress used to formally give to Department Secretaries, Agency heads and Commissions. The procedural assault, like the ideological assault has been underway for a long time.
Feral Finster
“This is, in my opinion, and in line with most lawyers, 100% unconstitutional.”
Law is meaningless. Enforcement is the only thing that matters.
Hiero
I would guess the contagion from USA going to “hell” presents a high risk of downgrading a lot of places in the world significantly, at least in the short term and in numerous ways (look what’s happening now in Mexico), such that any resourceful person with an ounce of fortitude (ie not the typical Westerner) might consider staying and attempting to prepare their local community (a thing everyone should be working at all the time anyway) to be at least parity with ejecting. And then there’s that climate thing lurking – I might consider that a stronger factor in making the choice to go refugee and where to try to land since that type of impact can overwhelm the best preparations.
I’ll have to re-watch Casablanca to get the juices flowing on this again.
ibaien
the whole “i’ve been telling people to get out for a decade!” thing is tiresome. where are generally unskilled, lower or middle income yanquis supposed to go, exactly? CDMX is having massive ‘gringo go home’ protests (and rightfully so); most of the welcoming-ish LATAM nations are one half-step away from despotism. china doesn’t need or want more marginal workers who don’t even speak mandarin; russia could definitely use the manpower and (having been bled pretty badly by the ukies) literal men, but seems like a political non-starter. considering how many americans live paycheck to paycheck, a golden visa somewhere else may as well be a unicorn. folks are gonna have to stay and fight, like it or not.
NR
Get out and go where, Ian? That might be worth a post in itself, because it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of great places to go anymore. Europe used to look attractive, not so much anymore. Even New Zealand, which used to be a pretty well-run country, is having a lot of problems these days. Most of the rest of the world doesn’t want Americans (understandably). So… go where?
Joan
Thanks, Ian. I’m on a two-year emigration timeline. I’m aggressively applying for overseas jobs.
China is light authoritarianism as long as you don’t read or write LGBT fiction: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c056nle2drno
Ian Welsh
Some people are not going to be able to get out, yup. If you’re low skilled and low money, you’re probably screwed.
But do some research before giving up. For example, if you have a grandparent of Irish extraction, you can get Irish citizenship. There are plenty of weird little niches.
Europe’s not so great, but most of it will keep more of a social net for longer than the US.
If you can somehow go to China, go (though that’s damn hard.) Don’t go to India.
Of course China is worse in some ways than the West. If you must write gay fiction, China’s not for you. But overall, it puts a Hell of a lot less people in prison than the US.
Purple Library Guy
@Hiero . . . Uh, what’s happening in Mexico? Everything I’ve heard about Mexico’s direction lately has been pretty positive. Sure, it was starting from a bad place, but the current government is pretty solid social democratic, creating perhaps the first real welfare state Mexico has ever seen, and last I heard was intending to respond to Trump’s tariffs with industrial policy. Has there been a change?
ibaien
this is the crux of why i sometimes find this site so philosophically incoherent: an ostensibly liberal host who reflexively cheerleads for the honestly and unapologetically authoritarian, illiberal CCP (let alone putin and his oligarchs). are we supposed to believe that surrendering virtually all freedoms because they “did covid better” is a morally correct choice? i like china, i’ve been there a bunch and it’s very modern and clever, but it’s a police state that would make our tinpot fascists red with envy. why is that the solution? seems like a cop-out at best. said it before, say it again, it’s “sinnerman” all the way down now.
Ian Welsh
1) I’m not a liberal (in the modern sense.)
2) China has a LOT less people in prison than the US does.
3) I would judge that in most of the country now, China provides a better standard of living than the US, and it’s definitely the future.
4) I’ve repeatedly noted that it is an authoritarian state. So is the US. If you’re going to live in an authoritarian state, might as well live in one that is competent and MUCH less likely to lock you up.
5) I’ve repeatedly called Putin evil (and gotten lots of flack for it.) That said, I think he’s less evil than most American Presidents.
6) Russia is much less of an oligarchy than America.
I don’t have a tribal identification with Russia, China or America so I assess them relatively objectively. Of the three, China is the best run, with the lowest incarceration rate. It isn’t even close. More than that, every indicator is that both the CPC and Putin have far higher approval ratings than any American president in my life, and no, I don’t think that’s fake, because both countries have vastly improved living standards of the past few decades while the US’s have declined (whatever the official numbers say, we all know that for most people things are worse in America every decade.)
A lot of Americans think the US is the land of the free or some such nonsense. If it was ever true, it hasn’t been true since about 1980 and it gets less true every day.
different clue
Here is an article about a looming population implosion crisis in Russia which might make Russia a possible destination for Americans seeking a new start elsewhere.
” Russia’s population crisis is so dire, it’s staring down a labor shortage of 11 million people by 2030, a minister told Putin ” ( ” behind soft paywall” ) . . .
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1m0bl6k/russias_population_crisis_is_so_dire_its_staring/
DMC
I and mine are headed out to Ecuador, specifically to Vilcabamba, a little town in the Southeast of the country. Its a “blue zone” where people routinely live to 100, where you can grow coffee and chocolate in your back yard, where the healthcare is CHEAP and GOOD, costs about $85 a month. Cost of living is also cheap, a 2 bedroom apartment is about $500, all the food is local and organic and costs pennies on the dollar. While it is a literal banana republic, with the current president as the richest guy in the country, who has a controlling interest in all aspects of the banana trade (including what gets shipped along with the bananas), if you don’t get in their way, you’re fine. They use USD as their currency, so no exchange fees. They really like expats who bring first world income(even if its only SSI) to the country which supports a lot of the local economy. There are 100’s of YouTube video from expats who made the move and are happy to go into minute detail about the pros and cons. If you have even $1500 a month you can live very comfortably. Real Estate is similarly cheap(watch the realtor videos). Downsides are no post office(you can DHL everything but it costs) no highway department(Locals will eventually clear mudslides) and some tropical diseases(inoculation against Yellow fever is mandatory). You don’t want to live in Quito or Guayaquil(cartel related crime) but Cuenca is fine and considered the cultural capital. Vilcabamba is noted for its expat community, and the climate is basically Spring year round.
Soredemos
Most ‘China does something evil/insane/absurd domestically’ stories, when you drill down into them, turn out to be provincial governor or even city mayor doing something goofy. ‘China’ as in the Beijing government seems to often not only not be behind various things that are actually regional fads, but is often very hands off, which enables such local things to happen in the first place.
That’s assuming the media isn’t effectively outright inventing the supposed outrage, eg Uyghur genocide, social credit system, etc.
I’m not saying genuinely objectionable things never happen in China. But so often it turns out to be the equivalent of ‘Alabama governor signs insane order’ and presenting it as official federal policy.
ibaien
@ian: using incarceration as a holistic metric for the health of a society is a choice; of your three major powers mentioned mine is the only one i’d feel comfortable posting without being behind a vpn or tor onions. america hating is valid but quickly ramps up into a binary fervor.
@dmc: this kind of emigration badly distorts local economies and destroys indigenous culture just so yanquis don’t have to face the consequences of their action (or inaction). not a solution, at best a bolthole. and the second the economy falters in ecuador, guess who will be first to be told to go?
responseTwo
“Congress loses its last real power” – congress is there to satisfy the wealthy billionaire class. I don’t think the power of congress really means much anymore. They have been bought and most work for the neocons.
Thermobarbaric
Different Clue:
The Russian population “crisis” proposed by your hyper alarmist Reddit link is unrealistic and vastly exaggerated. Most Western assessments of Russia’s population “crisis” don’t take into account the surge of Russian speaking civilians fleeing to the RF due to the war in UKR (around 2 million). Many of these refugees undoubtedly see the writing on the wall and will never return to UKR or only to parts that will become parts of Russia.
These Chicken Little pro-Western takes also never consider the population numbers of the various Oblasts that already are or soon will be re-unified with the Russian Fed: Crimea (2.5M), Donetsk & Lugansk (6.7M), Kherson (800K-1M), and Zaporhyze (1.7M). If you throw in the speculative but IMO highly likely inclusion of Odessa (1M), Russia’s population likely will be closer to 160M rather than the current official number of around 145M.
The country with an imploding population is Ukraine but we all know the West loves to project its own problems on its various enemies/opponents.
different clue
@Thermobarbaric,
If your analysis is correct, then the possibility of “moving to Russia” is a vain and silly hope.
DMC
this kind of emigration badly distorts local economies and destroys indigenous culture just so yanquis don’t have to face the consequences of their action (or inaction). not a solution, at best a bolthole.
Yeah, it distorts the economy in such a way as the locals get to work in shops instead of hoeing yams. The average income in Ecuador is about $470 a month and your telling me big spending Yanquis is a BAD thing? And frankly, bolt hole is about what we’re looking for at this point. Take a look around. The ship of States scuppers are awash and we’re looking for the boats. We’re old and weird and increasingly feel like” They’ll be coming after us, next”. And the expat community where we’re going is rather cosmopolitan(Canadians even!). And the nuclear threat to Ecuador is 0.
somecomputerguy
Well obviously, the expectation that the branches would jealously guard their powers didn’t pan out very well, or did it?
Obama considered allocating himself the power to extra-judicially kill American citizens, just a routine expansion of presidential powers, before Trump.
Every apparent expansion of Presidential power by the Supremes is also an expansion of their power at the expense of Congress and the lower courts.
The branch that can’t make itself irrelevant fast enough is Congress. Forget war powers, judicial appointments are where the Congress has made the long-term investment in being powerless. Particularly in Democratic assistance to Republicans in packing the Judiciary, via the Blue Slip.
John Roberts took things slow early in his tenure. He now thinks he can re-write the Constitution at will. He should be looking at a 21- member Court the next time Democrats get in, at a minimum, but we all know he won’t be.
Has anyone heard Democrats so much as promise to fix anything if elected?
Of course, if they did, then they wouldn’t have anything to run on next time around.
shagggz
It is absurd for you to call Putin “evil,” but I know you mean that in the context of what comes with the job of head of state, Ian. Very well then; which American president(s) do you consider less evil?
different clue
I have recently found a new-to-me genre of internet video content: African Black Africans making video content about American Black Americans and their situation and concerns. They re-use chunks of video content from American Black American content creators.
I found one with an isolated chunk of re-run video content which is very relevant to the attitude the stay-behind American majority might take when confronting government figures. Since the main body of the video is more relevant to questions of decisions, actions, consequence, etc., and this one chunk-in-isolation is different from all the rest of it and is uniquely relevant to the concerns of American stay-behinders, I will offer the starting and stopping timepoints of that separate chunk of video, so people can just watch it and avoid all the rest of it if they so choose.
The video is titled: ” Arab Americans are BEGGING Bl@cks for help now after REGRETTING voting Trump. ” It is by Evans From Kenya. Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7C6cPWtES8
Those who have” heard it all before” and don’t want to “hear it again” can avoid “hearing it again” by clicking the link with speakers OFF. If I can do that, digital technology masters can certainly do that. Once the video is link-engaged with the sound OFF, advance the timepoint slider-bar at the bottom of the screen to timepoint 18: 01. The totally-relevant-to-this subject chunk of video runs till slider-bar timepoint 24: 06. One can view that little separate video timechunk with the sound on and not have to hear or even see any of the rest of it.
I myself liked all the rest of it as well, but since that isolated timechunk of video out of all the rest of it was relevant to this post in a way that the rest of it is not, I have offered a way to see and hear just only that separately relevant video timechunk.
mago
Ok. Putin evil trope. Yeah, you don’t get to be a head of state by playing nice. Dude’s miles ahead of his western contemporaries, but it doesn’t make him Mr Nice Guy. Let’s get real and stop the simplistic Putin rag. He’s serving the same gods as all the rest. So a big middle finger and fuck you to all the power players.
Now then, for those who wish to emigrate to whatever imagined better world, all I can say is buena focking suerte. You don’t have a clue. Go ahead. May the gods be with you. . .
Like & Subscribe
I have a couple of suggestions for those serious about emigrating from America.
First on the list, Singapore. It has an extremely low crime rate and hey, who doesn’t respect a low crime rate? At any cost?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN6p4Tiqa-k
If too many rules are not to your liking, there is Shenzhen if you are looking for inexpensive housing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2UoBTwnstA
Hiero
@Purple Library Guy search the internet for “fuera gringos” – some people have had enough of white expats/digital nomads. I would definitely consider Mexico an option if I wasn’t a whitey with obviously accented spanish. I think there’s too much history of white oppression (with more stacking up by the day) of latinos in USA and potential for reprisals to make it worth the effort. I’ll take my chances at home.
I’m curious how someone emigrating to a village somewhere else in the world plans to ensure their dollar income/savings continues both to flow and to retain its value while USA goes to “hell”. If that dries up with the collapse, the former low cost of living becomes the normal cost of living on a reduced/nonexistent income – ie immigrant refugee status, not well-off expat, potentially in a not so well developed country competing with the natives. Outside of persecuted classes in USA society (ie cis whities), it seems like many of the expat arbitrage points have a high risk of losing much of their value with a USA collapse.