A false choice: Getting things done vs. having a republic of laws
And folks protest the removal of the Archivist of the United States
President Donald Trump plainly aims to move fast and break things in the process. Some observers on the right are cheering his efforts. At last, they say, somebody is hacking down the federal blob and severing its various corrupt entanglements with left-wingers and crooks around the globe.
When asked about the young men from the Department of Government Efficiency who entered the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Senator Bill Hagerty stated that “the actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue” and that “the agency is out of control.” Senator Rick Scott was even more enthusiastic about President Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts at USAID. “He’s doing exactly what he should be doing,” said the GOP legislator from Florida. “He’s going through every agency and looking at how to make sure the money’s spent right.”
Wait, a reporter asked the senator. Isn’t that Congress’s job? Senator Scott replied, “It doesn’t look like Congress is doing their job.”
Here we see the strange phenomenon, which Yuval Levin identified a few years ago, wherein legislators position themselves as outside critics of Congress who feel they have no duty or power to fix things in the executive branch. James Madison, who imagined ambition would counter ambition among elected figures, would be baffled.
This spectator pose propagates a false choice: that getting anything done means legislators should stand by and simply let the president do whatever he wants, licit or not. It also further deforms our constitutional system and creates precedents that, one day, a Democratic president will wield to do whatever he likes.
The zeal to “drain the swamp” has led the administration down a reckless path that already has elicited lawsuits. Ultimately, it must be noted, presidential unilateralism moves the power further away from the people and their myriad elected officials and morphs the founders’ republic into a quasi-parliamentary presidential system.
It does not have to be this way. Trump could simply ask Congress to give him temporary authority to reorganize USAID. President Bill Clinton did that in the late 1990s, and Congress complied by enacting a law. The president also could ask that Congress zero out various programs in the forthcoming State Department spending bill or defund the agency entirely. Voilà—USAID would be gone with no possible court challenges. Indeed, as the Congressional Research observed in 2017, there are a variety of means to rework and reform government.
None of this is rocket science, yet it seems lost on many people on Capitol Hill and in the White House.
Groups and citizens send a letter to the White House to protest the removal of the Archivist
The firing of Dr. Colleen Shogan, the first woman Archivist of the United States, disappointed a lot of people. The Trump Administration gave no explanation for her removal, and from where I sit she was making some good reforms to the agency to make it better for the American people. I joined a letter of disappointed individuals and groups who are concerned that Dr. Shogan’s removal will politicize the agency and disrupt its operations.
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