There is a lot to say about Trump’s Executive Order zone-flooding yesterday and I’m sure most of them will be flying into the ether and soon forgotten. That’s the point.
However, there were a few which should at least be noted prominently as the extreme authoritarian moves that they are. Vox put together a useful short list of the worst of them:
Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional immigration order
The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution makes it achingly clear: Anyone who is born in the United States is a citizen.
Trump’s most troubling executive order attempts to overturn this constitutional right by executive fiat, ordering US officials to stop issuing citizenship documents to any future children born to undocumented migrants. It’s an order that will test just how willing the federal bureaucracy and the courts are to defend against unlawful Trumpian behavior.
If they get away with this one, it will be clear that the Constitution is dead. (I would suggest it’s on life support already with the immunity ruling but this would pull the plug.)
The article explains the fatuousness of the right wing’s legal theory around this if you want to read it. But it’s obvious that everyone but Native Americans trace their ancestry to parents who were not born here. If being born in this country isn’t enough to prove our citizenship what is?
Trump’s Schedule F ticking time bomb
At the tail end of Trump’s first time in office, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for federal civil servants called Schedule F — essentially, a tool for converting civil servant jobs protected from removal based on party into political appointments he could fire at will. The order got nowhere before former President Joe Biden took office and promptly repealed it.
Well, Schedule F is back. One of Trump’s Day 1 executive actions restored the 2020 order and added a few tweaks, including an inquiry as to whether “additional categories of positions” should be included in Schedule F beyond the ones considered in the first executive order.
In theory, this could be as damaging to democracy as the birthright citizenship order — if not more so. Schedule F in its original form applied, per some estimates, to somewhere around 50,000 civil servants (and potentially quite a lot more). Purging that many people and allowing Trump to replace them with cronies would be a powerful tool for turning the federal government into an extension of his will.
They will have to go through some hoops to get that done. But if they do, we will have a serious problem. Let’s just say that there are not 50,000 competent Trump cronies in this country. I doubt there are even 500.
Trump’s dangerous pardons for January 6 offenses
When it came to people convicted of crimes relating to January 6, a group Trump calls J6 hostages, there was a range of plausible predictions — including, for example, reserving pardons for only nonviolent offenders.
Trump chose maximalism.
It’s just shocking. As the article points out, this incentivizes political violence:
Any extreme right-wingers who want to attack Democrats now have at least some cause to believe that the president will shield them from legal consequences.
There is no doubt. This is not just about January 6th, which we all know Trump excused because the people had allegedly had the election stolen from them. He’s always been this way. Recall back in 2016 when Trump was first running and two men attacked a homeless man with a pipe saying “Donald Trump was right” and Trump’s instinctive response was:
“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.”
It’s now clear that Trump will use his pardon power broadly to protect anyone who breaks the law on his behalf. It means not only that he has immunity from criminal behavior as president but practically speaking so do every one of his henchmen.
Trump’s potentially dangerous investigations
Two Trump executive orders, covering “weaponization” of government and “federal censorship” respectively, initiate formal inquiries into government conduct during the Biden administration.
What this means, in brief, is that the attorney general and the director of national intelligence are instructed to start looking into actions taken by the formal government in a series of areas ranging from January 6 prosecutions to FBI investigations of threats against teachers to cooperation with social media companies. Once the inquiries are complete, these officials are to recommend unspecified punishments for any wrongdoing uncovered.
I seem to recall Trump saying just the other day that he would leave any decisions about whether to investigate up to the Department of Justice. Of course he lies about everything so there’s no surprise that he lied about that.
This is very bad. Much depends upon the judiciary and I wish I had more faith that they would draw the line. But after overturning Roe v. Wade and creating a get out of jail free card for Trump I’m not sanguine.