America held hostage
From my earliest weeks in these pages, I’ve warned about metastasized capitalism: “we’re dealing with people who would sell you the air you breathe if they could control how it gets to your nose. And if you cannot afford to buy their air, well, you should have worked harder, planned better, and saved more.”
Now we have sitting in the Oval Office a felon convicted 34 times for crimes driven by that avarice, catalyzed by the will to power, and bent on dominating … everyone.
Josh Marshall suggests that Donald John Trump means to cow the states by threatening to cut off the “air supply” of any that hesitate to bow before him.
“It seems clear to me that Trump plans to coerce the states into operating under his direct control by cutting off their flows of federal money from the federal government,” Marshall writes. “We have already seen this with private institutions like Columbia University and other institutions in the form of NIH and other grants. Maine is already a focus because of the verbal confrontation between the state’s Gov. Janet Mills (D) and Trump back in late February.”
Trump is stepping over every constitutional line, jumping every remaining legal guardrail, skirting obstacles to dictatorship, and daring the courts and Congress to stop him. Only the courts (so far) are pushing back, but they have little enforcement power.
Trump’s next move, Marshall suggests, is to claim by presidential fiat which states get which monies budgeted by Congress. The states are in no position to respond in kind since individuals pay federal taxes directly to the IRS, not to their states’ treasurers. This renders them vulnerable to extortion by a president comfortable with it.
Depending on how far the President chose to go these decisions could genuinely cripple states. No money for road construction and the myriad other things that are funded in whole or in part by the federal government. And then there’s the big guns, what about cutting off Medicaid payments to hospitals in a given state? Maybe Social Security checks to people in a given state? These are crippling acts and they’re absurd in any normal world. But they’re not that strange under the kind of presidential power Trump claims to have.
“America held hostage” was how Rush Limbaugh opened his show during Bill Clinton’s terms. It wasn’t just that he and his listeners objected to Clinton’s policies. They rejected living under a government led by a Democrat. Decades later, Trump means to hold states hostage to his will by threatening to cut off federal funding both to state goverenments and to individual citizens. Kiss the ring or forfeit your funding (and Social Security).
Marshall offers that the Guarantee Clause of the constitution, Article IV, Section 4, ensures that states in our federal system can govern themselves:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
But the clause never anticipated the threat coming from inside the (White) house.
Citing Trump’s blithe dismissal of laws and any constitutional constraints on his presidency Marshall continues, “using federal funds to coerce the states” may render the Guarantee Clause inoperative. “Deprive elected officials of their free will and those who elected them are no longer living under republican government,” he explains.
But like so much else in obscurer parts of the Constitution, try enforcing it.
If Trump is unchecked, we are appoaching conditions that led to the Declaration. Except the sovereign at issue lives not across the Atlantic but alongside the Potomac:
I make these points now because it is important in a moment of high crisis like this to fully ventilate all of the Constitution’s provisions, the totality of its meaning. It is critical to understand not just its full meaning but to anticipate those moments when violations of its provisions may become so great that its obligations may no longer hold. Lots of people are thinking about the scenario I’ve sketched out above. A lawless President uses his unauthorized power to bring the states to their knees by fiscal coercion. Then maybe the courts say its fine. Some people have the idea that well that’s not fair and that sucks but there’s no recourse. That’s not so. The essence of monarchy — real monarchy, not the legacy product we see today in Europe — is the King’s arbitrary power. The President doesn’t have that. That is the essence of the distinction. Just how states or the citizens who live within their borders might resist such unconstitutional actions I don’t know. It’s a weighty and dangerous question. But the courts don’t own the Constitution and resisting the actions of a lawless President sometimes becomes necessary precisely to vindicate the constitutional order. The meaning of the Guarantee Clause is just one example of this. The totality of the Constitution is that we will have no Kings. It all starts with understanding just what the document means, requires and promises.
Trump is the nastiest combination of insanity and cruelty this country has seen since George III.
(h/t DC)
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