Tag: Barack Obama

Presidential Power Should Be A Top Election Issue

The midterm elections are a month away, and while I have expressed my feelings on voting and the electoral system generally, I have also made several posts trying to boost specific policy ideas that should be more discussed.  In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about which issues are top priority in this election, and whether any of them are actually as high impact as their popularity warrants.

The recent Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, which I think everyone agrees was pretty circus-like from start to finish regardless of political inclination, seems to have sparked more voter enthusiasm in the midterms. And while I’ll grant that Supreme Court nominations have grown in importance, it doesn’t follow that SCOTUS nominations should be a major issue in this election. The oldest justices are left-leaning, and so unlikely to retire in the next two years. Perhaps if there is a fear that Justices Ginsberg or Breyer (aged 85 and 80 respectively) will be forced into retirement due to medical problems, then this election would matter. But the chances of that seem less than 50%.

There are other issues, like immigration, that are highly impactful and also well discussed. If there was a decisive turnover from Republicans to Democrats in Congress, we’d expect some of that to be realized in immigration policy, but unfortunately not that much. Even if Democrats took both houses, this election is still largely being discussed in terms of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

This is a problem. Only one party can control the Presidency. Moreover, there are competing ideologies within parties, with many fiscal conservatives frustrated with George W. Bush, many neoconservatives frustrated with Trump, and yes, even some liberals frustrated with Obama on foreign policy. So really it should be said that only one ideology gets to control the White House as well. If the Presidency controls so much about policy, then this is disastrous for representative democracy. Depending on how ideological or political people are, the majority of people will not feel represented by the President, even if the President wins a majority of votes (something that has only happened 3 times in the last 8 presidential elections, going back 30 years).

The solution is clear, but we have no incentive to achieve it: Congress should be the most powerful branch of government. Its membership is large so as to draw from a wide range of views and geographical areas. When it acts, it must find compromises and alignments of interests, unlike the President which acts as a single unit. That was the design in the original constitution, and technically, if Congress worked to assert its control, it could retake such a position in government. However, congressmen have little incentive to do so; going on the record for votes and standing on specific principles is politically dangerous. Better instead to move questions of policy to the executive branch, and leave Congress to simply grandstand politically, never having to be tied down to specific votes.

For example: Barack Obama unilaterally decided to grant legal status and eligibility for federal benefits to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. I happen to think this was a good policy idea, but if the President can decide what laws to enforce and make his own laws with executive orders, then Congress is vestigial. President Trump actually took a pretty constitutional position and decided to end the DACA program and told Congress to pass the DREAM Act (would have crystallized the DACA program into law). He gave them six months, and they did not make the deadline, despite such action being pretty popular. This is unbelievable. Maybe too many people were playing politics. Maybe Donald Trump is incompetent in getting the legislation passed (he torpedoed a bipartisan bill), but that shouldn’t matter. Congress should be able to pass a bill that a majority of legislators agree with, but the will didn’t exist. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of the political divide of the Trump era, and so no bipartisanship could materialize, guaranteeing further partisanship in the future.

This cycle also delegitimizes Congress, making people look more often to the Presidency and to the courts. Congress is fundamentally tied to winning elections, so if people see Congress as unhelpful or unpopular, Senators and Representatives have even less incentive to do anything that might frustrate voters. That in turn also makes the courts increasingly important, which likely fuels additional democratic frustration, as the courts are still fairly removed from direct democratic influence. But if they are viewed as partisan extensions of the presidency, that just makes even more things rely on a single election where only a single ideology can win every four years.

I think there may be a way out of this mess if political parties made the midterms about Congressional vs Presidential Authority. It’s not always been true that Congress can only define itself in relation to the President, but it may be a useful way to couch constitutional authority in political terms. Reducing presidential power would be a concrete way to oppose Donald Trump, and perhaps even reach alleged small-government conservatives.

The Cato Institute lays out a platform for a resurgent Congress to run on: requiring votes on executive rule changes that will impose costs of $100 million on the economy (already introduced as the REINS Act), updating the Administrative Procedures Act to require courts to interpret administrative authority de novo or independent of the agency’s claimed interpretation (I’m horrified this isn’t already done), and require all fees and penalties collected by the government to be appropriated and spent by the Congress (right now, fees and profits are then spent by the collecting agency, with little oversight).

We don’t have to limit this approach to libertarian wishlist items. Kevin Kosar in Politico details additional approaches (and adds many more words in National Affairs), including an improvement to the robustness of congressional staffing; the executive has armies of bureaucrats working to provide the best information (and sometimes self-aggrandizing propaganda) to the branch (the Executive Office of the President alone includes some 4000 people). Congress has seen shrinking staffing for its oversight and accountability offices like the GAO. Congress should be the most powerful branch and so it should have access to the data and expert information on how best to oversee the actual implementation of policy the executive branch undertakes. Instead what we often have is Congressional staffers directly trying to research regulatory agencies, who are providing their own oversight information to non-expert politicians who often defer to the self-interested agencies. Kosar’s suggestion of a Congressional Regulation Office is also intriguing.

However, just because there is a way to do this, there is no reason to believe Democrats ever had an intention to follow this path during this midterm election. Nor does it mean Republicans will consider it in 2022 if the tables are reversed. Neither have an incentive to discuss constitutional authority when culture war issues are more likely to encourage their base to turn out. Understanding these public choice incentives doesn’t mean we have to live with them though. There is a nebulous role for real ideas in democracy, and it starts with having a discussion about the state of our politics.

Trump Junior and Russia

This weeks’ Fifth Column Podcast had an excellent discussion of Donald Trump Jr. and his attempt to get opposition research from the Russian government.

I have been pretty skeptical that the Trump administration and campaign actually did anything wrong with regard to Russia. I thought Trump was a poor candidate because he seemed very comfortable with authoritarians like Putin, which together with many positions he’s taken made me concerned about authoritarian policies he’d implement. Some of that concern has been well founded (e.g. appointing Jeff Sessions, removing an FBI Director he didn’t like), but in other places it has not. Trump seems to be bothered by criticism and a free press, but it’s clear the press is as robust and independent as ever.

I also thought Trump surrounded himself with really bad people, some of them with obvious terrible connections to the Russian government, like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn (all of whom were fired). Again, this points to his friendliness with authoritarians and perhaps his incompetence with whom he surrounds himself with, not that he’s had contact with the Russian government itself.

I thought the intense media scrutiny over Russia wouldn’t provide anything, and it was dragging on for far too long. I thought the worst thing we would find would be that Trump fired FBI Director Comey for investigating his ties to Russia, not for any connections to Russia itself. But I was wrong. The New York Times reporting on this was so impressive that Donald Trump Jr., the target of the Times‘ article actually felt it would be better if he published these emails himself!

Thus, I’m literally typing these word for word from Trump Jr.’s twitter account. He got an email saying “…and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”

Trump Jr’s response: “…if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”.

I don’t know if this is illegal, as Trump Jr. has some amorphous relationship with the Trump campaign and allegedly isn’t involved in the administration at all, despite regularly going on TV to defend the administration. However, it’s at the very least unpatriotic and seems pretty unethical. If agents of a foreign government are reaching out to you to attack political opponents, your response should be to forward it to the FBI, not to set up a meeting as soon as possible. Trump was elected to “drain the swamp”.  I thought that meant that many legislators are too close to special interests or are lobbied by large companies to pass favorable legislation. This is certainly problematic, but actively trying to get help from foreign governments to get into office seems at least as bad. Donald Trump Jr. is a swamp monster if ever there was such a thing.

Additionally, just like Hillary Clinton lied constantly about her email scandal (she didn’t have a private server; ok she did but there was nothing classified; ok it was classified but it was secure…), it turns out Trump Jr. and many other campaign members just straight up lied about having pursued Russian opposition research. Trump Jr. stated in a March interview that he had met people that were Russian but not meetings “…that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.” Here’s a full timeline, it’s pretty damning. This is the undermining of democracy that I thought Trump supporters claimed he was there to fight.

I wish all presidents were subjected to this sort of scrutiny. We had wall to wall media coverage for months with very few real stories until this week. The Obama administration crushed leakers and transparency, blocking FISA requests in an unprecedented manner. They brought government secrecy to a new level, while waging wars in several middle eastern countries without Congressional approval. Trump has only been in office for 6 months, and so it’s not hard to argue that the Obama administration was much worse in terms of doing illegal things, murdering civilians, spying on Americans and journalists, etc. Yet, media coverage has been much more aggressive on Trump (at least from the left, while the right-leaning media has often been at least as sycophantic as anything we saw under Obama on the left).  I guess it’s better late than never, but the media needs to be far more adversarial in the future long after Trump is gone.

 

The Obama Presidency Was Bad

We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.

There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration. I’ve done this by letter grades A through F.

The A’s

Iran Nuclear Deal

So…there was only one thing I could give an A to. Even this A is very hesitant. We did give up a lot for this deal–the Iranian government is pretty awful and by unfreezing their assets, they got access to very large amounts of money. However, I don’t think there was much else to do. Unless Republicans actually wanted to declare war on Iran, this seems like the only way to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon.  Iran’s nuclear program will be prohibited from refining any uranium for 15 years, and this was accomplished without any military intervention whatsoever. That’s pretty excellent. Moreover, the average citizens of Iran matter as well and it is somewhat unfair to punish them with high inflation and economic hardship because their authoritarian government is irresponsible.  Cato expands more here.

The B’s

Trade

One of the most important accomplishments is that Obama’s administration worked to pass several free trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. He also tried to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, although he could have really pushed harder on these initiatives. Obama didn’t do a great job making the case for free trade and his signature deal was ultimately a failure; honestly, a B is generous here, and is more of a function of the importance of free trade more so than Obama’s actual impact. Also worth noting is that his rhetoric while campaigning was pretty vigorously anti-trade, so he should be commended for changing his mind on this.

Gay Rights

Obama ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but was still on the record as anti-gay marriage as late as 2012. Sure, public opinion on gay marriage shifted rapidly, but Obama basically waited until it was 50-50 to switch to the right side on this; the Libertarian Party has been on board with gay marriage since the 70s. He should also be applauded for essentially not getting in the way of the court case. I know that’s a low bar, but he could have fought it and tried to keep the DOMA. The other issue is that while this is excellent, the impact of gay marriage legalization is somewhat limited to people who can take advantage of it.

Cuba

The Cuban embargo was imposed over 50 years ago in a bid to quickly end Castro’s dictatorship on the island. It failed. 25 years after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, a president finally spent some political capital to remove an outdated institution. Trade embargoes harm populations, and trade embargoes on a country that has been crushed by horrific socialist economic policies are even more harmful. The president cannot remove the embargo, but everything he can do without Congress, Obama has done on this issue. Trade can bring countries together, and Obama took steps to build those bridges. If he had actually gotten the embargo lifted, this would be an A.

The C’s

Marijuana Legalization

And that’s it for the entirely positive! Marijuana’s big progress had basically nothing to do with Obama, and Obama actually started out fighting it, performing more federal raids on state legal marijuana dispensaries in his first term than Bush. Eventually the administration did make the decision not to continue attempts to enforce marijuana laws with federal police forces. While kind of obvious and not very impressive, this may turn out to be something we remember fondly during the long night of the Jeff Sessions era.

Healthcare

As an incredibly brief overview, the ACA is flawed because it does nothing to address the fundamental problem with the healthcare system: a lack of market forces.  The laws of supply and demand create incentives for lower cost and higher quality care. Plastic surgery and lasik are not covered by insurance and thus must compete on price and quality and over time these areas have seen remarkable improvement with prices remaining the same or even dropping.

Our insurance system insulates both consumers and providers of healthcare from the market prices; consumers don’t pay for care, they don’t pay different prices at different places, and they often don’t even buy the insurance that does pay for care. Instead their employers pay for the thing that pays for their healthcare. And sometimes, if you go to a hospital, the insurance doesn’t really pay for care either, it pays the hospital in obfuscated and arcane ways, which in turn provides the doctors and actual equipment needed to provide care. It’s a complete mess.

The ACA did do some nice things like allow people with pre-existing conditions and people who didn’t get their healthcare through their employees and poor people to get health insurance. This is great, and any healthcare reform should strive to do that. However, by not addressing the price issue, they doomed these reforms. Things have sputtered along, but healthcare costs have kept rising, and now insurers are stuck with a disproportionate amount of sick people, needing to raise prices, which only drives away more healthy people. The death spiral was a predictable consequence (and indeed I did predict this in 2010 in a blog attached to my real name and thus will not be linking to here). Obamacare was not a poorly intended bill, but it was an incredible missed opportunity to actually fix the healthcare system. The only reason I didn’t give it a lower grade was because the system was so bad already, it’s hard to argue it was made that much worse.

Global Warming

Obama took steps to reduce climate change. Even if you’re not concerned about the most dire predictions of global warming, that’s probably a net benefit. He also was able to get China to sign onto the Paris Agreement. While not having legal punishments for countries who break their promises, it’s a solid negotiating achievement. However, Obama also implemented, largely by executive order, regulations on coal plants in the US that will have very little impact on carbon emissions. It’s also not at all market oriented, and therefore not particularly economically efficient. Additionally, in his first year in office, Obama had a chance to try and pass a more economically efficient carbon credit trading bill. Assuming climate change is as dire a threat as many say it is (I’m admittedly less worried), it seems to be a poor decision to spend political capital on other bills that did pass, especially something that was as flawed as Obamacare.

The Economy

The employment rate is lower than it has been in a long time, but the problem is this graph. Labor force participation has plummeted from 65% in the depths of the recession to around 62% now. The last time it was this low was before 1980. Since the current labor is around 160 million people, and we are at 62% participation, that means the cohort of the working age population is about 258 million. In 2009, unemployment was around 9%. With a labor force of 155 million people, that’s almost 14 million unemployed. Today with an unemployment rate of 4.7%, that’s only 7.5 million unemployed. However, looking at the people not in the labor force in 2009 there were 83.5 million not working but not unemployed. In 2017, there are 98 million not working but not unemployed. so unemployment dropped by almost 7 million, yet more than twice that many more people were staying out of the labor force entirely. The economy isn’t in free fall, but it’s not knocking it out of the park either, and this is 8 years after the recession. This isn’t entirely Obama’s fault, as the Federal Reserve is much more responsible for economic success overall, but the things Obama did have control over were abject failures: fiscal restraint, entitlement reform, and deregulation.

Immigration

Obama’s legacy on immigration liberalization is mixed. Unfortunately, as this is one of the more important issues in improving the world, a mixed record is disappointing. Obama deported more people than George Bush and he failed to pass any sort of comprehensive reform bill. Obviously, he couldn’t pass bills on everything, but this would have been a pretty important area to do so. Obama did however create an executive order delaying deportations for millions of illegal immigrants. This was a bit odd constitutionally, but with so many illegal immigrants in the United States, it would be impossible to deport them all anyway. Obama’s order simply prioritizes some over others, protecting children and parents of American citizens. This was certainly a good policy, but unfortunately Obama’s legacy in this area should have been so much better.

The D’s

Endless Wars

Obama is the first president to be at war for every day of his presidency. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, to undeclared wars and bombings in Yemen and Pakistan, we have entered a new era of endless war. Libya is specifically horrifying: Obama chose to involve the American military in Libya unilaterally. He explicitly did not get authorization from Congress, and in fact Congress explicitly voted against a resolution to authorize his military involvement after the fact. That is a terrifying precedent to give Donald Trump.

The only reason this category is not an F is because of Obama’s continued reluctance to expand the US involvement in Syria.  Of course, he did this in the worst possible way, by drawing a line in the sand and then backing down from it but it’s undeniable that a larger American role in Syria would have involved the US in one of the largest, bloodiest civil wars of the last decade. Of course, we have not even touched the fact that American troops are in Iraq 14 years after the invasion, and many US contractors remain in Afghanistan 16 years after that invasion. Obama has still institutionalized war in way never before seen.

The F’s

Surveillance

I mean wow. How did we get here? If you want all the citatations, this Mashable article is a good start. The United States government engages in broad sweeps of Americans’ phone records through unconstitutional general warrants issued via a secret court that had no defense team, no oversight, and has only rejected a handful of warrants in its entire history. The NSA also had a program for collecting data on foreigners and Americans from major technology companies, as well as a massive database storing all of that information for later search. Every available method of siphoning data is apparently being used.  The NSA also invested heavily in ways to break internet encryption standards. They even paid $10 million to RSA to get them to set their default encryption algorithm to one that was fundamentally broken in one of their products. Most impressively, it turns out that the big phone record collection the NSA was conducting in total secret, that had no oversight and Senators couldn’t even talk about, it’s illegal according to a federal appellate court.

It was such a disaster that Congress eventually tried to pass a reform bill to fix Section 215 of the Patriot Act which is what the courts cited as the justification for these general warrants. Yet in the end, that bill was watered down to the point of uselessness, with Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul all voting against it due to its lack of real power. In fact, the bill extended the Patriot Act for several years. Obama’s legacy in this area is a total disaster, and he leaves an out of control intelligence agency with no oversight in the hands of a petty authoritarian. The NSA (and all agencies they share information with) knows intimate details about all of our lives, our communication patterns, and our digital existences. As we’ve written before, this is not good.

Transparency

Reason does a good job tearing the Obama administration apart over the “most transparent administration in history” line. Again, this area is such a disaster there are too many things to cover. We can start by discussing how just a month or two prior to the Edward Snowden revealing everything we talked about in the last section, DNI Clapper blatantly lied to a Senate committee about the government’s spying capability. Obama himself has hardly given any interviews to the press. His administration has had more than double the Espionage Act charges against whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Which is especially concerning since none of these were acts of espionage! These were legitimate problems that were hidden from view from the public, brought to light by people doing the right thing. But the secrecy was pervasive throughout the administration; regular employees were banned from talking with reporters, a record number of FOIA requests were denied and at least 1 in 3 were denied improperly (which was only ever found out if challenged), and, of course, the government had a secret extrajudicial kill list.

Drone Strikes

Conor Friedersdorf writes that in Obama’s first year in office, his administration conducted over 100 drone strikes…in Pakistan. Quick recap: Congress voted for an Authorization of the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 Attacks, which allowed the government to invade Afghanistan. Congress also voted to go into Iraq. Pakistan is not one of these countries, yet apparently Obama was carrying out an entire proxy war via drone strikes. In 2010, those strikes only intensified, yet it was worse than that; to cloud the truth, the Obama administration counted all military age males in the vicinity of these strikes as combatants, regardless if they were civilians or not. There were eventually reforms to this process, and the number of civilian casualties per strikes started to go down, but this is but the smallest of victories. In waging these undeclared wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, the Obama administration concocted an absurd “legal” process to target specific individuals without a trial, including American citizens. We are talking about a logistically planned and funded protocol for murdering American citizens overseen only by the President. This process eventually ended up killing a civilian by accident, a 16 year old American. This is unjustifiable. No one was ever held accountable for these lawless actions, and the president retains power to murder at will, which he has promptly done, murdering the deceased teenager’s sister this past week. Someone get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.

Executive Power

This section condenses much of what Gene Healy says in his excellent piece “Goodbye, Obama”. The powers the Obama administration seized and expanded are vast. While initially running against “dumb wars” and unauthorized wars, Obama became the first president to be at war for every day of his presidency. He undertook drone strikes in countries where he had authorization to be in, he even undertook an entire military action in Libya when Congress had expressly voted against supporting it. He continued to use the 2001 AUMF six years after the death of Osama bin Laden and against a group (the Islamic State) that essentially didn’t exist on 9/11. And the Trump administration has continued this justification. His drone strikes have killed hundreds of civilians, and even American citizens. He has created a secret kill list with no oversight from courts or Congress. He has ascended to new heights of secrecy and prosecution of whistleblowers, and he has thwarted attempts at transparency at every turn. Without public knowledge, the ultimate oversight of the democratic process is destroyed as well. And none of this is even touching areas outside national security where Obama also took unilateral presidential orders to new and creative areas. These include instituting new immigration law by executive order when it was bogged down in Congress, creating new overtime labor rules, adding new environmental regulations on power plants, national school curriculum requirements, and even unilaterally amending Obamacare. Healy writes “More than any recent president, Obama has embraced and, to some extent, legitimized the anti-constitutional theory that congressional inaction is a legitimate source of presidential power.”

Obama’s legacy is the Imperial Presidency. Simply by occupying the same office as Obama, Donald Trump inherits vast powers, legislative, military, and judicial. Americans’ private information is available, their lives at risk without the need for due process, the very laws of the country can be changed via the presidential pen. Barack Obama has accomplished much during his presidency, but most of his important projects have ended in utter disaster, and the manner of their attempted accomplishment has greatly imperiled the separation of powers and constitutional restraint. While itg is quite possible, even likely, that the Trump presidency will be worse still, we cannot forget the incredible cost and horrific events of the Obama legacy.

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Trump, Democracy, and Power

I’m working on a post about the political implications of Trump’s victory, but for now, let’s look at what Trump’s win tells us about democracy and government legitimacy.

I’ve seen some people on the left trying to reach out and understand the concerns of Trump voters. This is absolutely welcome, and in a future post I will talk about which of those concerns make sense, and which don’t. However, if you’re only considering other points of view because you lost an election, you may be thinking about politics and government all wrong. The goal of government policy shouldn’t be to cater to the whims and desires of the people who voted and supported the winning coalition, while crushing the unbelievers under a savage reign of public shaming and thought crime. Unfortunately, it feels like much of the social justice left adopted this mentality, and so we now might be forced under a right-wing government that has countered by taking this same governing strategy to heart. Policy should be about creating the best outcomes we can, which I think largely results from allowing individuals to make as many of their own decisions as possible with minimal government interference. That means allowing for a broad range of activities and types of commerce to occur, but it also means opposing expansion of government power.

Of course, the best way to do that right now is to point out that political victory doesn’t mean Trump supporters have any good ideas about improving the country, or even their own situations. The expansion of government action and government power Trump has promised are still terrible regardless of any democratic outcome.

I’m aware this is harsh, and it’s part of what Trump voters are complaining about when they say coastal elites are ignoring them, but I’m not (and have never) dismissed their concerns as racism and xenophobia; I tried to look at Trump’s policies themselves. The problem is that Trump never met me or anyone else on policy grounds. He has few ideas, and the ones he does have are pretty crappy. Against Trump acknowledged the left had done plenty of bad things, but Trump promised things at least as bad.

Moreover, the left (and maybe even the right) shouldn’t be saying “I live in a democracy, so apparently Trump’s ideas are legitimate because he won an election”. They should be saying “Maybe democracy is dangerous if it legitimizes tyranny, and maybe we should limit the power of the state to reduce the risks democracy poses”. In fact, they probably should have been saying this for the last eight years.

Being skeptical of democracy isn’t so bad. Democracies don’t always come to good solutions to problems. Supposing a majority of voters have elected one candidate over another, it’s several steps of logic to then say that a single rejection of one candidate in an election of dozens of issues then constitutes that the winning candidate’s stance on a particular issues is (A) popular and (B) effective. Add in that Trump did not actually win the popular vote, and, the fact that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states that there is no knowable community preference on any issue which had 3 or more possible stances to choose from.  And even if voters could all agree on a single popular issues, there’s no reason their favorite policy would actually work.

What I’m trying to say is that despite whatever concerns Trump voters have, what matters are the actions he takes. The problem is that the last two administrations have massively expanded the executive power of the president and increased regulatory involvement in many areas of the economy. The Department of Defense has compiled a massive database and is spying on American citizens and foreign nationals without warrants. That data is shared with federal law enforcement agencies again without oversight. The president has the power to strip you of your rights and hold you indefinitely if you are investigated in connection to terrorism. He even apparently has the ability to kill you without a trial. Trump has promised further abuses of power, including deportations of millions of people that cannot be done without racial profiling and gross abuses of due process. 

Maybe Trump won’t seize executive authority or scoff at the Constitution at all, and 90% of his campaign promises will turn out to be hyperbole. But I doubt it. Maybe he’ll try to accomplish things and be thwarted by checks from the other branches of government and the Constitution like Madison imagined. I maintain that what matters is policy, and if his policies are not that bad, I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. But the fact that many are worried anyway indicates that we all understand to some extent or another that we have created an imperial presidency. It’s concerning that over 60 million people voted for a stated authoritarian who has advocated war crimes including killing of terrorists’ families; it’s also concerning that almost 61 million voted for someone who advocated a war in Libya without Congressional approval, who supported and continues to support warrantless spying on Americans, and condoned drone attacks that actually killed families of terrorists. The fact that 60 million votes is enough to make us fear for our rights means our troubles started a long time ago.

Yes, Trump’s presidency will likely be worse than anything we’ve ever seen, but as a state skeptic, it’s helpful when a politician just comes out and says how horrible they are rather than everyone pretending that the Obama and Bush imperial presidencies were normal and acceptable uses of executive authority. It makes the case against state power much more straightforward. Progressives need to realize is that Trump is worse only as a matter of degree; this blog post would have been written had Hillary won on Tuesday, it just wouldn’t have had a president-elect that cared so little about his reputation.

 

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Picture Credit: Replica Oval Office by George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Licensed under CC-BY-2.0.