daviddagan.bsky.social
Director of editorial and academic affairs at Niskanen Center. Read Hypertext: hypertext.niskanencenter.org. Read The Liberal Fortress: daviddagan.substack.com. Book: http://amzn.to/29rrt90.
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I often think about that. For me it was when nothing happened after Sandy Point. It revealed a level of decay in the culture that shocked me and still does.
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Written with all the eloquence of a junior high B paper, too.
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daviddagan.substack.com/p/elements-o...
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I think for now it makes more sense to think of American liberal-democracy — and the foundations of American prosperity — as wasting rapidly under severe illness. The way muscles recover from “wasting” is by being put to work. Naming these buckets of abuses loudly and repeatedly is step 1.
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Modern American presidents/elements of the federal gov have engaged in all of these — Palmer Raids; Teapot Dome; Japanese internment; McCarthyism; Hoover’s FBI; Watergate, etc. But I can't think of a case in which all these tactics were combined in a single centralized operation, and at such a pace.
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But also hard to weaponize the law without any prosecutors. We will see who ends up swallowing this worm.
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The Supreme Court almost by definition operates where the law is unclear and value judgments dispositive. That's the nature of a court of final appeal. The temptation to go beyond the law is harder to control because the baseline leeway is much wider. Most lawyers don't live in that world.
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We were so young...
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The good news is not that Trump is moving fast. It’s that the action will soon move to Congress, where his aura of invincibility will fade. It's that markets, while naive, correct fast when he oversteps, and influence him. And it's that public opinion will turn, and with it, key elites.
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@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social social has argued the speed of Trump's campaign is good. At the moment, tho, the logic could go the other way: Without a highly mobilized public opposition, R's in Congress may believe that Trump's popularity has yet to peak and refuse to back courts against him.
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The judicial branch has shown spine so far. But the gears of justice move slowly, while the executive moves with dispatch. What’s more, even actions that seem obviously illegal can face challenging pathways through the courts. Then there is the prospect of defiance.
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This is a dangerous moment that requires an analytical approach, one that games out the individual pathways that every lawless action could take, where the likeliest blockages are to be found, and how dimensions and time horizons will interact. See @mattgrossmann.bsky.social: x.com/MattGrossman...
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What makes this unprecedented disregard for the law even more disturbing is that it has been accompanied by moves that appear to condone or even invite violence, such as the pardoning of police-hunting Jan. 6 insurrectionists and the yanking of security details from former officials Trump dislikes.
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Past presidents, including Joe Biden, have claimed powers that seemed to clearly surpass what the law allowed. But they have not done so at this pace, or with the posture that the standing law was illegitimate.
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What I'd like to discuss is the consequences. As I wrote last month, accepting inherent presidential authority to impound is akin to shifting the balance of power between legislature and executive to something that resembles 16th century England. 8/
t.co/Q4VuJRtjw2