Happy Independence Day, everyone … and welcome to the next phase of our slide towards authoritarianism. It’s a track we’ve been on for decades, frankly, and our pace has accelerated with the dubious election of Donald Trump (a.k.a. Drumpf) as our president. Trump is taking the concept of the unitary executive, popularized under Bush II, to a whole new level, testing institutional constraints on presidential power, many of which apparently boil down to voluntarily-observed norms of behavior, ethical standards, etc., but very little in the way of black-letter law. Even in the case of explicit legal constraints, this president is demonstrating that there is very little in the way of available recourse to a chief executive that ignores or even violates the law. Who holds the president accountable, particularly if the Senate is a perennial no-show?

Now, as Trump prepares for his big, honking, tank-infested fourth of July show in D.C., his administration is contemplating an executive order that would violate a Supreme Court decision regarding exclusion of the citizenship question on the U.S. Census. If they move forward with this, welcome to the dictatorship. When our institutions cannot compel a president to comply with a duly-rendered opinion handed down by the highest court, that amounts to a constitutional crisis far beyond anything we have seen up to this point. What higher authority is there to compel a change of behavior on the part of the administration? There’s no inspector general, no ombudsman overseeing the presidency – just Congress … and honestly, if Congress finally gets up on its hind legs and tells Trump “enough!”, what happens if he ignores them?

We have a long tradition of republican rule in the United States, obviously attenuated by a foundational regime of racial, ethnic and gender-based exclusion that has kept whole classes of people from participating in the political process (and continues to do so). But that long, troubled history does not immunize us against dictatorship. Military rule in Chile was once thought impossible in a country with longstanding civilian rule, then came their September 11th (1973) and the Pinochet dictatorship. The fact is, it not only can happen here, it almost certainly will happen here if we don’t stand up and resist.  It is cliche to say that democracy is not a gift – that it must be fought for. Let’s remove that notion from the context of pointless wars. We need to fight for our freedom right here, right now.

How? Stand up. Call, visit, petition your representatives to hold the president accountable. March, protest, and participate in strikes when tactically appropriate. Make your voice heard. We have to turn this thing around and put authoritarianism back in the box … before some slightly more competent “Great Leader” comes along and takes up the reins from our current clown-president.

luv u,

jp