Self-Evident Truths - Laws, Rules, Regulations, and Greed
Laws
It seems fitting that, during the week we’re celebrating the anniversary of America’s independence from colonial rule, we’re deciding how laws should work in a modern democracy.
On one side of the argument - let’s call them the sticklers - you have liberals, Democrats, and probably most Americans who believe that the legal system does an okay job maintaining societal order. On the other are the offenders, made up of a certain ex-president and his followers, and the Republican party. In their view, laws are bad when they’re an impediment to getting absolutely everything they personally desire, and a cudgel to be wielded against their enemies, or people they don’t like.
This second view crystallized this week when the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. U.S. - an on-the-nose case title if ever there was one - that presidents (one in particular) have immunity from criminal liability for ‘official acts’ done in office. This was, if I’m being a stickler, an unnecessary ruling, since there are already existing protections against charging a president with crimes. Despite that, the Court felt it necessary to tell everyone that no, really, a president can do crimes if he says they’re official acts, and you can’t stop him.
Nor did the conservative majority leave it there - they created additional protections lest any pesky federal investigators even think about questioning whether an act was official:
[Roberts] barred prosecutors from introducing evidence of “official acts” to prove culpability for “unofficial acts” and prohibited any inquiry into the president’s motives when “dividing official and unofficial conduct.” The result is a vast shield against prosecution that will hamstring prosecutors at every turn even if they decide that it’s somehow worth it to try to surmount the hurdle of immunity and attempt to reach the trial stage.
It’s hard to imagine a clearer statement that the Justices - themselves unelected and unaccountable for their official acts - believe a president is above the law, more akin to a king than an elected public servant. A president can break any laws they wish, simply by acting in an ‘official’ manner, and their own government can’t hold them accountable. Cool!
Ironically, the judicial branch of government is supposed to serve as a check on executive power, but has instead handed the president the ability to do whatever it wants, with no fear of repercussion.
One can’t imagine these same Justices granting a Get Out of Jail Free card to Joe Biden if he were to, say, cover up crimes on behalf of his son, or use his Justice Department to actually gin up criminal charges against his political enemies. Officially, of course.
What can the sticklers do? If we read history as a guide, they will do nothing, stomping their feet and insisting it is indecorous to reward open contempt for the rule of law. There are many ways a Democratic president could act against crank legal theories put forth by an ideological Court. But he won’t, and his party won’t, and so we face the prospect of an unrepentant criminal being put in charge of this country again, this time with explicit permission to commit any crimes as he can dream up.
Rules
Trump’s election and subsequent shredding of D.C.’s stuffy procedural norms gave us a look at what happens when people decide not to follow rules that existed as behavioral guidelines for the operation of executive government.
Whatever you may think of the massive bureaucratic apparatus run by the people in our nation’s capital, it has, largely, worked for over a century. The idea behind having tens of thousands of unelected people in charge of running agencies should not be a controversial one, but it absolutely infuriates a small group of hardline conservatives, who formed a weird little club dedicated to dismantling it.
Project 2025 is a continuation of the MAGA party’s belief that the ‘administrative state’ should be destroyed. Lifelong bureaucrats and subject matter experts on things like clean air and workplace safety should be fired, and their agencies should cease protecting Americans from the excesses of private industry.
In years past, Reaganites and anti-big government types made hay with voters and donors detailing how the government should be drowned in a bathtub, though when they took power they mostly just appointed their friends to run the agencies they so hated. It was easy to hobble regulators from within, they learned, and you didn’t need to fire everyone and rip the pipes out of the walls to achieve your aims.
Now, a team of supervillains from the Heritage Foundation and the ultra-right has assembled a 920-page document calling for the demolition of government as we know it, to usher in a new, deranged century:
Project 2025 is candid about its ultimate goal: to reprogram the U.S. administrative state to support and sustain archconservative rule for decades to come. The distinguishing features of this regime would include a far more politicized bureaucracy, immunity against meaningful public or congressional oversight, abusive deployment of agency enforcement capabilities as a tool of political retribution, and aggressive manipulation of federal program implementation in the image of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and economic inequality.
There have always been those who wish to remake America from their religious authoritarian fever dreams, but they were relegated to the political fringes. Now, in Trump, they are so confident they’ve got a willing vessel for their dark future they are openly campaigning on seizing and holding power by shredding political norms.
2025ers would fire thousands of civil servants, implement political purity tests across all levels of government, and do away with any agencies whose agenda they disagree with. Unsurprisingly, they want to eliminate environmental and civil rights protections, unravel decades of labor law, and inject conservative Christianity and white supremist dogma into D.C.’s veins.
Theirs is a nihilist approach - the manifesto lists an endless number of targets to destroy, while remaining vague on how it would fix what its authors view as broken. What they do know is that government in its current form is an existential threat, and they’re ready to snuff it out of existence rather than live another day under its yoke. If Trump wins and the Project 2025 demons get their way, America will be a whole lot different by the time they’re done.
Regulations
Even if Trump doesn’t win, the Supreme Court has done its part to unravel governmental authority:
Shortly before handing down Trump v. U.S., the court issued Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturning a four-decade-old ruling that served as the basis for some 18,000 lower court decisions. Loper Bright abolished Chevron deference, the rule that federal courts should defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws. By doing so, it seriously curbed Congress’ latitude to enact laws that address a serious problem then allow agencies to fill in the details and gaps.
And, just like that, a bunch of judges decided that they should be the final decision on any regulatory rules not explicitly written by Congress - though, of course, Congress had already explicitly granted agencies said leeway in enacting said laws, but that didn’t sit well with Roberts:
“[A]gencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” the majority ruling asserts. “Courts do.”
What he’s saying is that, despite the fact that judges have been ruling on lawsuits against government regulators for the entirety of Chevron’s existence, overruling the precedent was important for, you know, reasons. Also, that judges know better than the literal subject matter experts at regulatory agencies whose entire job it is to think about these things.
What does this mean? Despite the Court’s concern trolling that previously decided rules should remain in place, we know that every right wing legal organization has a slate of cases ready to file against every protection, civil right, and government decision they disagree with.
It’s been mere days and we’ve already seen a judge block the FTC’s ban on noncompete agreements, and another shut down antidiscrimination protections for transgender Americans, citing the Court’s ruling. By stripping away all appearance of regulatory leeway, it has opened the door for anyone to sue the government for anything, and made federal judges the final say in how our country is run.
Not only is this going to grind regulatory agencies to a halt as they prepare for waves of lawsuits, it is going to inundate an already overburdened federal circuit court system - there simply aren’t enough judges and lawyers to handle all the spurious cases enemies of oversight can throw at them.
Like Citizen’s United opened the floodgates to dirty money in politics and overwhelmed our flimsy election laws, Loper is going to fill our court systems with challenges to any and every protection we’ve enjoyed for the last forty years.
Power
We’ve watched helplessly as a tiny number of venal shitheads secure near absolute power for themselves and strip it away from everyone else. As I think about how bad this will be for the average American, I return to a question - why?
Why are the already rich and powerful so obsessed with imposing misery on people who’ve done nothing to them? What makes an oil baron so frothing mad at the government for only making him a single-digit billionaire that he spends millions of his dollars rigging the political system (and the courts) just so he can get another fractional win? What good is all that money when you’ve destroyed everything else?
With Trump, the motivations are clear - he has never been rich, and has teetered one or two bad deals away from financial ruin for most of his adult life. His criminality seemed like it might be about to catch up with him, so he’s allied himself with people who share his belief that (white collar) crime should be legal, and anyone who disagrees should themselves be jailed.
For the rest of the MAGAverse - the grinning hedge fund sharks and business magnates who love giving interviews insisting they’ve had it so bad under a president who’s overseen record business profits and a booming economy - what the fuck are you doing? Is it so bad to be rich and mildly loathed by the general public, whom you can safely avoid in your cocoon of wealth?
The answer, of course, is that it is not enough, and these people feel they deserve not only unchecked power, but loyalty, fealty, and adoration from the shivering masses they are so eager to grind into dust. It is why they love Project 2025, and Trump, and all the other loathsome politicians who’ve sworn to enact their feudal visions across the country. Winning by every available metric isn’t enough, they must be worshipped for the geniuses they are so certain they are.
We are witnessing the swift decline and perhaps destruction of the world’s richest democracy, because a small group of its most powerful are perpetually aggrieved that somewhere, someone may be holding their success against them.
And so, as we celebrate another year of America, its existence quivers atop a knife edge of hubris. We have the power to drive these nihilists out of government and out of power, but will we? Or will they bring us all down with them?
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Short Cons
NYT - “In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, the senator noted that insurance companies were charging Americans for contraceptives that, under federal law, should be free — and that they were also denying appeals from consumers who were seeking to have their contraceptives covered. Some experts estimate that those practices could affect access to birth control for millions of women.”
Bloomberg - “After emerging from the fog of the early pandemic, mothers found that when working from home was combined with reliable child care, the dual demands of work and home were easier to meet.”
Bloomberg - “There are 800,000 incarcerated workers in the US, and they do roughly $10 billion worth of work a year, more than $2 billion of it for clients outside the prison system, according to a 2022 study by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago.”
NYT - “South Africa’s public health care system has run out of the human insulin pens that it provides to people with diabetes, as the pharmaceutical industry shifts production priorities to blockbuster weight-loss drugs that use a similar device for delivery.”
CNN - “The study found that ChatGPT provided accurate responses to only about 10 of the questions, or about a quarter of the total. For the other 29 prompts, the answers were incomplete or inaccurate, or they did not address the questions.”
AP - “A jury in U.S. District Court ordered the NFL to pay nearly $4.8 billion in damages Thursday after ruling that the league violated antitrust laws in distributing out-of-market Sunday afternoon games on a premium subscription service.”
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