The most consequential moves by Donald Trump since his return to the White House — his various attempts to dramatically increase presidential authority and circumvent 200-plus years of precedent on the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government — have stunned millions of Americans, for good reason.
But will his power grabs hold up in court? There is nothing in their history to suggest that four of the six justices who make up the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will blanketly accept them. John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s liberal wing — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — are seven solid votes to preserve historic U.S. checks and balances.
This is why Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, no fan of Trump, wrote this week, “For now, let’s take the stress test one burst at a time, and try to keep breathing.” Here’s hoping Feldman is right.
Yet it’s worth ing there are many Trump voters who ed him not because they wanted a remake of democracy but because of a genuine belief that he would provide needed changes on huge issues. This group should also be deeply dismayed by the early weeks of Trump 2.0 and the return of his “ready, fire, aim” management style. Here are two examples:
In California, the idea that there is something seriously out of whack with the Golden State’s water policies is hardly a far-right proposition. This is why the Biden istration ed major changes. The evidence is in plain sight that environmental groups use laws like the Endangered Species Act much more as a tool to fight development — whether it be of dams and reservoirs or subdivisions — than because of genuine fears about the fate of the Delta smelt and other species. Those fears are real and legitimate. But how do they justify green groups’ opposition to desperately needed water storage facilities?
Unfortunately, the president has used his bully pulpit to advance the simply wrong idea that water from Northern California could have been easily conveyed to the Los Angeles area last month to fight the worst wildfires the region had ever seen. Then he doubled down on this claim with his dumbfounding decision to order the wintertime release of 2.2 billion gallons of water from two federally controlled reservoirs in the San Joaquin Valley.
The White House hasn’t made the case that this makes sense because it can’t. While Central Valley farm interests are huge Trump ers, The Sacramento Bee’s Tom Philp reported this week that at two water conferences, he found no one willing to defend Trump’s decision. Farmers know that water should have been saved for the summer.
At the federal level, the idea that many billions of dollars in spending is wasted — on the Pentagon, for starters, which has had increasingly ineffective oversight during this century’s military build-up — is hardly a far-right proposition. Richard Danzig, secretary of the Navy during the Clinton istration, has long warned that old-school bureaucracies within the Defense Department reflexively fight basic reforms on procurement in favor of continuing to buy expensive weapons designed for U.S. needs in the 20th century.
As shown by comments from Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, the potential for a blockbuster bipartisan effort to force change used to be plain. But after Elon Musk’s scattershot attempts to downsize government by his seemingly illegal plan to induce mass resignations in the federal work force and his utterly inaccurate descriptions of how a half-dozen agencies use their money, this whiff of extremism may have closed that window. If so, that’s genuinely unfortunate.
Perhaps it is naive to say things didn’t have to be this way. Economist Tyler Cowen’s recent observation — that based solely on Trump’s behavior, it appears that his main goal isn’t changing the government but advancing red-meat cultural arguments and then enjoying the resulting applause — makes sense.
But after the applause dies down, will our government be better run? Cowen is skeptical. Especially after the dam stunt, Californians — including Trump voters — should be as well.
