I don’t have much to live for anymore.
My Dad died. My Mom died. My brothers died. My two best friends died. My dogs died.
And as I go on, everything I loved and everything I care about dies out before me.
As I get older it is increasingly clear that I am not immortal and I am getting less immortal all the time.
I now basically have the old-fashioned idea that I should just try to leave this world a better place than I found it, or at least not make it worse.
And I had thought that the United States of America would outlive me, but now I’m not so sure.
Because this week, Elon Musk, the actual chief executive of the United States, commandeered the records of the entire US Treasury and sent his own personal staff, who were not government employees, to come in with personal unsecured devices in order to purge the bureaucracy, taking out the separate USAID charity organization (supposedly now being shifted to the State Department) while also seeking to defund or outright eliminate other agencies like the Department of Education. [NOTE: I just found out that the Trump ‘administration’ agreed to restrict DOGE staff access to Treasury records “after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system — and the personal data housed in it — violated federal privacy laws.”]
Now, I still consider myself a right-winger, so in principle I would be in favor of killing the Department of Education. After all, most of the people who voted for Trump after he gave us all Trump Virus ™ were products of American public schools, so clearly it’s not doing any good.
But even if you could make cases against a lot of these agencies, the fact is it is not Elon Musk’s place to cut the funding. The Congress in Article I of the Constitution has sole power of the purse and the executive branch is there to make sure its funds are administered as Congress directs. Even if Vice President Trump designates Musk and his boy band “special government employees” after the fact they have no certification in that system. And nobody, including Republicans, elected Elon Musk to effectively have more power than the President does. This is nothing less than a coup.
We could fight them for real, but as Eric Stratton says, that would take years, and cost millions of lives. The saving grace of our situation is that these people are as incompetent as they are evil. In past examples of encroaching tyranny, we had previously used the example of a frog in a pot of water, which is gradually turned up to the boiling point slowly enough that the frog doesn’t realize what is happening and cooks to death. Well, the Trump-Musk Party decided to just turn the stove to full boil then take the metal pot off the stove and shove it in the microwave.
The escalation is getting to the point that it may raise a critical mass of people against it, including some Trump voters, like all those senior citizens who now know that their Social Security records are in the hands of the world’s most powerful drug addict.
But even if we could claw back some of this power grab, we will never get back to the status quo ante, because it no longer exists. The precedent has been set. The precedent being, that once a guy is elected president, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Even if he’s not currently president. He can stage an insurrection against his successor’s certification, send a mob into the Capitol to try and kill the Speaker of the House and his own Vice President, and not get prosecuted. He can run for president again despite being an insurrectionist, because the Supreme Court wants to pretend the 14th Amendment doesn’t exist. He can steal classified documents from the White House and not get prosecuted because he’s running for president again. And when he gets re-elected he can have Elon Musk and his chemically addled commandos seize control of the infrastructure with no certification whatsoever. Why? Because we let the president do anything he wants. And this is a standard that was set long before Trump. And if you’re a Democrat, not taking advantage of that is handicapping yourself. People complained that Biden pardoned his son, like that was going to be a lowering of our legal standards. But those standards no longer exist. Biden was simply acknowledging that fact.
We need to acknowledge it too.
The system is broken. It cannot be glued back together like a Japanese vase. We need to start over.
We need a Constitution 2.0.
Laws in and of themselves will not restrain evil men, for the reasons we’ve seen, but we can at least change the incentives to make abuse less likely, and resetting the system will make it more clear that the precedent of abuse will no longer stand.
Now, I am not a lawyer, nor do I have a Political Science degree, but neither does Elon Musk, and that’s not stopping him. I think that we need to have this discussion sooner rather than later, and in my next posts I want to go over my ideas for what ought to be changed. You could even call it a prolegomena, if you want to get all Kantian and pretentious.
But prior to going over my ideas, I would need to explain the basis of where they are coming from, so in my next post I want to go over what my philosophy and political positions are now and how I got to that point.