Global Thermonator Gold blasting through $4000 at $4060
Excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson post yesterday
The power being wielded by unelected officials in the Trump administration echoes the conditions of the U.S. government a century ago. In 1920, Republicans won a landslide victory. They put the handsome, back-slapping Warren G. Harding in the White House in what was widely interpreted as the country’s desire to leave the years of World War I behind them and to stop having to listen to President Woodrow Wilson’s preaching at them (one journalist called Wilson a “frozen flame of righteous intelligence”). Old-school Republicans who rejected the party’s early-twentieth-century progressivism won control of Congress.
But the victory offered no clear direction for the country. Party leaders had put Harding at the head of the ticket because he was from Ohio, whose loss in 1916 had cost the Republicans the presidency. Harding celebrated his anti-intellectualism and the fact that, even after a world war, he knew nothing about Europe. He told one of his secretaries he couldn’t make heads or tails of fights over taxes, and he was such a terrible speaker that one man commented that his speeches “leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes those meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”
Harding could not manage his corrupt appointees, who became known as the “Ohio Gang,” and spent much of his time drinking and playing poker upstairs at the White House. In the absence of a strong president, the power of the government could have flowed to Congress. But congressional Republicans had spent twenty years obstructing the progressive presidents who had been in the White House since 1901: first Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and then Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Republicans in Congress had become skilled at obstruction, but once in power, they split into factions and quarreled among themselves.
Into the vacuum stepped administration officers, notably Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. With them at the helm, the government implemented pro-business policies that would turn the government over to businessmen. Eight years later, the conflagration of the Great Crash and the ensuing Great Depression illustrated just how misguided the abdication of elected lawmakers from their duties had been.
In the second Trump administration, the president does not seem especially interested in governance. He seems to want to use the government to persecute those he considers his enemies and to protect and enrich himself.
Attorney General Pam Bondi encapsulated that approach to the government when she appeared today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She refused to answer questions, instead attacking Democratic senators. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) pointed out that Bondi refused to answer whether she consulted with career ethics lawyers before approving the gift of a $400 million airplane for Trump from Qatar, who asked that Trump’s name be flagged in the Epstein files, whether “border czar” Tom Homan kept the $50,000 bribe he took for promising to steer contracts toward the men who offered the money, whether career prosecutors found insufficient evidence to charge former FBI director James Comey with lying to Congress, how military strikes on boats in the Caribbean are legal, and so on.
Many observers noticed something else, though: Bondi refused to answer a specific question about Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked: “There has been public reporting that Jeffrey Epstein showed people photos of President Trump with half-naked young women. Do you know if the FBI found those photographs in their search of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe or premises or otherwise. Have you seen any such thing?”
Bondi, who says she has seen the files, would not answer “no.” Instead, she accused Whitehouse of “trying to slander President Trump.”
If Trump were not going to use the power of the government for the good of the American people, Republicans in Congress could have picked up the power that he let fall. But they have chosen not to exercise their Constitutional duties, instead going along with what White House officials want. With their abdication, power appears to have flowed to unelected officials, first to billionaire Elon Musk and now to OMB director Russell Vought, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As the senior White House official told Caputo: “OMB is in charge.”
But those officials were not elected and are operating according to deeply unpopular ideologies.
Miller has been pushing the idea that those opposed to the administration are engaged in “insurrection” against the United States, and reporters are increasingly questioning Trump about whether he would invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. That law permits a president to override the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the government from using federal troops against U.S. citizens to enforce the law. Trump’s advisors prevented him from invoking the Insurrection Act in his first term, but he seems open to the idea again, falsely suggesting that Democratic cities are, as he described Portland, Oregon, “War ravaged.”
Today in an interview with CNN, Miller went further, claiming that the president has “plenary authority,” that is, complete, unchecked power, to use the military to put down an insurrection. Miller stopped talking, oddly, in midsentence after making that claim, leaving this exception to the rule of law his final phrase. The claim that exceptions to the rule of law reveal where true power rests in a society is central to the philosophy of Carl Schmitt, a German political scientist who joined the Nazis.