Tag Archives: The Heritage Foundation

A Chilling Plan In The Works

Posted on by under Economic issues, education, Election 2024, Environmental Issues, Free Press Issues, History, Law and justice, Political commentary

Presumably, every president in this nation has at some point chafed at certain limitations to his power, constraints on his ability to pursue his agenda, but to date none have gone so far as to dictatorially remove those constraints.  If the people of the United States throw caution to the wind in November 2024 and foolishly elect a former president who attempted to overturn the 2020 election, that could change.  Donald Trump is a ‘man’ without a conscience, a ‘man’ who does not believe in democracy and does not care about the nation – he cares only about his own lust for power, wealth, and adoration.  A story in the New York Times this morning literally chilled my blood.

Remember back in 2019 when, frustrated with the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, Trump said …

“Then, I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Obviously, his ignorance knew no boundaries for him to spout such nonsense, but today as he makes his bid to once again be elected, he has a whole team working tirelessly to turn his nonsense into reality, into our worst nightmare.  That team includes the anti-democratic group, The Heritage Foundation, an anti-democratic, ultra-conservative think tank who had outsized influence on Trump during his four years in office.  They are, according to the NYT article, “planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”  If that doesn’t chill your blood, then I don’t know what will.  Handing nearly unlimited power to a megalomaniac with very little intelligence and a huge ego … what could possibly go wrong?

In the interest of time and space, I won’t copy the entire article here, but here are a few key excerpts …

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control [emphasis added] of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read the article in its entirety.  While it’s true that there are safeguards in place that should prevent much of what is being plotted, we have to ask just how secure those safeguards are if Trump is elected and immediately slides his own people into positions of power?  What’s at stake?  Well, the planet for one … Trump and The Heritage Foundation are climate change deniers and part of the ‘plan’ is to roll back environmental regulations that cut into the profits of large corporations.  They also plan to roll back regulations that were put in place to protect employees in the workplace.  And more.

There are numerous valid reasons that Donald Trump should never again set foot in the Oval Office, including his theft of classified documents, his role in the January 6th attempted coup, and his multiple attempts to overturn the 2020 election.  But perhaps the biggest reason of all lies in the plans being formed already, 16 months before the election, to literally shred the U.S. Constitution, taking us from a democratic republic to a full-on authoritarian government wholly dependent on the whims of one ‘man’ with no conscience, no integrity or values, and very little intelligence, but an oversized ego.

Who Are “We The People”?

Posted on by under education, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

The preamble to the United States Constitution reads …

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

But … just who are “We the People”?  Today, many of us consider that term to be all-inclusive … regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, religion, gender, wealth, etc., but it wasn’t that way in the beginning, and today many in the Republican Party would like to narrow the definition of We the People to mean only white Christians, preferably wealthy ones.  Columnist Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times, has a more in-depth take on it …

The Republican Party Is the Anti-Democracy Party

Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist, 03 August 2022

The word “democracy” never appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

However, democracy is central to the modern concept of America.

The founders seemed to prefer calling the burgeoning country a Republic rather than a democracy. Many were opposed to direct democracy and the possibility that demagogues could corrupt it or mob rule could overtake it. They instead designed a representative government in which “the people” would elect representatives who would make the laws and conduct the governance.

The problem, or course, was that their definition of “the people” was largely limited to wealthy white men, enslavers among them.

Over the years, America has expanded the definition of “the people” to include more Americans, but conservatives have resisted the expansion at every turn. And now, they are trying to drag the country backward, to pare down the ranks of those who can vote and to deny or invalidate elections in which voting populations, not yet pared down enough, deliver results with which they disagree.

We keep hearing people say that candidates, like some of the ones competing in Tuesday’s primaries, threaten our democracy. We heard during the Jan. 6 hearings about threats to our democracy. We have heard for years that Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy.

But it seems to me that we have to take a step back and realize that the current Republican Party has abandoned the idea of a full democracy.

Republicans want to revert the country to the way the founders conceived of it, when white men had outsize influence, when patriarchy prevailed, when white supremacy masqueraded as conventional wisdom.

Liberals often seem to me overly vexed by why Republicans don’t recognize the threat that Trump’s election denialism poses. The reason is clear to me: They have turned their backs on democracy.

For anti-democracy Republicans, Trump is an incredibly useful tool. His motivations are selfish and small, but the Republicans balking at full democracy have plans that are grand. They see themselves falling into a minority, so they want to devise a plan for minority rule.

And they are attacking the electoral process at every level to realize their goals.

By calling themselves traditionalist and constitutionalist, and by canonizing the flawed founders, they disguise their regression as preservation.

Conservatives now routinely make the point that America isn’t a democracy, but a Republic. The Heritage Foundation even published a report in 2020 entitled “America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy.” The report argued, “The contemporary efforts to weaken our republican customs and institutions in the name of greater equality thus run against the efforts by America’s Founders to defend our country from the potential excesses of democratic majorities,” and that the American system of government is “threatened by an egalitarianism that undermines the social, familial, religious, and economic distinctions and inequalities that undergird our political liberty.”

In their telling, the will of the majority itself seems to be a problem. I interpret this broadly: that a fuller democracy is, in the view of many conservatives, a disaster waiting to happen.

So we are seeing an epic clash playing out in America in which the parameters are not being fully, loudly delineated: The Democrats want a democracy; the Republicans don’t. The Republican Party is anti-democracy, post-democracy. While Democrats are screaming about a collapsing country, Republicans are already surveying the landscape of the America that will emerge from the wreckage.

George Thomas, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, argued in The Atlantic in 2020 that although the word “democracy” may not be in the Constitution, the spirit of it is. As he put it: “High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government. Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.”

Perversion, distortion and deceit now appear to be the spine of the Republican Party. It is no longer a party of ideas, but rather a party of atavism. It is a party frantically running down an ascending escalator.

The problem is that there is a real risk that the party will succeed in bringing the country down with it.

As Sue Halpern has written in The New Yorker, “The paradox of American democracy is that its survival is a choice; it persists solely at the discretion of an electorate that can, if it so wills, dismantle it.” Republicans are pushing the portion of the electorate they control to dismantle it.