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Klein tries to counter this argument from history by pointing out that 4 years of learning and prep by the Trump reelection team makes one of their high-priority goals be vetting top-level staff for compliance with Trump's desires and personal loyalty. Separately, his attempt at moving federal workers to Schedule F to remove protections against firing them and rehiring for loyalty and obedience late in his prior presidency tried and failed to do the same thing in medium- and low-level roles. Klein claims that this would remove the moderating factors that prevented pundits' fears from manifesting.
I don't know how the tension will resolve over time, between the need to maintain continuity in low-level staffing to enable daily operations versus the need to overwrite existing loyalty and power structures, but separately I worry about the damage the attempt will do to tacit institutional knowledge rather than procedural knowledge; cf the various worries about the shallower bench of talent on the right.
Wait Klein wants us to be scared that Trump might fire a bunch of entrenched bureaucrats with whom I have extreme disagreements and thinks that’s a bad thing?
Every time I see this ad on tv, I feel like Kamala is threatening me with a good time. Like I'm supposed to be upset that the young, well-groomed, attractive, upper-middle class white couple has to start having kids? or that old people should get less free money?
how does the federal government ban abortion? that seems beyond their power. i presume the FDA can ban / regulate abortion drugs but the FDA doesn't have the power to regulate surgical procedures. but it looks like commerce clause strikes again. just mention the magic words 'affecting interstate commerce' and the federal government can regulate anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Carhart
the other hilarious thing is if they argued against the federal government having the power to regulate abortion they would have been probably more likely to succeed given the make up of the court.
Birthing new Americans is a hell of a lot more impactful on interstate commerce than Wickard growing slightly more wheat that he's not selling. Interstate commerce can be scaled to infinity given the current standard.
You could make the flimsiest argument that not regulating abortion undercuts regulation on baby strollers and you're probably already there.
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Can't they also criminalize it? I could have sworn it used to be a crime in a bunch of places.
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The 14th Amendment gives the federal government the power to protect the right to life.
Ah but the unborn are not "citizens of the united states" yet are they?
For the right to life part, the relevant question is only whether they are persons: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
So in theory all that's needed then is for congress to modify 1 U.S. Code § 8 to include the unborn or to add a clause that includes them for some specific purposes?
I'm not that familiar with US Code, but I guess basically yes.
Looking up the code you referenced, modifying it looks sufficient and might not even be necessary, since it also says "(c)Nothing in this section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being “born alive” as defined in this section"
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Federal law already considers murdering a pregnant woman and her unborn child to be two murders. It was slightly controversial at the time, but hasn't quite (yet) been read the way you suggest.
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Klein made a compelling case but I still disagree with him. The first Trump admin was a mess, but I don't think it was a mess because of a lack of personal loyalty, it was a lack of ideological loyalty that led to that lack of personal loyalty. Add on to that that personal loyalty is basically impossible to vet (I mean, are you only going to hire ride or die Trump supporters that were willing to storm the capitol?), and that leaves you with a much more ideologically lockstep second Trump term, but I still think will hold back the super crazy Trump tendencies when their personal loyalty to follow him no matter what is tested..
If you operationalize "personal loyalty to Trump" as "conformist authoritarian tendencies", then we've had a profiling instrument for that for awhile courtesy of Bob Altemeyer at U Manitoba: https://theauthoritarians.org/ . You can take a version of his research questionnaire at http://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ to get the flavor of personality type that it's trying to detect. (No it doesn't capture every way there is to be authoritarian, yes woke is left authoritarian, it still seems relevant to answer the question at hand.) Couple that with "amount of pushback against direction from superiors" as an item of quarterly personnel review to set up evaporative cooling dynamics, have semiannual shit tests and purity spirals, and I bet by year 3 of a Trump admin you could get at least some of them to rerun Jonestown. Maybe have a not-legally-binding oath to Trump personally, just to engage the monkey brain a bit harder.
This would probably do terrible things to your talent pool, mind! It's basically building a cult around the Presidency, with direct interpersonal dynamics rather than parasocial ones like we've already seen with the Trump cult of personality. Selecting for that trait seems like it starts trading off against general competence, independence, ability to be delegated to, pretty quickly.
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The only way I can see something like that working is if congress repealed the Administrative Procedure Act, putting Trump and his immediate appointees in direct control of federal regulations.
Curtis Yarvin talks a lot about how no president has been truly in charge of the government since FDR. The reason for this is the Administrative Procedure Act.
Yarvin is wrong. The APA was in response to a growing administrative state and was an attempt to put safe guards on it. The biggest problem has been incredible deference to the administrative state ignoring the APA.
Loper Bright (and to a lesser extent Kisor) reduces some of that deference. The major questions doctrine reduces yet more. And the continued vitality of forcing administrative agencies to respond with real thoughts to comments shows the courts are finally taking the APA seriously.
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Which is silly, because the APA is a way of regularising the use of the broad powers delegated by Congress to the executive during the New Deal era. Pre-FDR Presidents had less control over the government, not more - both because the federal government had less control over "the government" viz-a-viz the states, and because the executive had less control over the federal government viz-a-viz Congress.
That the federal government was small enough for one man to control in 1890 and not in 1930 seems entirely plausible. But Yarvin defines the government as "that which is sovereign" - which in 1890 still meant the system of shared sovereignty between the feds and the states.
I’m afraid the ship had sailed by 1881 at the absolute latest.
I agree with you that the Pendleton Act is the point at which the US Executive Branch stops being a one-man show.
But the bigger change over the 20th century is the shift in power from Congress to the Executive.
Even now, the US government is more of a one-man show than it was when an effective House Speaker could have more power over domestic policy than the President did.
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Curtis Yarvin talks about a lot of things. Most of them don't hold up if one doesn't share his beliefs about philosopher-kings.
The President hasn't controlled the government since John Adams.
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Especially with Loper Bright overruling Chevron deference, the president has even less authority to regulate than they used to.
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