This is the opening paragraph of today's 'Letter from an American' by Heather Cox Richardson.
Just after 1:00 this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named The One Big, Beautiful Bill. If passed, this measure will put Trump's wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”
Ignore the stupidity of the House of Representatives having to start a debate on a critical piece of legislation at one in the morning: this is just performative crassness to attract media attention to the Trump bandwagon.
Instead, focus on that issue around contempt of court, slipped into a Budget Bill.
This is quite staggering.
What it, in effect, says is that the US court system will now be sidelined and have no power over the administration of government in the USA.
The effect is that nothing the government does can be challenged. The court could rule against the government. Then the administration could ignore the court order, and there would be nothing at all that the court could do to enforce the ruling.
Contempt proceedings could not be brought.
The government could literally ignore the judicial system.
The essential checks and balances in a democracy would have failed.
The US Constitution would have been overthrown.
A totalitarian regime would be in power. And this Bill is likely to pass, with this provision in it.
The fascists will have taken control, and there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it after this, without the use of pitchforks (and I really do not like violence).
It will have taken a few months, in all, to dismantle democracy.
And please do not think it could not happen here. It could.
That is another unknown known that no one will talk about.
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I find myself wondering…
Will it be a Labour or a Reform government that dismantles what is left of our democracy? I’ve realised that I can’t easily answer that question, which is quite depressing.
A couple of years ago I worried about an increasingly authoritarian (Tory) Home Sec. clamping down on protest. Now I worry that Starmer may decide that his 420 MPs are getting uppity, and will be working out how to side-line Parliament. Our very vague constitution gives us few protections, it relies on convention and traditions, and Johnson showed us how fragile they were. Starmer could easily follow Johnson’s example, by proroguing parliament.
He might even manage to get enough compliant corrupt MPs to support him, but he wouldn’t NEED them. With a little help from Mr. Speaker, and a lie to the King, he could send the MPs on gardening leave and dust off all manner of “Henry VIII” powers or declare a national emergency.
We always think, “it can’t happen here”, then it does.
A minority gov’t proroguing Parliament to prevent its own defeat? The PM lying to the monarch? Retired Army generals telling us a Corbyn government would be removed? Soldiers using pictures of LOTO for target practice? The government “legislating” to flout international law?
It couldn’t happen here… but it did.
And Starmer is far more dishonest, far more ruthless, than Johnson.
It could happen here.
Agree on your main point, Richard, but as Chris Hayes pointed out in a segment of his MSNBC show on Tuesday evening the 1am hearings are held to discourage coverage – not the other way round. The segments isn’t available any more so I can’t link to it, but Hayes went through a series of contentions Bills that have been debated at the 1am – the most famous of which was John McCain’s thumbs down to Trumps first term effort to overturn Obamacare. Apparently hearings at 1am are not usually televised (as no technicians work at that hour), and they also miss the reporting window for the printed press – though that’s not such an issue nowadays.
On a positive note (?) Hayes went through the number of Republican Congressmen who are likely to lose their seats in the mid terms if they support this Bill – it would certainly hand Congress to the Democrats – with what that entails for Trumps impeachment in early 2027. That said, I still believe that there’ll be no mid term elections – or if there are Trump will not accept the results (Johnson could simply decline to take on the ratification process in Congress -which I’m sure he would as he’s Trump’s arch lapdog).
On a slightly related note, I can’t see many world leaders wanting to visit the White House over the coming months/years after witnessing what happened to the President of South Africa yesterday. I watched the “show” – for that was what it was – live. Interestingly, I though something odd was going to happen as for the most part Trump couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with Ramaphosa even in the initial chat, when they were talking about golf.
However, there’s one thing you can always rely on with Trump – just when you thought he could get any baser, more vulgar, more disgusting, more corrupt and more twisted he always pushes things further. What was it he used to say: drain the swamp. Well we know now what he actually meant: I’ll drain the swamp – of it’s mud – and fill it full of stinking shit instead. After all, in your in for a penny you many as well be in for a $400 milion dollar plane.
There is a video on this tomorrow….in edit now
See also:
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-hidden-provision-in-the-big-ugly
Even more chilling after seeing on BBC4 earlier this week , how easy it was for democracy to be overthrown in early thirties Germany
I have some dear American friends in Las Vegas, Davis (California), Tacoma Park, Ann Arbor, Denver, New York &Washington DC. Reading this article makes me almost too depressed to comment. I just know the liberal United States where I once lived -and met some of the friends above- is very rapidly being dismantled and life is about to get really tough for the poorest. “Voters remorse” is surely going to rise up rapidly.
The EU (& the UK ) need to detach themselves from the USA. Man-baby has seen what works in Ruzzia & wants the same in the USA.
The only open question is: what rousing song (marching song?) will the Maga imbeciles pick for the new regime? Something to stir the soul & go with the thump of marching boots on the ground etc etc. Something Wessel perhaps?
(oh & speaking of pogroms – I predict given the events in Washington – of a progrom against Palestiniains in the USA).
Awful. We can only hope and pray that what’s left of US democratic structures and the complex nature of the legislative process will provide the opportunities and mechanisms to push back.
Additional to my earlier comment, here’s a link to Lawrence O’Donnell talking about the Big Beautiful Bill Act and it’s impact, put together by “Sadistic Zombies” as Paul Krugman labelled them. https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-the-trump-republican-budget-bill-is-the-work-of-sadistic-zombies-240088133695
Thanks
For later
The UK has already stopped being democratic.
MPs have been “bought” with “donations”.
The BBC has been captured by the Right.
Regulatory agencies have been captured by corporations.
Only 20% of the population voted for Starmer, who lied about every election pledge he had.
The right to protest has gone.
And there is no legal way to overturn the government.
No, we are a long way from where the US now is
The Bill has passed
Sorry to be a misery guts, but the bad guys always win. Fortunately, they always lose as well. Project 2025 is so full of contradictory and competing interests that the Right-Wing Trump coalition will tear itself apart. Unfortunately, regular Americans will have to live through it. If this bill passes and essentially makes Trump king, the process will be longer and harder, but eventually, Trump will destroy himself.
So, Trump’s “Enabling Bill” comes forward as an Act!
We should not forget that in one of his campaign speeches Trump said people wouldn’t have to bother voting in future – glossed over and ignored, but apparently an ulterior objective.
Of course, he’s clearly both impeachable and capable of conviction, and of being thrown out of office, for brazenly breaking his oath, sworn at his Inauguration, to protect the Constitution.
However, with a gerrymandered Congress (and the Republicans have gerrymandered the whole US electoral system), that’s not going to happen – pigs might fly, and there are fairies at the bottom of my garden.
Ultimately this lies at the door of the corrupt establishment Democrats, who failed to deal with Biden’s dementia, or at least his failing mental capacity, early enough, and decisively enough, to ensure Trump was convincingly, and unarguably, defeated by selecting a really strong candidate, and one who opposed the Gaza genocide, which Kamala Harris clearly did not, being a fervent Zionist.
Alas, Democrats are too much Wall Street rather than Main Street, having forgotten their real blue collar raison d’etre in their eagerness to stay on the gravy train of Washington DC, quite apart from the fact that most of them – both sides of Congress, actually – have been tied in golden fetters by AIPAC.
What a way to run a nation. What a way to run the world. The USA is sleepwalking into Fascism, and taking us, and a lot of the world, with it.
Thanks
It really is astonishing.
Trump, leader of the Republican party, will become, essentially, an unaccountable Monarch.
So, 151 years after Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’, America seems likely to overturn not just their constitution, their vision and rights as set out in the Declaration of Independence, but also democracy and the system of accountability intended to avoid exactly this kind of event.
So, swap one mad King for another —– progress, eh ?
Oops! Make it 250 years!
I wasn’t sure where to add what I have to say here, as it’s relevant to all of your blogs today, to some – mostly large – extent, and it also underpins what you said in your new short introductory video to your You Tube channel.
I want to quote something which I actually covered many years ago in a course I authored for the OU. It’s from Steven Lukes ‘Power:a radical view’ (2nd Edition).
‘The “vehicle fallacy” is commited by those tempted by the idea that power must mean whatever goes into operation when power is activated. This idea has led soiologists and military analysts, for example, to equate power with power resources, such as wealth and status, or military forces and weapons. But having the means of power is not the same as being powerful. As the United States discovered in Vietnam and postwar Iraq, having military superiority is not the same as having power. In short, observing the exercise of power can give evidence of possession, and counting power resources can be a clue to distribution, but power is a capacity, and not the exercise or the vehicle of that capacity.’ (Lukes, 2005:70).
To which, elsewhere in the book, Lukes adds: ‘…we need to think about power broadly rather than narrowly – in three dimensions rather than one or two – and that we need to attend to those aspects of power that are least accessible to observation: that, indeed, power is at its most effective when least observable.’ (p.1).
Your blog on ‘known unknowns’ brought the latter to mind, while Trumps treatment of the President of SA was very much Trump and his cronies recognising that power is a capacity that they posses, and relying on Ramaphosa and his delegation recognising that too – which they clearly did.
Thanks, Ivan.
I like that idea. I will definitely muse on it.
What the idea explains is why those with power almost invariably lose it eventually, despite having all the odds stacked in their favour. There are tipping points.
Glad it was useful, Richard.
Of course, others have touched on the same conclusions as Lukes. C. Wright Mills wrote about elites in the 1950s and concluded much the same – though not explained as well as Lukes. Also Gramsci, with his thinking on hegemony, under which he examined how “consent” was manufactured amongst the citizenry, even when that consent led to outcomes that were against their own interests – as with Trump’s MAGA crowd now.
If I recall correctly, at one time I wrote some papers looking at this issue from a critical realist perspective and how structural, cultural and ideational factors all shape and condition how we act, both as individual agents and groups. In other words, a critical realist take on power.
I better stop there otherwise I’ll get all starry eyed for “the good old days” as an academic!
🙂
I learned I have had a paper accepted today….
Give it two years and it might see the light of day
The trick seems to be making sure that the serfs are kept totally unaware of their power, as consumers, as providers of labour, as disrupters, as thinkers, as a majority, as opinion formers.
Occasionally individuals come along who successfully dispel that ignorance, some through violence, some by creative non-violent resistance, some with ideas and education, and then powerful systems tumble (for a while) until human greed re-establishes its hegemony.
For example: (a very partisan and arbitrary incomplete selection)
Jesus of Nazareth
Tyndale and the English Bible
Cromwell and the New Model Army
Karl Marx
John Wesley
Tom Paine
Samuel Sharpe
Mahatma Gandhi
Emily Pankhurst
Clement Atlee
Nelson Mandela
Martin Luther-King Jr
Salvador Allende
Oscar Romero
(Sorry for the male bias)
The success of many of these disrupters (and what also defined the limits of their success) often lay in their ability to unite different sectional interests in common cause against a common oppressor. Their failures often followed the success of the powerful in “divide and rule” tactics.
Cromwell conflicts me….
Others might as well
But I get your point.
I should add, these are not listed as perfect heroes but successful disrupters. So yes Cromwell illustrates how to fail as well as how to succeed. I’m personally more inspired by the creative ideas being explored in the Putney Debates than Cromwell’s decline into authoritarian almost theocratic dynastic rule.
Fair comment. I like that anyone can still fish St Mary’s Putney.
In response to Richard, I think Cromwell went bonkers are winning the 2 civil wars and a bit of head chopping. It is almost as if he went to the dark side & used religion to justify it. There was no counterbalancing force. Very sad & a warning from history. (& what he did to the levellers and those that disagreed with him was inexcusable).
I was referring to his actions in Ireland, above all.
And is Trumps visit still going ahead in September ? How low can this country get.