{"id":82547,"date":"2025-05-22T08:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T07:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=82547"},"modified":"2025-05-22T08:56:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T07:56:50","slug":"democracy-is-almost-over-in-the-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/05\/22\/democracy-is-almost-over-in-the-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy is almost over in the States"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the opening paragraph of today's 'Letter from an American<\/a>' by Heather Cox Richardson.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on \u201cthe authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,\u201d as Dean of Berkeley Law School\u00a0Erwin Chemerinsky<\/a>\u00a0explained in\u00a0Just Security<\/em>\u00a0Monday. \u201cWithout the contempt power,\u201d he writes, \u201cjudicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Instead, focus on that issue around contempt of court, slipped into a Budget Bill.<\/p>\n

This is quite staggering.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Contempt proceedings could not be brought.<\/p>\n

The government could literally ignore the judicial system.<\/p>\n

The essential checks and balances in a democracy would have failed.<\/p>\n

The US Constitution would have been overthrown.<\/p>\n

A totalitarian regime would be in power. And this Bill is likely to pass, with this provision in it.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

It will have taken a few months, in all, to dismantle democracy.<\/p>\n

And please do not think it could not happen here. It could.<\/p>\n

That is another unknown known<\/a> that no one will talk about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[215,14,203,106,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-age-of-aggression","category-corruption","category-fascism","category-politics","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82547"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82550,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82547\/revisions\/82550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}