Where is our nation headed?

I posted this image and text this morning to BlueSky, Meta, and TwittX:

THIS is likely where we’re headed, given that the Article I Branch is now in hospice care with a DNR.

That photo jibe is a knock-off from a WWII fascist quote aimed at the Pope. Hyperbolic today?

 

Consider, from Joyce Vance's new book, just released.

 

to wit,

...Judicial review positions the Court, arguably the weakest of the three branches of government, to determine when one of the other branches exceeds the scope of its constitutional authority and to countermand the unconstitutional act. 

Marbury v. Madison establishes the principle of judicial review, which allows courts to assess laws passed by Congress for constitutionality. The contours of judicial review are not laid out in the Constitution, but Chief Justice Marshall understood that if the new nation were to have a functional rule of law, the Supreme Court had to have both the authority to deem laws unconstitutional and to overrule them so they could not stay in effect in violation of the Constitution. 

But what about unconstitutional acts by a president? [emphasis mine] That part of the equation was explicitly confirmed by the Court in a case heard a century and a half later. By then, plenty of case law already pointed to this obvious conclusion, but the Court made plain: Even a president can’t bypass the courts and ignore judges’ decisions. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, decided in 1952, the Supreme Court refused to let President Harry Truman take over US steel mills during the Korean War. Though Truman didn’t like the decision, he complied. That’s how the rule of law works. 

By December 1951, trouble was brewing in the nation’s steel mills. There was a dispute with organized labor over wages and working conditions. But the United States had been at war in Korea for more than a year, and China had also entered the fray. Then, negotiations with the United Steelworkers of America, a powerful union, failed. The union filed notice that it would strike at the end of the month when existing agreements with employers expired. Federal mediation with the union was tried and failed. Truman sent the case to the Federal Wage Stabilization Board in an effort to avoid a major disruption of material in such a delicate moment. That failed as well, and the union gave notice that a nationwide strike would commence on April 9, 1952. 

The Court explained what President Truman did next in its opinion: “The indispensability of steel as a component of substantially all weapons and other war materials led the President to believe that the proposed work stoppage would immediately jeopardize our national defense and that governmental seizure of the steel mills was necessary in order to assure the continued availability of steel. Reciting these considerations for his action, the President, a few hours before the strike was to begin, issued Executive Order 10340…. The order directed the Secretary of Commerce to take possession of most of the steel mills and keep them running.” The issue before the Court was whether a president had the power to take this action via executive order. 

The steel companies tried to fight off the executive order in court, arguing that the president lacked the power to make the seizures because neither the Constitution nor an act of Congress granted it to him. On April 30, 1952, the district court ruled in their favor and enjoined the government’s seizure. The court of appeals weighed in the same day, but it came to the opposite conclusion. It stayed the district court’s injunction, which meant the president could move forward. In a display of the speed with which the Supreme Court can act when motivated, it granted certiorari, agreeing to hear the case on May 3, and set it for oral argument on May 12. 

Plenty of case law from the intervening 149 years since Marbury pointed toward the conclusion the Supreme Court reached in Youngstown, but its decision settled the matter once and for all…

Vance, Joyce. Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy (pp. 24-26). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 Will Donald Trump simply scoff? He scoffs crudely at everything else these days

 

 Joyce's Substack (I subscribe).

 

Click here.

Below, another worthy read.

 

 

 

 

BACK TO JOYCE

 

Cutting to the chase.

 

 

UPDATE

 

From Rick Wilson's Substack.

[Steve] Bannon is road-testing a narrative that treats the Constitution as negotiable, the law as elastic, and power as a permanent condition of the right people in the right offices. He’s not coy about it either. Asked how they’d get around the pesky “no third term” rule, he purred that there are “many different alternatives,” and that, at the “appropriate time,” he’d unveil the plan.

Translation: they’re workshopping pathways to normalize the unthinkable and daring the rest of us to stop them.

This is how authoritarians advance: by saying the quiet part out loud until it isn’t quiet anymore. They float the balloon, smirk while you sputter, then call your protest hysteria. The goal isn’t persuasion; it’s habituation. Bannon’s prediction isn’t a legal argument; it’s a loyalty oath: accept that Trump is destiny, that elections are a formality, and that rules are for the weak.

'eh?