Congress Is the Entire Illness

Opponents of the new Constitution warned that the framers had put too much power in one figure, a new king who would sit at the head of the executive branch. Better, they thought, to disperse the executive power — maybe an executive council or something, with shared authority. Alexander Hamilton answered them, writing as one of the three Federalists who published under the name Publius, in a series of essays on the nature of the executive, this proposed thing called a “President of the United States.”

The new office of President, he wrote, would be weighed down and boxed in on all sides. The people could remove him after four years if he failed them, and he could be impeached and removed even more quickly than that. He commanded the army and the navy that Congress would authorize him to raise, but only Congress could declare war. He could fill subordinate offices, but the Senate would have to agree. And so on: the power of the single office would be restrained by the diligence of the people who watched and checked the actions of the executive branch. The great weight of balancing wisdom in other branches, and in the people, would keep the President of the United States from becoming a despot. With their duty to approve treaties and appointments, among other responsibilities, the statesmen of the Senate would stand astride the bulwarks, guarding the republic. Now, watch:

“Are you supportive of these onesies,” the man shouted.

The dismal sad-sackery of performative checks and balances descends into a moment in which we can’t choose the civilian head of the military department until Mazie Hirono brings her wisdom to bear on the appropriateness of the choice. Senators babble dimwitted tantrum-spew at executive branch appointees, who sigh heavily and sneak peaks at the clock.

Tina Smith, an abject idiot whose primary qualification for elected office is that she worked at Planned Parenthood, ranted at Robert F. Kennedy today about SSRIs, which Kennedy reasonably described as addictive and under-studied. Smith called him a liar, and used the dreaded word “misinformation.” She said in response to his caution about pharmaceuticals that when she was younger, she felt depressed, so she took SSRIs, “which helped me to clear my mind, get me back on track to being a mom and a wife and a productive, happy person.” Then she added: “And I think everyone should have access to that care. And your job as Secretary is to expand access to care.” So being a healthy person is taking pills, and the role of government is to get more people on as many pills as possible.

Watch all of this if you can stomach it, but the exchange about pills causing health and everyone needing way more pills starts at 3:50:

Donald Trump is signing an enormous number of executive orders, restructuring American society and the economy in consequential ways through the unilateral use of power from his position as the head of a single branch of government. This is flatly not the way the constitutional republic is supposed to work. But Trump isn’t the person who broke it. He arrives in a moment when Congress is just an absolute pile of shit, dumb and broken and loud and worthless. Blaming Trump for the moment is like walking into the final moments of the third act and thinking you’ve seen the whole play. Congress should make the laws, and the President of the United States should take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That structure went out the window a long time ago, exact timing subject to debate.

“ARE YOU SUPPORTIVE OF THESE ONESIES!?!?” Vacuums are filled. Congress, imploding, has created one. Then Trump arrives.

Dr. Eithan Haim almost went to prison over an absurd prosecutorial construction of nonsensical HIPAA violations, but here’s the thing to notice about the patient privacy standards in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act:

So Congress passed a law that made it illegal to violate patient privacy standards, but then said — in the law that they were passing — that they didn’t know what the patient privacy standards were. They asked the executive branch to come back and tell them, so they could pass another law later that would say what the first law had meant, but they also conceded the possibility that they wouldn’t be able to pass the second law to explain what they meant in the first law, so they invited the executive branch to just announce the meaning of the law: If the new law is not enacted, “the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall promulgate final regulations containing such standards.”

It’s illegal to do (we’re not sure, but you figure it out).

That’s the context in which you get a new President of the United States who runs the country, not merely the executive branch, by issuing a bunch of orders. Congress, complaining about Trump, could solve the problem. But they’d have to not be idiots and dirtbags and empty vessels.

So I think that Donald Trump is issuing a bunch of orders that are remarkably sane and reasonable, and I simultaneously don’t think that the President of the United States should issue orders that remake the nation and the society, and I simultaneously think that Trump is behaving in a way that makes sense in the total functional absence of the institutional structure that’s supposed to define the republic.

I don’t know how to solve that problem, but that is the problem. The Article I branch is an absence at the heart of the American republic. The Article II branch is currently also the Article I branch, because the actual Article I branch is just hanging there like a dead limb on a sick tree. I challenge you to watch the RFK, Jr. confirmation hearings and argue for a different conclusion.