Your Job Is to Push the Yes Button

the secretaries make the game clear

Notice when a counter-argument doesn’t describe the argument: I refute (thing I will only vaguely reference). This mode of “argument” is somehow becoming the new normal, quickly.

A gaggle of former Secretaries of the Treasury — Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen — warn in the New York Times today that the President of the United States is interfering with the operations of the executive branch. No, really. It remains entirely true that warnings about the threat to “Our Democracy” are, in fact, warnings about the threat to Our Bureaucracy.

Five people who’ve served at the top levels of the federal government can’t produce one clear and reasonable premise between them. After a bunch of throat clearing, the fourth paragraph begins the actual attempt at an argument:

The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.

The administrative state is impartial, honest, accurate, and pure. “Civil servants” are good; political people are bad. But this is how Article II begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Our entire system of government is premised on the authority of people who, having been elected to office, are accountable to be the people of the country for their choices. A function of government that “has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants”: not present in the Constitution. Prove otherwise, if you’d like to try. Show me the authority of that “very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants” in Article II, and tell me exactly where to find it.

Five former senior government officials, feeling themselves wonderfully virtuous, have casually upended the entire American system of government without noticing that they’ve done it. Dire warning: The President of the United States is acting like he’s in charge of the executive branch.

Their second argument, abandoning their Fiona Hill maneuver about the president interfering with the apparatus of government, is merely willfully obtuse:

A key component of the rule of law is the executive branch’s commitment to respect Congress’s power of the purse: The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.

But notice, when you read the thing, that they never actually identify the place where the executive branch is currently refusing to honor “Congress’s power of the purse.” They’re arguing against an argument that they never mention or refute, which is that the executive branch is not spending money the way Congress has directed it to spend that money. This is what they’re arguing against, but they don’t mention it or discuss it:

The argument Congress has the power of the purse isn’t a rebuke of an audit that seeks to evaluate spending controls and figure out where the money has been going. There are many more examples of Musk — and therefore Trump, whose authority Musk is acting under as an advisor to the president — making this argument about checking to see where the money is going:

1. We’re looking for fraud and mispayments

2. No, Congress has the power of the purse!

Absolute nonsense. Lewis Carroll couldn’t have topped it.