THE RIGHT WING DEFENSE OF TRUMP IS TRADITIONAL REPUBLICANISM

QUOTING FROM NATIONAL REVIEW COLUMNIST JOHN YOO

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/how-donald-trump-defends-presidential-power/

Trump represents something new, but not in the way his critics imagine and fear. He has not played the role of standard populists, who usually seek to remove constitutional barriers to their reform agendas. Instead, he has become, by the end of his four years, an unexpected constitutional traditionalist who has relied on theories of executive power held by his predecessors — even (gasp) Barack Obama and George W. Bush — to defend the rights of his office. He has fought off the efforts of so-described progressives, who have wanted to revolutionize our constitutional order by vesting ever more power in a permanent bureaucracy with virtually limitless authority but without democratic accountability. Whether consciously or by reacting to his own political incentives (which the Constitution itself creates), Trump has become a stouter defender of our original governing document than his critics.

Progressives have unwittingly engineered similar results across the constitutional landscape. Even though Trump lost the popular vote in the 2016 election, he legitimately won the presidency under the rules of the Electoral College, which grants each state votes based on their number of members of the House and Senate (thereby favoring smaller states and, because states award all of its electoral votes to the winner, slightly muting the popular vote). Progressives responded by seeking to abolish the Constitution’s two-centuries-old method for presidential selection. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed the Electoral College is “a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic.” In spring 2019, Democratic senators Brian Schatz, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, and Kirsten Gillibrand even introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. Progressive intellectual leaders and retiring Representative John Dingell, the longest-serving member of the House, want to abolish the Senate too while they are at it. When it comes to defending our Constitution and its existing institutions, progressives eagerly cede the field to Trump.

Democrats would do even more damage to the constitutional order if they were to win this November. During the primaries, they launched proposals for a Medicare-for-All health-care system that would abolish private insurance, a Green New Deal that would escalate Washington’s control over the economy, federal wealth or sales taxes that violate the income-tax amendment, and the takeover of state and local areas of governance ranging from criminal justice to consumer contracts to property. Trump could protect the Constitution merely by winning the 2020 election (again through the Electoral College), governing with the Senate, and simply stopping progressive efforts to vest even more new powers in a permanent, unaccountable bureaucracy.

Third, Trump appointed a Supreme Court that could return the Constitution to its original understanding on questions ranging from federalism to individual liberties nominated Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, conservative judges with eminent qualifications, to the Supreme Court, and has filled more than a quarter of the lower courts with young, bright, conservative intellects. 

  The liberals rightly worry that these appointments augur a sea change in constitutional law that could threaten the vast administrative state, the creeping control of Washington, D.C., over everyday life, and even Roe v. Wade’s protections for abortion. Progressives responded by attacking the Supreme Court. During the Democratic presidential primaries, senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, among others, called for expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices so that the next Democratic president could pack it with liberals. Democrats have attacked the personal records of judicial nominees and have even threatened to impeach Kavanaugh for sexual-harassment claims that the Senate fully aired during his confirmation. All of these attacks leave Trump in the position of defending the Supreme Court and the institution of judicial independence.

These battles over presidential power and the Constitution provide an important insight into the political and constitutional change of the Trump years. Political analysts have observed that Trump represents a realignment in American politics, with Republicans coming to represent a populist nationalism suspicious of globalization, foreign entanglements, and immigration, while Democrats evolve away from their (WHITE)working-class constituents to represent the cosmopolitan, educated elites in coastal cities and suburbs.

THESE SO CALLED ELITES ARE NOT THE RULING CLASS OR EVEN THE 1% THEY ARE THE BROAD PROLETARIAT, BLUE, WHITE AND PINK COLLARS, BLACK, LATINO, AND WOMEN WORKING CLASS CONSTITUENTS. IT IS ALSO AN ATTACK ON LGBTQ COMMUNITY AS COSMOPOLOTIN COASTAL ELITES

 But the deeper change that Trump’s election may have triggered is a revolution in the nature of government. At certain periods in our history, government can become ossified and overgrown with rules and bureaucracy that have separated from the wishes of the people. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR,*** and Reagan led popular movements that swept away old political orders and replaced them with new, spartan forms of government more responsive to the political times.

FDR IS HATED BY REPUBLICANS AS A STATIST AND THEY BEGAN THEIR WAR ON AMERICAN PROGRESS WAY BACK THEN AND IT HAS NEVER STOPPED. IT WAS INCLUDED AS A BACK HANDED COMPLEMENT.

Trump’s presidency may signal a similar seismic shift in government, one that extends far beyond his own personal political interests or his low polling. Today’s federal government can trace its lineage directly to the New Deal. Large, expert federal bureaucracies exercising broad powers delegated by Congress continue to govern an economy and society that have evolved far from the world of the 1930s–1960s. Even as America races into a post-industrial society, where information has become the foundation of the most valuable goods and services, it continues to govern itself with forms suited for continent-spanning GMs and IBMs and their matching labor unions.  A more spartan government, controlled by a Constitution of limited powers, may well prove more nimble and effective in the new 21st-century world than the government of the New Deal. Even while he recalls America to the society of the past, Trump may have shaken up the political system enough to allow it to adapt to the new economy of social media, networks, and AI. Presidential power provides the critical leverage to spark such significant government change, and it may be Trump’s most unlikely legacy to have preserved the constitutional authorities of his office that make such reform possible.