Scotus

 

The Supreme Court takes briefs today in a case which, in a very real way, will determine if the United States will remain a constitutional democratic republic or be converted to a unitary executive dictatorship.

This is not hyperbole. It’s really that simple.

The court will decide if the president, by his own discretion alone and in contradiction to the US Constitution and statutory law, can ignore court orders because he doesn’t like them. It will decide if the 248-year precedent of a constitutionally prescribed separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government will stand or be abandoned.

Here’s the situation. In one of his first executive orders last month, Trump illegally ordered the shuttering of USAID, an agency created by Congress and which, under law, only Congress can change or eliminate. Trump ordered all congressionally and contractually appropriated USAID funding to be halted. It literally ordered USAID to not pay $2 billion to contractors to whom the agency has legally binding contractual obligations. Again, that’s patently illegal under existing law and constitutional principle which gives Congress control of the purse, not the president.

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order which demanded that the administration immediately reverse its action and release the funding. The administration ignored the court. On Tuesday, the judge ordered the administration back into court to explain why it hadn’t complied with the court’s orders. Trump administration lawyers could not or would not, instead floundering and bumbling through an embarrassing and comically inept attempt to provide a sensible legal argument. The judge then issued an “enforcement” order which required the administration to release the funds and honor the contracts by midnight last night.

The administration appealed the ruling but an appeals court rejected it and let the lower court’s ruling stand. That’s when Trump asked the Supreme Court to step in and, only three hours until the court-imposed deadline, Chief Justice John Roberts stayed the ruling and ordered attorneys to file briefs with the court by noon today.

You might think this is only about USAID but it’s much bigger than that. If the Supreme Court overturns the lower court ruling, it will have neutered Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government. It will have established that presidents have the unilateral power to completely ignore laws passed by Congress, ignore rulings by the courts and ignore the constitution itself. If the court decides that convicted felon and dictator wannabe Donald Trump can seize the power of the budget appropriation from Congress for himself, then it will have invalidated one of the elemental pillars of the constitution and will have rendered the foundational document null and void.

In other words, it will have ended the US government as constituted and replaced it with a governing system in which all power is invested in a unitary executive. At that point, we will have a dictatorship, full stop.

Now, in a world in which the constitution means anything, the high court has no choice but to uphold the lower court ruling. But this is a Supreme Court which, just last year, invented from whole cloth an entirely new and radical concept in which presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed while performing an “official duty” of the office. This is a court whose ultra-far right majority literally accepted the argument that a president could order the Navy’s Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival and get away with it, so who knows what they’ll do here.

The phrase “constitutional crisis” is often bandied about frivolously but this is the real thing. Make no mistake. This is the whole ball of wax, folks.

Founding father Benjamin Franklin, when asked if the new nation of the United States would be a monarchy or a Republican, said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Can we keep it? Will we? We are at the precipice of that question right now, right here.