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Uncle Joe

(64,787 posts)
Thu Feb 13, 2025, 03:46 PM Feb 2025

How to stop Trump's power grab [View all]

Trump isn’t inevitable. Here’s a plan to keep democracy intact.

At this point, there is little doubt that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are engaged in a fundamentally unlawful effort to rewrite the American constitutional order. Their efforts to redirect federal spending are attempts to seize Congress’s power of the purse, a core element of its Article I constitutional power. They have attempted to shutter multiple federal agencies, like USAID, whose existence are expressly guaranteed by statute.

Yet while the public is waking to the scope of the threat to democracy, many Americans are still feeling powerless. It can seem that Trump’s control over the executive branch, together with congressional Republicans’ spinelessness, makes it hard for anyone to respond effectively.

But nonetheless, there are ways to fight back — to do more than is already being done. An effective strategy would revolve around three key points:

1. First, Trump is weak. He has deputized Musk to grab power illegally because he doesn’t have the votes to win it through legislation. The illegality of Trump’s agenda means that there are lots of levers his opponents can pull to stop him. The most significant of these are lawsuits, many of which have already yielded injunctions against unlawful Trump-Musk orders.

(snip)

https://www.vox.com/politics/399530/trump-power-grab-musk-protest-resistance-strategy
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