Unelected billionaire breaks laws to "restore" democracy
This is NOT what democracy looks like.
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“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” President Trump posted last week on his social media platform.
The quote was widely attributed to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Trump, who fancies himself one of history’s great leaders, leaned into the monarchical fantasy. And lest there was any confusion, he explicitly linked it to a story about his administration defying a court order with respect to the federal budget.
The quote is an unmistakable echo of Richard Nixon, who insisted in 1977 that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
That wasn’t true for Nixon, of course, who by then had been out of office for three years. But last year the Supreme Court gutted the rulings that reined in Nixon, and now Trump and Elon Musk are running the government as if they are the only law in the land. They insist they are “saving” the country by burning down its institutions, and they claim a mandate of the people to do it.
Vox populi, vox regis
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the self-described “free speech absolutist” crowed that he was turning the platform back over to its users.
“Vox populi, vox dei” he wrote after posting a poll asking whether Donald Trump’s account should be restored. “The people have spoken.”
This was nonsense. The platform has — or had when it was a public company — rules that Trump had broken. In reinstating the former president, Musk wasn’t taking orders from “the people.” He was the new owner of the website and he could do what he liked with it. Indeed, Musk was perfectly within his rights to boot the owner of this website for posting information he didn’t like, and he had no obligation to put it up for a vote.
When it comes to Twitter, Elon Musk is the “voice of god.” (And not for nothing, but he literally sued “the people” when they exercised their right to criticize him or not speak on his platform.)
But Musk and Trump make a similar false equivalency when it comes to governing, insisting that the results in November empower them to do whatever they like, law be damned.
“The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive,” Trump told Time Magazine in December, adding that "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
In reality, Trump won by less than 1.5 percent and took less than 50 percent of all votes cast. His popular vote margin was one-third as large as Biden’s and the second-narrowest in 60 years. There was no “mandate,” let alone a “massive” one.
And yet Trump and Musk govern as if they won an overwhelming majority, and this gives them the right to ignore the law.
At the recent Oval Office press conference where Musk played with his toddler son, the saucer-eyed vizier delivered a manic defense of the DOGE committee’s “hostile takeover of the government.” (Video after the transcript.)
Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The President spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about.
In reality, Trump announced the DOGE committee after he won in November, promising that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (remember him?) would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” He only brought DOGE inside the government by executive order on January 20.
Trump did not run on a promise to unleash an unelected billionaire to slash-and-burn through the government, firing tens of thousands of employees and arbitrarily canceling contracts and federal programs. And even if he had, that still wouldn’t make it legal.
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Votes are not laws
The United States is a constitutional democracy. We must all abide by the Constitution, and we don’t get to override its provisions by popular referendum.
We couldn’t, for example, abolish the electoral college by popular vote, because it’s enshrined in Article II and can only be changed by an amendment. Amendments must be approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate and ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Once approved, amendments become part of the Constitution, so we couldn’t simply vote today to ban guns (2nd), reimpose slavery (13th), block women from voting (19th), or prohibit alcohol (21st).
And yet Musk, who received exactly zero votes, insists that he is restoring democracy by unilaterally slashing the federal government.
“If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” he babbled, adding “you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that's responsive to the people. That's the whole point of a democracy.”
Musk is himself a bureaucrat, and one wholly unresponsive to the people. But that irony appears not to have penetrated.
“Nobody's going to bat a thousand,” he shrugged when asked about his false claim that USAID sent $50 million to Gaza for condoms.
Laws are laws
In reality, most of what Musk is doing is flatly illegal.
Canceling contracts without notice violates the law. Mass firing federal employees without cause violates the law. Cutting federal funds for all scientific and medical research violates the law. But most egregiously, Musk’s deletion of entire government departments and Trump’s refusal to spend money as directed by the budget bills violates the Constitution. That’s why multiple courts have enjoined the Trump administration from blanket spending cuts.
It is axiomatic that Congress has the power of the purse, and “feeding USAID to the woodchipper” violates the separation of powers because Congress established the agency and allocated funds to it as part of the federal budget.
As Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, wrote last week in the New York Times:
Congress, not the executive branch, has the power of the purse, meaning the power to control federal spending. It is right there, as clear as day in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”
This is a bedrock principle of our government, which President Trump and his unchecked billionaire buddy are attempting to subvert.
Congress still gets to dictate the budget, even if the DOGE dauphin sincerely believes that the deficit is “just something we got to fix.”
We’ve been here before … sort of
Trump is not the first president to try to cross out individual items from congressional bills.
In 1974, Richard Nixon (who won an actual landslide victory, taking 49 states and 61 percent of the popular vote) tried to axe funds allocated by Congress for municipal sewer updates. The money had been appropriated as part of the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act, which passed over Nixon’s veto, and Nixon ordered his EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus not to spend all of it.
In 1975, the Supreme Court held in Train v. City of New York that the EPA had no choice but to spend the money as per Congress’s allocation. In the meantime, Congress enacted the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which reiterated its constitutional authority over the budget, while providing a mechanism for the president to seek an accommodation if he wished to withhold funds.
In 1996, Congress passed the Line Item Veto Act, which gave President Clinton (who also won an actual landslide electoral victory in 1996) the ability to delete specific items from budget bills. That law was declared unconstitutional two years later in Clinton v. City of New York.
And yet Trump, with his bare 1.5 percent margin, claims that his electoral win authorizes him to “save his country” by any means necessary, including ignoring federal laws.
There’s something more than ironic about Musk declaring that “it's incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public's elected representatives, the president, the House, and the Senate, decide what happens, as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.” Musk is, of course, no one’s elected representative. And the federal bureaucracy and budget he’s trying to dismantle is a direct result of the “feedback loop” between “the public’s elected representatives.”
Americans elected Democrats to the House, Senate, and White House in 2020, and then Congress enacted and the president signed budgets in each of the following four years. In prior years, Congress established the Department of Education, USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and all the agencies Musk and Trump are currently taking a sledgehammer to. The federal bureaucracy that Musk sneers at is the direct result of decades of decisions made by American voters speaking their minds at the ballot box.
In fact, Musk is disrupting the “feedback loop” in a way that’s fundamentally undemocratic. While claiming the mantle of democracy, he is in fact seizing dictatorial powers to unilaterally nix federal laws.
And so perhaps we should remind ourselves about Napoleon Bonaparte, a repressive leader who attacked minorities and journalists and ended representative government in France. Bonaparte was defeated by a coalition of European powers at the Battle of Leipzig and forced to abdicate the throne in 1814. He was exiled to the island of Alba, but escaped and regained control of France, only to be defeated once and for all the following year at Waterloo and exiled to the island of St Helena.
Let us hope that our own Battle of Waterloo will come sooner rather than later.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Brilliant analysis as always, Liz! Every single day, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills (to quote the great Mugato from “Zoolander”) when I read the Shadow President/Legislator proclaim his ignorance of government as he destroys everything we’ve established without pushback from our feckless Congress. It’s also worth noting that the agencies in his crosshairs are the ones holding him accountable, too.
Now my question is this: what can we do?
Musk to U.S. — Upon water walketh I.