To say President Donald Trump has exceeded expectations in his first week is putting things mildly. In truth, his barrage of executive orders, pardons of innocents, and open defiance of the global order on everything from DEI to World Health Organization membership to gender ideology to the climate hoax nonsense and seemingly every other issue that matters has gone far above beyond what any of us dreamed would happen in his first 100 days, much less seven. It has truly been a glorious, multi-fronted, all-out assault on the left that would make the D-Day warriors proud, and I couldn’t be happier (OK, the ‘no tax on tips’ thing is a dud, but nobody’s perfect!).
Though the bipartisan and much needed Laken Riley Act will be the first, the entirety of this barrage on the communist agenda has been done without any legislation actually passed by the Congress and signed by the president. It was also entirely necessary to begin to reverse the incomprehensible destruction former President Joe Biden did to the country with nothing more than a stroke of the Executive pen.
Should it have been necessary though? Absolutely not, and there’s the rub. In truth, the fact that Biden had done so much damage, most of it with a mere signature, largely made the 2024 election the most important election in American history. And you know what? Unless things drastically change, every subsequent election from now until the end of the Republic will also be the ‘most important election in history.’
That’s a LOT of stress to endure every four years, stress that doesn’t bode well for easing the tensions between the political spectrums, or my blood pressure. I know I say this after every election (and every close Tennessee game), but I don’t know how many more of these I can take without having a heart attack!
So where did we go wrong? How did the balance of power get so out of whack? When the founders established the Constitution, they did so with three ‘separate but equal’ branches of government. It was meant to be a check on unlimited power being in the hands of too few. Instead of a king, we got a president who must stand for election every four years, could be removed from office via the impeachment process, and was at the mercy of the ‘people’ (i.e. Congress) for financing and enacting laws. It was a nice try.
Sadly, as the isolationism advised by George Washington waned, as executive agencies to administer laws rose, as the country endured wars, crises, and cataclysmic events like 9/11, and as the human nature to seek power took its inevitable course, the presidency, and indeed the entire government, grew increasingly more powerful. Where in the old days the chief executive was responsible for little that actually affected the lives of most ordinary people, today it’s hard to imagine an aspect of our lives that ISN’T affected by the decisions the leader of the free world makes.
It shouldn’t be this much of a relief to win a presidential election. The potential of losing shouldn’t stoke so much fear. Election results shouldn’t be the difference in whether or not millions will be able to comfortably feed their families. Whoever occupies the Oval Office shouldn’t have this much power over our lives and our success as a country. But they do, and so defeating the other side means a bullet dodged that would have made our lives worse in infinite ways.
Yes, government in general should shrink massively. But before that, the power the executive branch wields should be curbed to some semblance of what it once was. If anything, Congress should be the most powerful branch by a long shot instead of the afterthought it is right now. Then the presidency, then the judiciary only to make sure things are constitutional.
You probably will have a knee-jerk reaction to this one, but hear me out. One way to make Congress relevant again would be to revise the Senate filibuster to the old days where causing delays meant actually having to stand and speak, or even eliminate it entirely. When Congress can never pass anything meaningful, power is left to the president to act unilaterally, which is what we’ve increasingly seen over the past couple of decades.
As to making the federal government less powerful, that ability already resides with the states in the form of the 10th Amendment. It’s past time for them to start exercising that power.
The status quo is unsustainable long-term. Unless things change, every election will get more and more consequential, until the other side finds itself literally in a Gulag.
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