Summary
A Congressional Research Service report states Trump lacks the authority to abolish USAID, as congressional approval is required.
It explains that a 1998 law briefly allowed reorganization but expired in 1999. While past administrations have modified USAID’s functions, they consulted Congress.
Lawmakers are concerned about Trump’s executive order pausing foreign aid and potential USAID-State Department consolidation.
Authority means nothing anymore. Only power does.
The Liberals still don’t understand that.
The US has two options to reverse course now
- indefinite general strike and civil disobedience, damanding resignation of entire administration.
- Military coup.
People don’t seem to understand that there is a whole new order now. Previously, we said the President can’t do X, Y, or Z, and we relied on long-standing norms, beliefs, and traditions as a self-enforcing mechanism. We told the President “You can’t”, and he said “Okay”. But now, we’re saying “You can’t”, and Trump is saying “Who says I can’t, and what are you going to do about it?”, knowing that the answer is largely “Nothing.”
This is the way it works now.
Unless there is something directly in the Constitution explicitly saying that Trump cannot do something, then as far as Trump is concerned, he can and will do it.
Even if there is something in the Constitution explicitly stating that Trump cannot do something, Trump is going to do it anyway to see if anybody is willing to enforce it.
If nobody is willing or able to stop him, Trump essentially has the power to do it.
Even if a court ruling were to prevent Trump from directly shutting down a federal agency like USAID, what’s to just stop him from firing the entire staff and saying “Sure, USAID can remain open. It’ll just have zero employees.”. Then what?
I get it, he’s doing all kinds of shit that’s illegal now. And I get it, people need to stand up to him.
At the same time, let’s not do his work for him by treating it like a forgone conclusion he will do whatever he wants.
Sometimes politicians, law enforcement and just rank & file workers need assurance and official blessing to not comply.
I don’t like how things are going at all, and want to be clear eyed about the situation. Still, lets not assume it’s all over, cause it’s not.
I get it, he’s doing all kinds of shit that’s illegal now. And I get it, people need to stand up to him.
At the same time, let’s not do his work for him by treating it like a forgone conclusion he will do whatever he wants.
Have you not been paying attention? Have you seen even the slightest smidge of indication that anyone in power will stand up to him? Because right now, he’s doing whatever he wants and being rewarded for it, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon.
Sometimes politicians, law enforcement and just rank & file workers need assurance and official blessing to not comply.
And right now the official word they’re getting is comply, be fired, or be sent to Gitmo/El Salvador. There is nobody in a position to be able to give them “an official blessing to not comply” even if they wanted to. If you want, I’ll give you my official blessing not to comply. It carries just as much weight right now (read: none).
I don’t like how things are going at all, and want to be clear eyed about the situation. Still, lets not assume it’s all over, cause it’s not.
I wish I had your optimism. But right now, every political body that could stand up to Trump is either marching in lockstep with him or rolling over and playing dead. That optimism right now just isn’t based in reality.
Didn’t things look worse when Nazi Germany was at its height? Didn’t things look worse when slavery was at its height?
The state of the world has been much worse before, and things still got better.
We have to acknowledge that a lot of people died, and a lot more were hurt, before things got better. And it may come to that in our times as well. But barring nuclear disaster, things can improve. And one prerequisite is not agreeing to lay down and die.
Like I said, I get it. Seems like anyone with any real power doesn’t recognize the severity of the situation. Seems like there’s no justice. Are you going to say “no point in trying”? I don’t think so because you wouldn’t be so mad about it if you didn’t care. I don’t have the answer. But believing change is possible is a crucial ingredient in change happening.
It’s cute that anyone thinks Trump cares or that the Republicans won’t remove it of president musk demands it.
I love all these “it’s illegal” and “he has no authority” articles.
Until someone stops him, he has the authority. The man isn’t going to stop because you wave a piece of paper at him, and neither are his cronies.
I hope these kinds of stories embolden or empower the folks trying to stand up to him, but its already clear he’ll physically remove people from offices if needed. How long before the dissenters are just on the next plane to Gitmo while every Republican voter either cheers him on, stands by silently, or doesn’t even know it’s happening?
This is going to end up with a whole lot of people getting lynched by angry mobs.
- Who’s angry mobs are going to be victorious, is the question.
- That’s not where things will end. That’s where they’ll start.
God damnit. This sounds like some cyberpunk bullshit story and were fucking living it.
It’s because it is, it’s literally the end goal. Look up Balaji Srinivasan, the guy that came up with the idea of replacing traditional nation-states with decentralized, corporate-run regions, and wrote about it in a whole-ass book called “The Network State: How To Start a New Country”. These assholes read cyberpunk and decided it was an excellent idea because they all thought they’d be Arasaka or Pharmakom.
Nowhere near enough people understand this. Challenging these things in court isn’t going to matter when the courts are all shut down. The DOJ has already advised that he can ignore court injunctions. The US government is being rapidly dismantled. The rule of law no longer exists.
Turns out checks and balances don’t work when one of them has all the guns.
And none of the others have a spine.
Okay well he’s done it
Meanwhile USAID’s employees are threatened and their servers seized by 20-somethings who refuse to give their name.
It boggles my mind how you can just…waltz into a government department with no legal basis, and people just comply.Money is god
Well in this case the president is, and anyone in his service that he’d pardon.
Crazy how fast they move now…
It took years for them to decide if Biden had the power to do, well, anything as president.
Almost like them slow walking the entire Dem platform was intentional, and a major reason Dems lost 2024 as a result
Biden was trying to with within the legal system. Trump don’t care.
Well he certainly had the authority to direct the national archivist to ratify the ERA. And if they refused, he had the authority to replace them. There are dozens of such examples. There is a yawning gulf between the lawlessness of Trump and the utter impotence of Biden.
Hey now, he issued those pardons for his friends and family like a genuine dictator there towards the end. He was figuring out how to wield his powers effectively but they were only really put to use for personal gain. Funny how that works
Hey now, he issued those pardons for his friends and family like a genuine dictator there towards the end.
To be fair, every President has done this. Every president issues last-second pardons to friends, family, cronies, whoever when they’re literally on their way out the door, when they no longer have to worry about the political blowback of such actions.
And in Biden’s defense, a lot of the people he pardoned were people who either were already known to be or expected to be on Trump’s hit list, and he was taking pre-emptive action to ensure they wouldn’t be jailed on (no pun intended) trumped up charges. Garland’s DOJ already spent an inordinate amount of time and resources on what amounted to a political persecution of Biden’s son on relatively minor and inconsequential charges in order to give a supposed appearance of impartiality. What do you think would happen to these people under the Trump administration once he started the Trump Revenge Tour if he hadn’t?
(And I’m not excusing Hunter Biden’s actions. But let’s be realistic. We all know the reason he was charged in the first place. The DOJ isn’t going to waste that much time and resources over a weapons possession charge by a cocaine addict that literally happened a decade or so prior. That was a political hit from start to finish by a man who thanked Biden for the AG position by slow-walking Trump investigations while simultaneously finding something to charge his own son with in order to appear “independent”.)
This actually tells me that Biden, to the very last, still didn’t understand that Trump doesn’t believe in the system. If Trump wants to prosecute Hunter Biden, does anyone really think that these pardons will stop him? In a non-bizarro world, sure, maybe, but those pardons are going to mean about as much as we Kleenex to Trump’s DOJ. ALSO, Biden didn’t understand that Trump is really not interested in going after rich people as long as they stay out of his way. Trump got elected and basically instantly forgot about Hillary, never even bothered trying to prosecute her. I think we’ll probably never hear anything else about the Bidens except for rants on social media.
he doesn’t have ‘authority’ to do many of the things he’s currently getting away with.
We will condemn with the strongest possible terms as we watch.
He has implicit Congressional Approval as long as the GOP maintain a majority and sit back, doing nothing.
Twenty-something years from now, we’ll all be quoting “First they came for the migrants, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a migrant; then they came for the foreign aid workers, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a foreign aid worker…” when referring to the downfall of the United States of America.
Twenty something years from now, the people left will be telling ancient stories around a campfire.
So… impeachment? What are you waiting for.
Impeachment has never done anything.
They don’t have the numbers for it to work
Better not do anything at all then
He was impeached twice before and nothing happened because they didn’t have the numbers in the senate. To remove a sitting president you have to have majorities in both the house and senate, and his people hold those majorities.
So, no, it’s not better than doing nothing at all, and might be detrimental when they fail.
Nothing happened is not an accurate representation of those events. At minimum we have a historical record that all Republicans refused to convict him which means they supported his actions. Dem voters got to watch their representatives stand up for them and make the case that Trump’s behavior was not acceptable. Those are both important things despite the fact that he was not removed from office. That’s a big part of the information we needed to have to know how bad a 2nd Trump term is going to be.
What they’re doing now is giving up without a fight. In fact, they’re actively speeding things up by confirming his nominees.
Dem voters got to watch their representatives stand up for them and make the case that Trump’s behavior was not acceptable.
So we managed to give him the equivalent of, what, a frowny face? A finger wag?
And he was voted back into office. Which means that as far as the voters were concerned, his behavior was acceptable. The ones who told him the first time that his behavior wasn’t acceptable? They’re gone now. They’ve resigned. They’ve been primaried. They’ve been replaced with MAGA sycophants who will be glad to respond to his behavior with thunderous applause while the ones who told him “no” the first time are now wondering if they’re going to be a target on the Trump Revenge Tour.
And now we have states making it illegal to vote against their policies. We have the very real possibility of US citizens being shipped off to El Salvador. We have a federal government being purged of anyone who even might stand up to Trump happening in real-time. We have a federal government where Democrats not hold power in a single branch of government, and a Supreme Court that all but anointed Trump a king and have openly stated they intend to tip the scales in his favor because he deserves special treatment.
Like it or not, this is a fight that the Democrats cannot win right now. Fighting a losing battle under these circumstances isn’t bravery. It’s not sending a message. It’s suicide. It is a battle that needs to be started from the ground up, taking advantage of small victories wherever we can get them. But as the saying goes, if you go after the king, you had best not miss. And going after the king when you’re holding a half-empty squirt gun when that king is holding a nuke isn’t going to work out very well for you.
It sucks, but sometimes doing nothing is the least bad option available to you while you wait for an actual opportunity to arise.
What are you doing?
In another day or two Elon and his minions will likely be able to halt all money going yo USAID, including salaries to workers. So that will effectively abolish it.
He’s already fired everyone. And takem over the federal financial systems. They have the firehose, they can point it at thier owm wallets.
Ok, they won’t shut down USAID, but all US employees are fired and computers removed and buildings condemned. It’s still operating.
