The government took away many rights during Covid by invoking a state of emergency, and now Trump & Elon are implicitly stating that America is in a state of emergency, and that the executive has to grab the rudder to save the ship.
I was listening to a liberal Constitutional law expert Steve Vladeck yesterday state that Trump’s Executive Order (EO) banning migrants from seven majority Muslim nations in his first term would not have passed Supreme Court muster if they had not already ruled out his first two EOs on this.
It’s similar to playing aggressive defense and daring the refs to call a penalty on every play.
I don’t think America has ever seen anything like this second Trump administration and their number of EOs. Trump is making Reagan look like a softie.
Trump musing about taking over Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal, Gaza, I don’t know how to think about this state of exception except with Carl Schmitt.
“The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” ― Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
A philosopher friend says: “Schmitt focused on discretionary power but he also venerated the state and its use of it. Trump seems to be pushing the limits of using it, but to constrain the officials who had been using it. what people usually mean by mentioning Schmitt is the friend-enemy distinction. This is more often used by people like AOC and virtue signalers more generally: When you turn a political dispute into a moral one you are defining the other as an enemy in Schmitt’s sense. And the real influence of Schmitt has been underground, mostly via the Frankfurt School and then through feminism, with the notion that everything is political — so Marcuse made liberal notions of tolerance political and repressive, and the same kind of inversion occurs all the time with feminism, where equality becomes a male concept if it is not defined in a way that liberates women in relation to men.”
“There is an emergency about the deficit. But if the courts are consistent at all, the fact that Obama was allowed to fail to enforce immigration law via prosecutorial discretion justified by budget considerations would seem to be the sufficient precedent. But [Chief Justice John] Roberts will find a way to protect the status quo, because he is a status quo guy. I’m telling people to look at Clinton Rossiter, who thought through all this stuff in American terms. [His book] American Presidency shows how weak the countervailing powers are. Carl Schmitt’s Dictatorship is worth a read too. Long but nice history. You are on the right track here.”
