Keynesian Beauty Contests, Schelling Points, and the Omnicause
Let’s get some quick definitions out of the way. (If you’re already familiar with these terms, I apologize.)
According to Wikipedia, a Keynesian Beauty Contest is: “a beauty contest where judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces among all contestants, rather than those they may personally find the most attractive.”
It’s a good analogy for, among other things, the stock market. Vote for who you think will be the prettiest contestant tomorrow by buying the stock today and, tomorrow, if you’re right, you can sell it for a nifty profit.
A Schelling Point (a.k.a. “focal point“) is: “a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication in order to avoid coordination failure”.
Wikipedia explains:
The existence of the focal point is first demonstrated by Schelling with a series of questions. Here is one example: to determine the time and place to meet a stranger in New York City, but without being able to communicate in person beforehand. In this coordination game, any place and time in the city could be an equilibrium solution. Schelling asked a group of students this question, and found the most common answer was “noon at (the information booth at) Grand Central Terminal”.
As an idle test of this, I asked a couple of friends/acquaintances about where they’d meet a stranger in NYC and got the answers “Radio City Music Hall” and “The Central Park Zoo” so, yeah, it doesn’t always work (or maybe it just doesn’t work anymore) but that’s what a Schelling Point is.
The “Omnicause” is a neologism from our very own Alysia Ames:
It seems like where "intersectionality" went wrong was assuming that anyone with any claim to oppression must be part of one omnicause + global warming for some reason. https://t.co/ASov21Kco8
— Mom for Gliberty 🗳️ (@fakegreekgrill) October 24, 2023
The definition according to Know Your Meme is:
Omnicause is a slang term used to describe the convergence of several causes into one, and has been used in both positive and negative contexts, particularly when simultaneous fight for multiple misaligned causes hinders achieving progress in any of them. Spawned in October 2023 and related to the concept of intersectionality, the term has saw gradual spread on social media through 2024.
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Okay, that’s out of the way.
Trump found the major weakness of the Omnicause. Do a million things and cause a million responses and people will not naturally coordinate. Some will go to Grand Central Station, some will go to the Central Park Zoo, some will go to Radio Center Music Hall.
Since there is no real consensus on which is the most important cause within the omnicause, there is no Schelling Point.
And how can you guess what will be the most important Schelling Point tomorrow? Or next week?
Three weeks ago, we were aghast at how Trump was blaming California Leadership for the fires instead of Climate Change. Two weeks ago we were talking about the military planes full of Colombian refugees. Last week we were aghast at the blame of DEI for the state of Flight Controllers. Two days ago, we were bemoaning the Tariffs against Canada and Mexico.
And today, apparently, we’re going to be involved in the creation of American Gaza?
I’m trying to imagine who will be the winner of the beauty contest next week and I can’t even imagine. Any suggestion I make can, with only minor tweaking, sound like a punchline. Here, watch:
“Guys, I think we need to center around the 28th Amendment.”
“Guys, I think we need to center around protecting trans youth in high school sports.”
“Guys, I think we need to center around abolishing ICE.”
And with each one of those, it’s simple to imagine the (whatever) community standing up and saying “WHAT THE HELL? HOW DARE YOU?!?” because we’re picking one cause out of the omnicause and trying to make it the Schelling Point when the point of the Omnicause is to tell *ALL* of the contestants that they’re beautiful.
Which means that we can’t say whether one is more beautiful than another and that is an important pre-req to being able to guess who will be most attractive next week.
And it’s *REALLY* important to pick a Schelling Point… because if you don’t, someone else will except it won’t be the activists, the organizers, or the people who think they’re running the show: It’ll be whoever is best at navigating this new political reality and that doesn’t seem to be anybody involved in the opposition at this point in time.
Wanna keep your status as a judge? You’d best pick a winner because, if you don’t, your value as a judge will have been demonstrated to be pretty dang low. If you’re a crappy judge, the cause won’t require you to do much more than just show up and applaud a winner that you might not even recognize. (Hey, do you think the contestant will look good in a keffiyeh?)
(Featured image is “Day 49: 9 dominoes“, Photo taken by jacqui.brown33.)
I think you’re looking at it incorrectly Jay on a basic level.
If Trumps -only- opposition were, say, the Democratic Party, or the Librul(tm) media then this “flood the zone” stuff could plausibly work and what you’re describing could apply. This would be doubly true if only the Democratic Party, for instance, could materially oppose Trump. This would be triply true if controlling what “present public discourse” or “what we’re talking about now” or even “Vibes” constituted victory. I can also see how you, or I, with us both being individuals who are not directly effected by Trumps myriad attacks and who are interacting with them only by the discourse or the vibe might say “holy cow, Trump is winning so much.” I, personally, equate this to various points in Putins early stage attacks on Ukraine when the Russians launched innumerable assaults from many different directions against many different targets. For a little while everyone was like “holy cow the Ukrainians are gong to get owned.”
This is not, however, the case in reality.
Each relevant impacted individual is both able and is incredibly motivated to respond individually to each of the myriad Trump attacks. Individuals who’re being illegally dismissed or sidelined have absolutely every motivation to file their complaints at court against these unlawful dismissals. Every group who’s having their funding unlawfully suspended or cut off has absolutely every motivation and every ability to push back. The court system across the entire country has a lot of dockets to hear these various cases.
The question, really, is if there’s some fundamental flaw in the legal analysis. That the executive has some obscure procedural right to do this astonishing, unprecedented wave of unilateral changes in government or to sanction these deranged and wild antics? The bet on the Trumpian/republitarian side seems to be that when these cases and appeals cascade up to the Supreme Court that some significant number of those justices will say ‘Ha-HAH! The time has come!” rip off their masks and reverse themselves on decades of conservative case law saying “suck it libs, it was all a ruse!”
It’s theoretically plausible that such a thing could happen I suppose but I suspect that it won’t. I mean Thomas will do what he’s paid to do. He’s old, he generally doesn’t seem to give a fish. Alito, might maybe, ramble some circular nonsense and throw in with Trump, maybe. But the rest of the younger conservative justices? I don’t know it seems unlikely that they are entirely and on this subject and for this President willing to throw their entire ideology and reputation on a bonfire.
And all this stuff Trump is blizzarding out is predicated on him somehow, eventually, winning. If he doesn’t then he’ll get driven back in a blizzard of losses, punitive damages and reversals that’ll, in the end, cost the Federal Government more money and him more reputational loss than if he’d never tried it in the first place.
Of course, he could try to say “let the courts enforce their powerless rulings” and flat out do a constitutional crisis but that strikes me as un-Trumpian. When faced with concrete resistance he’s always historically folded. When committing his various venal crimes it’s always a sideways sidle, it always is oblique and full of posterior covering excuses and allusions. Flat out defy the courts and say “I’m King now?” It doesn’t feel like his MO.
So right now it seems to me we’re in the opening salvo of a blizzard of nonsense. “OMG there’re soldiers on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions at 10,000 points across the line of engagement!” That’s right now. But it seems very possible, maybe even very likely that with a little time and fortitude, when the dust settles, it’ll become. “OMG we blew away all those idiots on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions and now there’re 120,000 corpses on the flat land in front of us.”
And this is without even considering the possibility that Musk and his little platoon of coder idiots accidentally fiddles with the wrong line of ancient COBOL script and causes something integral, and hard to fix, and central to break and 71 million people suddenly wake up and aren’t receiving their social security checks for a couple of weeks. Or months. And that is the thing that all the republitarians exulting about “cutting the gummint the way them elected squishes would never vote to!” are trying to ignore. If Trump finds himself holding a fork that has the business end stuck into the outlet of social security or medicare? There’ll be an almighty ruckus and the smell of burning hairspray and then a shower of spray tan and that’ll be the end of Trump. And it’ll be red state voters who’ll be baying to hang him from a lamp post. Because owning the libs is one thing but if those gummint hands start grabbin at your disability or your social security check or suddenly meemaw or papaw needs to move in with you because they can’t make rent, well, owning the libs is gonna suddenly be a heck of a lot less important to you.Report
So hold out for hope that the judges will stop him and hold out hope that he makes a mistake.
Could work.
Trying to frame stuff like “We’re going to do X!” and then there being an outcry and then him saying “Okay, we’re not going to do X!” as him being weak or something like that rather than him listening to feedback and changing accordingly might work…
But it might also come across as insincere.
“Trump said that we’re going to do X! Thousands will die! Billions of dollars will be flushed down the commode!”
“Trump said that we’re not going to do X.”
“Pfft. What a (derogatory term)!”
And, in the meantime, we’d best hope that Elon doesn’t dig up stuff. You know the USAID stuff? Some of that stuff is pretty damning. If half of the stuff he’s unearthing ends up being in the ballpark of true? You’re gonna need him to barf on a Japanese diplomat or something.Report
Your original post was descriptive, not prescriptive, so I confined my critiques to what I saw as flaws in your description.Report
Fair enough.
So there is no need for a Schelling point because the judiciary will be sufficient to hold against Trump.
I believe that this is true for somewhere between a quarter and a third of what Trump is attempting.
And that leaves a *LOT*.Report
You keep switching over to projecting prescriptive analysis on me in your comments which is fine except that you, yourself, haven’t laid any prescriptive cards on the table in your original article.
I’m down with talking prescriptive analysis if you want to but I think you should go first.Report
I thought I phrased “So there is no need for a Schelling point because the judiciary will be sufficient to hold against Trump” as descriptive.
Let me get rid of the fluff.
“The judiciary will hold off the worst of Trump’s excesses.”
Is that better?
If so, I’d say that the worst of Trump’s excesses are somewhere between a quarter and a third of what’s currently happening.
Which leaves a lot.Report
I guess so, yes. Or rather there’s no need for the DEI omnicause (a pointy headed academic concept almost as idiotic as the idea of intersectionality being widely applicable to politics in general) to be employed to resist Trump. Each of Trumps feints can be directly opposed by those his given feint effects and it’s neither useful nor practical for the entire greater Trump opposition to join in every single element of resistance.Report
I wouldn’t say that the omnicause is a pointy headed academic concept as much as an observed phenomenon.
The term originated with a tweet talking about tweet about a film festival.Report
Heh that puts it only slightly below intersectionality in academic seriousness.Report
But for casual use within casual discussion?
It made it all the way to Know Your Meme.Report
So has most intersectional pap. The only reason most people give a fish about (distorted, misused and twisted) intersectional or DEI stuff is because it did the functional equivalent of escaping from its ivory tower and got into Know Your Meme. If it was still in its origin stage; a way for young minority academics to wrench tenure slots from the trembling withered death grip of ancient white academic; no one would care about it at all.Report
Most intersectional pap escaped the ivory tower, sure.
What makes this distinct is that the term did not escape at all. It was spawned in the hellsite itself by a particularly astute observer.
This ain’t a top-down that went through a game of telephone.
This is a bottom-up.Report
Yes, it’s not jargon, it’s criticism – the sorts of people it describes would not accept it, because it implies a sort of herd mentality.Report
I don’t think it’s ‘hold out hope’ so much as that for at least the next 2 years, unless Congress wants to step in (lol!), all anyone who wants to push back on (nominally) official action can do is raise a fuss look to the courts. However I think North is right about the inclinations of the federal judiciary. There are certainly some hacks on the bench but one upside of the lifetime appointments is that the courts tend to have longer and more circumspect view of the world that goes beyond the next election cycle or two.
For that reason, if I had the ear of one of these 19 or 20 year old muskrats going into federal buildings, I’d warn them that there are not, I don’t believe, any statutes of limitations on various unpermitted access felonies. Of the many things that could happen, one that I think is very unlikely would be daddy Elon’s writ extending to club fed.Report
Oh wow – could they really be in jeopardy even if they were just (indirectly) following the president’s orders and with the apparent consent of Congress?Report
One of our more scholarly lawyers would need to chime in. I’m not sure if there is any precedent that might be instructive. I do know that there are some very broad statutes on the books. The last place I’d want to find myself is standing between an AUSA and a federal judge whenever the winds change. Maybe it’s a worthwhile risk for the richest man in the world but if you’re just some guy being there in the first place means you’ve already lost.Report
Damn, the Nuremberg defense already?Report
Of the many things that could happen, one that I think is very unlikely would be daddy Elon’s writ extending to club fed.
Are these felonies state-level felonies or federal-level felonies?Report
Federal. So probably not much to really worry about while Trump is president (though who knows what happens if there is some kind of falling out or disaster that results in finger pointing). But that’s why I bring up the statute of limitations issue. Again, not predicting what’s going to happen one way or the other, just saying the advice I’d give to a young vassal of the DOGE in the moment.Report
At that point it becomes pretty important for the vassals that they win, then.
(I admit, seeing what happened during the day or two that USAID’s funds were turned off was already pretty funny… Politico missed payroll, for example.)
You know the stuff that jurors aren’t allowed to know?
The last thing you need is the stuff that jurors aren’t allowed to know becoming common knowledge.Report
And what does WIN mean, in this respect?
Whatever they WIN, they have also won for the next Democratic President (Go Mayor Pete!!), who will have his own agenda to impose, using the same (newly found in the penumbras of the Constitution) powers, with the exact same (lack of) limitations.
Unless WIN means only Republicans (and only some Republicans) are allowed to run, and, Bath-like, they win with 101% of the votes.
So I’ll repeat the question that, mutatis mutanda, I ask every time we talk about the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Where do you want this process to end? What is your end-game?Report
I think the more likely win they envision is enacting the reverse santa claus dynamic that Republicans have been slavering after ever since the 90’s: The right slashes taxes and blows up the deficit, then the Dems come in and slash spending to balance the budget, get blamed and usher the GOP back in to slash taxes again.
They just have an underpants gnome method of getting there which is a bunch of qestion marks in between “we do this and then the Dems meekly do that” which is why the right always explodes in bilious fury when Dems get into office and refuse to balance the budget through spending cuts.Report
Honestly, this is (possibly) an interesting ‘coalition’ issue… Team Grey Republitarians assume the goal is to kill the depts… but I’m seeing open challenges not to kill the agencies, but to use the funds for good ™.Report
I’m not a lawyer but I have a suspicion that the Supremes would view “I just took the money appropriated by congress for one thing and spent it on this other thing I like better instead” even more dimly than they’d view impounding.Report
How would “I took the money appropriated by congress for one thing that was being used by a subsidiary of Team Good and I took that money and gave it to a subsidiary of Team Evil to do something that is arguably the same thing”?Report
Right. The secondary question is how quickly can a *possible* signal correction create an incentive structure for [new] organizations to deliver?Report
Yes, but that’s not what I’m pointing out.
Every year there’s a funding/grant review process… that’s what you take over, and you route the funding to programs that are better aligned for US Soft-power / International aid than some other programs.
I think it’s a bit of a smokescreen to follow Musk’s tweets as policy — he hasn’t ‘deleted’ anything because he can’t.
Now, having some set of programs ID’d for non-renewal or re-bid, etc? That’s actually legit.
With the caveat that some programs within agencies eventually get direct funding from Congress. And, let’s say you didn’t like how, say, PEPFAR was working, you’d have to find a competing NGO to deliver the $1.2B (I think) program.
So, it’s not quite call up March and give him the $B program to figure out… but you could open solicit bids for the $B programs.
…and then you have to go back to GSA and make sure that the bidding process and requirements are aligned, etc.
Which is just to say, that IF the goal is to do things that have evolved into DEM coded projects and do them as R coded projects… well, you can – but it’ll take a few years. Do I think Trump has a plan to do this? No I don’t. But if you don’t have a plan to do this, I don’t think your ad hoc plans will make it past the courts.Report
Ah yes, I see your point now, thank you. Yeah, I sort of doubt Musk has a set of replacement plans for various things he might try to axe nor do I think his intention is to try and divert (allegedly) corrupt or grafted funds that Dems aligned groups are (allegedly) enjoying and divert them to their ostensible purpose or to Republican aligned graft groups. Though who knows what exactly he thinks he’s accomplishing crawling around in the organizational bowels of the Federal government. I have my doubts even he knows what he’s trying to accomplish beyond triggering liberals and nosing around where he’s not supposed to be. I don’t doubt he’ll, given enough time, come up with something he’ll want to do with this access and power- if he isn’t evicted by the courts which seems to be an event that’s coming up fast. I’ll also note that I’d take allegations of graft and corruption, coming from this lot, with a Minnesota salt truck sized serving of salt until/unless they file charges and furnish evidence.Report
“And what does WIN mean, in this respect?”
In this respect, it’s revealing the most egregious of the most egregious examples of FWA enabled by, in this case, USAID.
One of the things speculated is that Politico missed payroll the other day because the funding from USAID was abruptly cut off.
If this is true, then it seems like USAID was used to pay for particular coverage.
If this is cut off, then I agree that it’s a win for Mayor Pete and, indeed, for all Americans.
But if it’s a tool that stops being used at all, then it’s a tool that stops being used against Team Evil and no longer a tool in the toolbox of Team Good.
Where do you want this process to end? What is your end-game?
Nothing ever ends.
But to answer what I think you might be asking… one of the things that bubbled up about USAID was that, apparently, 97% of the USAID recipients who donated to US politicians apparently donated to Democrats… which creates a self-licking ice cream cone.
I, personally, would be interested in seeing what happens without the worst of the USAID graft and find it ironic that if the numbers were closer to 70-30, we’d NEVER have gotten here.
So my end-game? Get rid of the self-licking ice cream cone.
But I also know that the process will never end.Report
I think this is itself an interesting question.
What *is* winning?
It isn’t Deficit Reduction.
The hypothesis I’d throw out is this:
The long march through the institutions was, in fact, very successful; but in the end, TOO successful. Think about it this way, as long as each team could fund various pet projects, there’s little incentive to audit too closely… as long as there’s a Rodeo Clown Training Pipeline being funded for every Anti-Racist Baby Seminar there’s some sense of shared ownership. In this sense, the Trump Populist review is an outsider’s review of people not on the spigot. I mean, it’s pretty obviously a bad use of funds to create an artificial category of Rodeo Clown.Report
If they kept it to 70-30, they could have kept it up indefinitely.
(Same for college professors, too.)Report
So all this is about USAID? That’s the win? We get rid of USAID (without actually having to go to Congress and having the USAID disbanded) and we all go home?
Somehow I thought Trump (or Musk) were trying to do significantly more than ridding us of USAID, or of Politico. that they were traying to remake America
If they are successful, President Mayor Pete will have a blast. He’ll in turn remake America with his vision. He’ll make us all very (McKinsey) efficient, and will make us all gay, too, for good measure.Report
I suspect a hypothetical President Mayor Pete bent on payback with the new tools at hand could find a lot of red state pork to impound. An astronomical amount of it, especially in the defense and NASA budget.
But all this is scribbling in the margins in deficit terms.Report
I thought we were talking about Trump’s vassals storming the databases.
We get rid of USAID (without actually having to go to Congress and having the USAID disbanded) and we all go home?
The Irony is that USAID was created by Executive Order. Executive Order 10973, to be precise.
Which puts it pretty squarely under his jurisdiction.
Which is where this all gets pretty dicey.
If they are successful, President Mayor Pete will have a blast. He’ll in turn remake America with his vision. He’ll make us all very (McKinsey) efficient, and will make us all gay, too, for good measure.
That’ll be a lot tougher without Politico.Report
Check your sources Jay:
https://www.justsecurity.org/107267/can-president-dissolve-usaid-by-executive-order/Report
Yeah, he probably can’t undo it… but he can make it transparent and whether or not transparency is to its benefit is going to pretty much how it gets used in the future.
Unless, of course, Mayor Pete does a good job of making it translucent again.Report
I’m not entirely sure if that’s the goal.
I was trying to research how exactly Congress funds USAID… remember a lot of Congressional funding is for what we might say a Mission tied to a Dept… some of that is very specific in that it is for a submitted and approved budget. But, some depts get something like a Block Grant that they then distribute according to the mission and their internal vetting criteria — NIH is a good example of this. Congress didn’t fund EcoHealth Alliance, it funded NIH for various mission defined projects and NIH solicited grants and EHA’s grant was funded.
It *might* be the goal to simply end USAID… but it could also be the goal to scrutinize all the aid and then decide to fund other projects with those funds.
It depends on how the USAID appropriation is set-up as to how specific those things are… So, we’ve also heard that State is going to take over the disbursement of appropriated funds and the USAID dept would be disbanded.
As I mention above, it depends on how it’s all structured, but it’s not impossible that USAID remains and its future grants are routed elsewhere, or, if legal, it’s disbanded and the funding goes, say, to State where it is disbursed.
One thing that I was able to confirm doing initial research is that 80% of all funding goes through 75 large ‘partners’ as is typical. Here’s a really poorly formatted chart of 2024 and 2023 funding categories.
2024 / 2023
Grants to PIOs $7.93 billion $7.20 billion
Direct Payments to Ukraine 4.22 / 14.80
Grants/CAs to NGOs 7.18 / 8.76
Contracts and IDVs 7.27 / 6.80
Other Financial Assistance 1.70 / 0.64
Total $28.30 billion / $38.20 billion
Still, for clarity, my personal political philosophy is that you have to work within the legal framework to change where the funding goes or how it’s managed… but nothing at USAID should be considered ‘required’ funding… there’s simply projects we want to fund and projects we don’t — if Congress doesn’t specify what exactly is funded, then the Agency sets criteria and funds whatever it wants as long as it plausibly meets the mission.Report
The FY 23 omnibus approves bill is here – https://www.congress.gov/117/cprt/HPRT50348/CPRT-117HPRT50348.pdf
If you go to Division K, Title II (page 2705) you find USAID. The language is fairly proscriptive by dollar and function.
You may not agree with this, but like all federal agencies USAID largely follows congressional direction.Report
Thanks, appreciate the link, I hate it when work gets in the way of the internet.
I’m not arguing against the system, itself… I’m pointing out that the system works in these ways. Appropriations are a combination of specific direction and discretionary deployments.
PEPFAR (since it’s in the news) is a good example where the Funds are appropriated to the President further directed to go through State, but to a specific multilateral global fund and thereafter as determined by the fund. PEPFAR isn’t specified.
PEPFAR is a distillation of concepts that only exist contingently depending upon continued funding resolutions. And that’s ok… my point is that the entire edifice is impossibly complex.
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-u-s-presidents-emergency-plan-for-aids-relief-pepfar/
But yes, I agree that for this funding cycle, that’s how the funds are appropriated.Report
But it’s _not_ true, in fact, the huge amount that was claimed to go from USAID is form the _entire_ government, because it turns out that a huge amount of people in the government subscribe to Politico. USAID itself paid a grand total of $44k to Politico.
Like, literally all this is a lie, and it’s an obvious lie from the people that started it.
And you fell for it. Haha.
How many lies about USAID are you going to fall for there, Jaybird?
97% of USAID _employees_ that donated to US politicans donated to Democrats. Not recipients, almost none of who would be eligible to donate to any politician. (Indeed, a lot of them are not even human beings.)
I wonder why this is? Perhaps, and bear with me now: Republicans wanted to, and in fact did, shut down their place of work. So it seems a bad plan to give them money.
Hey Jaybird? What percentage of US government employees do you think donate to Democrats vs. Republicans? 75% to Democrats.
In fact, the only agency that has more donations to the Republicans and Democrats is the Air Force, and barely there. Even the Navy and the Army and Defense Department donate more to the Democrats.
0% of the Department of Education donate to Republicans. Weird. It’s almost as if Republicans have been actively promising to shut that down _also_.
It’s almost as if people inside the government can see a little more clearer how each party operates and how much they value the government.
But your ‘The organizations must be incredibly biased in their hiring’ works too. Perhaps there could be some sort of initiative to diversify the viewpoint…oh, hell, I’ve just been arrested.Report
But it’s _not_ true, in fact, the huge amount that was claimed to go from USAID is form the _entire_ government, because it turns out that a huge amount of people in the government subscribe to Politico. USAID itself paid a grand total of $44k to Politico.
Oh, it’s not from USAID but from, like, the government itself?
Well, it turns out that the government subscriptions were cancelled and Politico, coincidentally, missed payroll.
97% of USAID _employees_ that donated to US politicans donated to Democrats.
Hey Jaybird? What percentage of US government employees do you think donate to Democrats vs. Republicans? 75% to Democrats.
Ah. Well, the long march through the institutions worked a little too well, I guess.
It’s almost as if people inside the government can see a little more clearer how each party operates and how much they value the government.
Same thing seems to have happened to the universities. People who are smart just gravitate to liberalism and professorships, I guess.
We should get someone like James Damore to write an essay about the phenomenon.Report
Yeah this is the nub of it.
If Elon and Trump remain close then the Muskrats have little to fear since any Federal charges would easily be pardoned by Trump.
BUT
If they fish something up, or if Elon and Trump have a falling out or if they fish something up and Trump finds it advantageous to scapegoat Elon… well then all bets are off. It’s not like Trump doesn’t have a long history of throwing his subordinates under the bus.
But Jaybird is also right: none of these characters would be doing this stuff if they weren’t strongly convinced they’ll win. So the above analysis probably hasn’t occurred to them and Elon is so self centered it probably hasn’t occurred to him either.
It is a great deal for Trump, though. Elon and his minions take on the downside risk and Trump is insulated somewhat (but if they fish up one of the third rails that electrical arc will burn right through the insulation of separation that Elon provides.)Report
Right, if things go ‘well’ they will be shielded from any future prosecution.
If things go sideways, Trump will hang them out to dry.
The 20-something will eat it; Musk might eat it, but has various ways to deflect.
Either way, it’s a really really bad bet for the kids.Report
But, of course, they’re kids. It was a bad bet for kids to enlist in every army action in history, they still did it because they were kids.Report
I think it is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court rules that the President can unilaterally decide what the Constitution means and doesn’t mean because that basically turns the President into an absolute monarch.
I do think it is possible, perhaps even probable that they decide “How many divisions does Justice Roberts have?”Report
I wouldn’t say your thoughts are irrational or unreasonable, but I will reiterate that direct overt confrontation when facing a firm opposition has not, historically, been Trumps MO. It’s entirely possible that, with his current clique of courtiers stiffening his spine, Trump could do what you’re talking about but it’s an overt and risky move that Trump has, historically, shied away from. Remember: Trump doesn’t believe in this stuff in the slightest, heck, he basically got into office in 2016 by undercutting libertarians more than any other group of the rights coalition except for the neocons.Report
During the last administration, Trump tended to make a public show of backing down but quietly ignoring the Court orders. This was especially true on immigration decisions against him. You are being way too optimistic here.Report
Trump was surrounded by more “reasonable” people in his last term who were willing to tell him, “no, you can’t do that.”
Trump has gotten rid of those people this term and is also giving positions to people who were too toxic for his first term. Hegseth was considered for a position in his first term but was rejected because of his issues with alcohol and sexual assault. Not a big deal this time for the toughest cabinet position. Not too mention the outright ideological cranks getting nominated like Gabbard and Kennedy and Oz.
Additionally, people who were kicked out of Trump’s first term for attending things like White Supremacist rallies are being invited back in for more important positions like Under Secretary of State.
TL/DR, optimism bias is a hell of a dangerous drug and past performance does indicate future resultsReport
Saul, Lee, I’ll reiterate that you’re both laying out lots of reasons for thoughtful people to conclude that Trump will defy court orders and I have no quibbles with them. I will, merely, reiterate that few people have lost money betting on the venality and cowardice of Donald Trump.Report
Pam Bondi just announced that the Justice Department serves the interests of Trump and is his personal law firmReport
No surprise there.Report
The math of what they’re trying to do suggests they need to cut entitlements because that’s where the money is at.
In a sane government we’d try to reduce gov spending by forcing HealthCare providers to fix and publish prices so market forces are brought to bear.
The pollical system is so easy for special interests to gum up that we’re doing to have insane gov instead.Report
In a sane government or a government facing an actual fiscal crisis, benefit cuts to entitlements would be married to spending cuts on right wing shibboleths like defense along with tax increases weighted towards the wealthy and upper middle class which would result in no one being happy and thus everyone ending up accepting it.
Contra your understandable libertarian fantasies if Trump or his Muskrats gets even close to entitlements with these stunts they’ll get politically exploded like a toad struck by lightning. Trump is keenly aware of this which is why, when they briefly interrupted Medicare access portals, they promptly backtracked furiously in a frenzy of denials and pledges of fealty to Medicare.Report
RE: Cutting Medicare
Making Medicare more efficient via the market would drastically reduce it’s cost without “cuts”. There would also be a ton of other positive side effects.
RE: Tax increases
It’s unclear if seriously increasing taxes will actually result in seriously increasing the amount of money the gov collects via taxation.
RE: Cutting defense
We have already cut defense if we look at percentage of GDP. We also have the issue the amount of money we need to raise dwarfs Defense spending.Report
I think the Schelling point is an interesting idea, but doesn’t it behave differently depending on who’s doing what? It’s essentially a coordination problem, no?
In one case the lack of a Schelling point allows for coalition building, but hinders the coalition from actually prioritizing marginal gains… or put another way, it’s your old favorite of crab-bucketing on the entire prioritization project — which never ends. So, in terms of ‘going on the offensive’ the Omnicause can’t really because no-one ever goes to the right rallying point — or, another way to put it is everyone believes *they* are at the right rallying point but everyone else is at various wrong ones.
I think I see your point that Trump is exploiting the Schelling point coordination problem of Team Blue; BUT, I’m not entirely sure that that’s only what’s happening. Put another way, it’s not simply a coordination problem, but more of a bandwidth overload problem — more like obscuring chaff. Chaff is difficult to deal with even if you have a singular mission of blowing up the airplane.
I think it get’s exacerbated by Unreliable Narrators who can’t (or don’t want to) separate the chaff from the plane… but there’s just an awful lot of chaff.Report
Yeah, exactly. In the 1960s, “Grand Central Station” was one of *THE* landmarks in NYC. It makes sense to think that that would be a good place to meet a stranger at the information booth.
In 2025? I don’t know that Grand Central Station even shows up in movies anymore… Huh. I guess it was in John Wick 3.
Get rid of the main Schelling point. What’s the next best one?
Maybe it shouldn’t be everybody’s first choice. Maybe it could be like the Chicago Cubs… everybody’s second favorite team. Is there a consensus on the second favorite? (Abortion, right?)Report
Maybe we got a Schelling point…
Report
Christ you people are fkkking morons. My Lord, where to start?
First of all, Trump might not win every single one of the cases arising from his executive actions since he’s returned to office, but he’s going to win the vast majority of them.
About cutting money he’s cutting, that will depend on the actual words in appropriations bills or CRs. If the law says we appropriate $1 billion dollars to add an extra lane on I10 from Phoenix to LA, that money will go out. But my guess is, most laws don’t say that.
What’s more likely is that a lot of appropriations, especially the ones at issue, say the Secretary of HHS will appropriate up to $500 million toward worthwhile public health initiatives in Africa, Asia or the Near East. Then some NGO gets a letter from the Program Director for External Affairs at HHS and it says, “Congratulations, you have been approved for $1million in staff cost and $2 million in program expenses to toward your program to help prevent malaria among the LGBTQ community in Sri Lanka.”
_That_ is going to get zeroed out by DOGE, and it’s going to stick. And somehow, even if Trump loses, it’s not going to matter a whole lot because USAID and the other whiners aren’t going to be reappropriated anyway. So whoever’s getting zeroed out has 2, 3, 8 months whatever in a best case scenario.
Push comes to shove GOP can do it in reconciliation because it’s clearly a money issue and not a policy issue, so Demos can’t even filibuster. But frankly I don’t think it’s going to get that far.
Same with going after the DOGE wunderkids for unauthorized access of this or that. F that, they are authorized by the President himself.
No, the things that are upsetting for a certain kind of Democrat is not going to get any traction for a while. Trump is popular, in an effective sense he’s going to get more popular as people trust him more. He has vastly more support from the judiciary, from institutions in general, from professional white-collar America in general than he had in his first term. And, the people he has working for him are much more competent than the first term Trump people.
No, Trump is going to get hurt politically, when some _Trump_ initiative is seen to backfire against some group of people who were previously neutral or favorable towards Trump. This hasn’t happened yet, and there’s nothing plausibly in play right now to where it looks like it could happen soon.
Zeroing out USAID, banning trans in women’s sports, the more Demos/legacy media/GOP talk about these these things, the better Trump looks and more satisfied the American people are with electing him.
Frankly, in terms of ideological vibe-level domination, the GOP hasn’t had it this good since Reagan.Report
Heh while I appreciate the enthusiasm I think you’re overly optimistic about how a lot of this will work out. Trump’s record in court on in his first term was terrible. From 2019:
Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-real-reason-president-trump-is-constantly-losing-in-court/2019/03/19/f5ffb056-33a8-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html
Now you’re right that if Congress passes an appropriations bill eliminating funding for an agency then that that will indeed be the law of the land, but we all know that hasn’t happened yet and we also know that the GOP majority has barely been able to pass continuing resolutions by itself. So I think your best case is that this is all a lot of cart before horse. But until that happens I think we should fully anticipate that he is going to lose in court and lose a lot.
I think he’s on much firmer ground when it comes to the DEI, ‘gender’ wackiness, and similar stuff which has never had a strong statutory basis and always rested on the weird internal politics of the bureaucracies and those who work in them. You know my posting history well enough to know that I personally won’t mourn the end of that sort of thing and that I actually agree, that the Democratic party could help itself quite a bit by moving on from it.
Lastly though I think you also know that ‘because the president said so’ has never been the final word in this country and I don’t expect it will be on the policy, or for Musk and his minions. All glory is fleeting.Report
It is every American’s 1st Amendment right to advocate for a king, sir.Report
Absolutely!
Though I think what’s really going on with a lot of this is the belief that we should have less a king than a CEO. One of the reasons I think that the Democrats have struggled to deal with Trump is the slow but sure elimination from the coalition of people with insight into the private sector and total take over by those used to environments where you get your way by manipulation of processes and succeding via proceduralism. They’re just not used to dealing with people like this, who play chicken and/or engage in a bunch of puffery and craziness as a tactic. The lack of perspective makes Trump seem stronger than he actually is.
I myself have dealt with this kind of thing, particularly in tech, when the business people enter into regulated industries. Tech is mostly unregulated so unless your tech services something like finance or healthcare you can do a lot of moving fast and breaking things. But when you get into something like government you have to deal with rules and stakeholders and people who are bound to follow a playbook you can’t control. In the government that playbook is what the law actually is, as it is written.
I am starting to hear and read that very few feds are taking the ‘buyout’ (really more of an extended resignation). If the civil service doesn’t blink, and I think it’s looking increasingly likely that they won’t, he will end up with no choice but to go to Congress. While I have no doubts Johnson and Thune will do their best for his agenda, as they find it helpful to them, it will not be this kind of unilaterlism. And that’s not even getting into the delays and road blocks that are going to start coming up as this works through the courts.Report
So point and laugh is still a good defense then.Report
More like pick your little piece of turf and defend it and let whoever is most self interested pick their little piece of turf and defend that. Trump will win some but probably lose a lot of others. The end result is to turn the situation from some kind of existential threat to to the constitutional system to just politics.
Honestly I think the best strategy may be to turn Jaybird’s theorem from the OP on its head. Instead of trying to unite disparate people, institutions, and interests, force Trump to try to dismantle everything he doesn’t like one by one.Report
Yes, friend of the blog Hanley made a substack directly about how that is exactly what is happening and what Trump and Musk will likely bog down in.
https://jameshanley.substack.com/p/flooding-the-zone-with-lawsuitsReport
People of a certain political persuasion have been saying that government needs to be “ran” like a business (I can’t tell you how much the use of the wrong tense in this phrase grates on my ears.), which is fine on the face of it. Everyone knows running a business entails growing revenue, right? Then you ask them what needs to be cut and it’s always a program that doesn’t touch them and which amounts to 0.000000001% of the budget. Every day, Gene Wilder’s little soliloquy in Blazing Saddles becomes truer and truer.
https://youtu.be/KHJbSvidohg?feature=shared
The bottom line is if we want a CEO in the White House, DJT is about the last guy I’d pick.Report
The thing people seem to miss is that the government already runs like a business, if you look at union businesses where work gets paid by the hour and anything past eight hours is overtime.
What happens in most salary-only private-sector shops is that you work until the job is done, and you get paid Your Salary for that, regardless of how long it actually takes. And the management can tell themselves that Obviously Private Industry Is Better because half of the actual labor the work requires doesn’t show up on anybody’s balance sheet.Report
Oh, no. I’m surprised you’re falling for this. In order to defund USAID (and the like), Congress doesn’t have to pass any defunding legislation, in fact they don’t have to pass anything at all. Whatever has been appropriated will run out soon enough, either by time or dollars.
And that’s if, somehow, Trump is forced to spend what’s already been appropriated, which very likely he won’t. Because, following on from my previous example, there’s no law that says NGOforAfrica or the LGBTQ community in Sri Lanka gets X dollars toward the prevention of malaria. So there’s no trans person from Sri Lanka who can legitimately sue in federal district court somewhere.
So to summarize, unless there is a client level appropriation or objective actually in statute, Trump and DOGE control the payment systems (and the personnel systems) so the money he stops will stay stopped.
And how do you think this is going to play politically? Activist Demos are desperate to find some leverage to stop Trump but where is it? Do you think Booker, Fetterman, Chris Coons and Hickenlooper are going to say, “We won’t vote for any appropriations bill or CR unless funding for USAID is restored.” Again, Demos are desperate, they might. But then Thune will say, completely truthfully, “Demos are hijacking your Social Security and Medicare in order to give money to trans people in Sri Lanka.” No, push comes to shove I don’t think Demos will go there.
Plus, so what if they do? Demos will try to hold that line but even if they band together they still can’t defend it. GOP will just get the appropriations they need through Congress on party-line votes. Then Demos will be the party of defunding Medicare and USAID will still be zeroed out.Report
“following on from my previous example, there’s no law that says NGOforAfrica or the LGBTQ community in Sri Lanka gets X dollars toward the prevention of malaria.”
The Foreign Assistance Act does in fact mention USAID directly, so refusing to provide it with the money allocated to it is in fact in contravention of the law.Report
Yeah, but no. USAID still exists now, under Trump. It’s part of the Department of State and it reports to Marco Rubio.
Tbh, I don’t know much about the Foreign Service Act. From what I recall, it defines what USAID (and other foreign aid bureaucracy) _can’t_ do. Ie, it can’t give aid to communist countries and/or countries that practice torture. And even there, those restrictions are waivable by the President if he makes certain findings, ie, that aid is not going to torture or for support of a communist government.
There are quasi-independent agencies that are sort of executive, sort of not, where the leadership is established by statute (and usually has fixed terms). Trump has tried to fire some of those people as well, and that will end up depending on whether some New Deal-era precedents for independent leadership are upheld.
USAID doesn’t even have that. Part of State, not part of State, it doesn’t matter it always reports to the President. So the President can always stop its disbursements.Report
No, not only does it fund USAID, it directly funds NGO Programs like the Global Fund ($2B, p.2639) – which is the primary mover for PEPFAR… And that’s just one of many other specified appropriations. See the thread above with link to the appropriations bill.
Even among ‘discretionary’ funding, the appropriations process is a blend of directed, specific, and discretionary funding.
A better example of what you are talking about would be the NIH (page 1837) which basically allocates block grants for the institution to then grant to other entities pursuant to their main charter. The executive could, in cases like these, review the grant process and make changes to the selection process — as long as it’s consistent with the primary charter. for example:
NATIONAL HEART, LUNG, AND BLOOD INSTITUTE
For carrying out section 301 and title IV of the PHS Act with respect to cardiovascular, lung, and blood diseases, and blood and
blood products, $3,982,345,000.
Fine with me to review the Grant process to make sure that the $3.9B is being allocated to the best blood disease science; any time you’ve got an institution disbursing $3.9B annually, there are going to be some questionable and potentially ‘soft’ grants to allies; but that’s just the margins of what’s basically $3.9B in grants to study blood diseases.
If the Executive wants to change priorities at a macro and not micro grant level, it needs to get it’s budget passed so the appropriations match the intentions.Report
That’s certainly one way to do things.
Otoh, you could just reallocate things from the Executive Branch. That’ll probably work too.Report
One of the many ways Congress used to control its appropriations after they passed is a law that says if you want to reallocate more then 10% of something at the lowest budget execution level you have to go back and get congressional approval. Next level up is 5%. YMMV how much leeway that gives an executive to avoid fulfilling their article 2 duties but Congress has made its will pretty clear.Report
It is kind of embarrassing that the American people have allowed Congress to reduce itself to a sycophantic rubber stamp over the years.Report
I blame the 17th Amendment coupled with the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act.Report
As DD said, where Congress has spent the money, not spending it is a violation of the law. There’s already been at least one lawsuit filed. We will see how that plays out. I am certainly open to the possibility that USAID is one of those odd duck institutions that no one is going to go to bat for in Congress or that creates little controversy within the GOP coalition and is therefore easily cuttable. But they aren’t all like that. Federal largesse is spread out all over the place red and blue state alike, and plenty of Frontline GOP representatives have interests in keeping this or that alive. Currently you can only lose 4 votes.
Also are you really suggesting that if the GOP couldn’t get the votes to pass its own budget, to the point Medicare claims payments were at risk, that the Democrats would be blamed by the public for that? Come on now.Report
_One lawsuit_?
Please, give me smelling salts. I don’t think I can handle the trauma that one lawsuit will bring.
Yeah, libs are going to bytch and sue and complain as best as they can, but the reality is they’re completely outgunned. You don’t see lib district judges throwing out injunctions like confetti. The Trump lawyers are much better this time around. And Trump’s actions are much more purposeful and popular this time around, so they are easier to defend.
And if Trump loses, so what? There will be jurisdictional workarounds, waivers, EOs and so on to continue what Trump wants. And if that doesn’t work, Trump might just ignore adverse judicial rulings. And if that doesn’t work, Trump could just fold and bring it up again in Congress 4, 8, 18 months later where GOP has a majority in both Houses for now and the forseeable future.
There’s so many levels of backstop involved, Trump is going to get a lot of things done, one way or another. It’s just absurdly silly not to see this.
Well yeah, those programs either won’t be cut, or cuts that do happen will be restored toot sweet.
And for that matter, I expect that many of the USAID programs will end up being re-funded at some point in the future as well, after a good bit of culling and being administered by different, more ideologically simpatico bureaucrats.
Well, before the Demos get into play, there’s the problem of herding cats among the GOP in the House especially. Maybe the Senate too a little bit but definitely in the House. Suppose you have 210+ House GOPs pass a budget and/or CR but Massie and Chip Roy and whoever prevents a GOP majority.
In that case, I think the entire GOP will come down like a ton of bricks on the holdouts to keep the trains moving.
If somehow that doesn’t work and the Demos come into play, it will depend on what their ask is. If it’s restoring USAID, and it probably will be, among a lot of other things, then absolutely I think the Demos will get blamed for that.
But again, I suspect that won’t happen. The more outlandish the Demo ask is, the more incentive/more pressure for GOP holdouts to cave.Report
I’m not telling you to be shaking in your boots over a lawsuit. I’m telling you there is a high probability that the courts aren’t going to go along with a lot of this because it isn’t how the law or constitution works. In the last 48 hours alone we’ve had freezes on the birth right citizenship EO, the order to put the USAID employees on leave, and on Musk and team’s access to Treasury Dept data, including an order to destroy anything they’ve taken.
What even conservatives should be worried about, not that I imagine they will be, is an approach to governance that amounts to yelling ‘Somebody stop me!’ like Jim Carey in the Mask. Our system is only capable of containing so much defection and aggressive probing of boundaries before sparking a constitutional crisis. No one knows what’s on the other side of that and no one with any sense should want to find out.
Alternatively, while I have my doubts about the GOP’s ability to govern itself in Congress, if they are able to do so and pass laws rolling up USAID into the State Department or eliminating its functions entirely, well that’s just life in a democracy. Elections have consequences and whatever I or anyone else thinks about the policy decisions Congress has the authority to do things like that. Same if they want to mandate some sort of audit, eliminate the Department of Education, liquidate the federal workforce, or whatever else.Report
Yeah, but no. The Somebody Stop Me in this situation is Congress, and it’s important to note that Trump so far at least, is not picking any fights with them.
Not spending these legacy appropriations, maybe de minimis violations of something, maybe not, in any event not very important.
More important for the context of this train of comments, even if the Administration is guilty of de minimis violations or adverse court rulings about this or that, it won’t necessarily stop them.
And to reiterate, in the bigger picture, even if it does, the Administration can, if it wants, just come back next year with majorities in both houses and solve whatever problems legislatively.
And specifically wrt USAID, rolling up USAID into the State Dep’t might or might not require legislation depending on how the ball bounces from here, defunding USAID does not.
USAID will automatically be defunded when its current appropriation runs out, whatever whenever that is. It will require Congressional majorities to re-fund that which seems to me to be a dimmer prospect than cranky GOP House holdouts throwing a wrench into Trump’s agenda.Report
“_One lawsuit_?
Please, give me smelling salts. I don’t think I can handle the trauma that one lawsuit will bring.”
The tip of a spear is pretty small but there’s plenty of shaft behind it.Report
He has cut off head start – which hurts his supporters. He has cut off all sorts of healthcare subsidies. The GOP is about to proposes massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security which hurts his supporters.
To say nothing of the growing amount of unpicked produce and the almost grinding halt to home building he has started.
What you conveniently ignore about USAID is that the fight isn’t about the programs – it’s about who has control. And no president has control of the appropriations process – even you concede that’s Congress. So while eviscerating USAID may make great red meat for his base, it’s unconstitutional. Which means illegal. And getting 31% of voters support doesn’t give anyone the right to break the law.Report
They don’t care about that stuff Phil. You know that.Report
I know that. You know that. Koz probably knows that. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t state it clearly.Report
What’s going to happen with DOGE is what happened with Bush’s Drug Czar, which is that the guy’s going to come in hot and ready to solve the problem with a quick stroke of the pen, realize that the “problem” is nine-tenths created by the people the programs are meant to serve, pivot to making a huge splash about something that’s a side issue (assault rifles / “woke” language) along with a few layups that get spun into Major Cases, and then finish the administration’s term claiming the whole thing was a win.Report
Yeah, I thought so too a week or two ago, but clearly that’s not the way it’s happening now. Putting the payment and personnel systems under close operational control of the President is a big game changer.
Plus, specifically wrt USAID and parts of the deep state in a similar situation, it should be understood that a lot of the novelty of the Trump Administration isn’t just DOGE but it’s also substantive ideological agreement with Trump/Musk among Republicans in Washington.
Logistical/operational issues aside, 15+ years ago this would never have happened because Republicans would want to support foreign aid. Money for trans people in Sri Lanka is annoying but the thought was, there was still very important bipartisan foreign policy objectives being advanced. Now, the juice is not worth the squeeze. Not even close.Report
The payment and personnel systems were already under presidential control. Subject to congressional oversight.Report
Most laws do _require_ the spending, mostly because we ran into that issue in 1804 when Thomas Jefferson declined to buy some gunboats that Congress had authorized spending money on, but had not required it. I love how you apparently think this country sprang into existence a year ago and Trump is figuring out all the clever loopholes.
On top of that…are you aware there’s literally a law requiring the president to spend money allocated by Congress, called the Impoundment Control Act of 1974? This was created when Nixon tried literally the same trick Trump is, refusing to spend funds for programs he did not approve of, under the justification of the laws (which did require him to do the thing) did not explicitly say what he had to do with it.
“Yes, I agree I am supposed to be spending this money by law, but I don’t see how I can do that.”
Hell, maybe you should have paid attention during Trump’s first impeachment, where the impoundment of fund to the Ukraine was literally the crime listed. (Along with lying about it.)
Here, just read the primer. Here’s a key section: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-primer-on-the-impoundment-control-act
Now, a _clever_ man could claim there are delays, but that they are only delays, and that they are merely to make things more efficiency, not stop what is being done.
But Trump is not a clever man. Neither is Elon. And shuttering an entire agency cannot possibly count as a deferral, it counts as a rescission. Which Trump cannot do. He can pause spending for 45 days, but at that point, it has been considered long enough for Congress to have looked at it, so he must restart if they have not changed appropriations.Report
Incidentally, before you try to act outraged: Biden did, indeed, skit the ICA to not build the border wall by claiming the delays were programmatic.. It was a pretext, he had a political reason to not do that spending, and he figured out how to do it in such a way that it _looked_ legal.
In fact, Donald Trump might have gotten away with the Ukraine thing if we _didn’t_ have a bunch of evidence he was extorting Ukraine over it. Trump had something he could point at that was legitimately causing a delay. It’s just, we also had evidence that he was doing it for personal reasons…not even political policy, but to help with reelection.
Biden was wisely like ‘Sure, I will build the wall as required by Congress. I will spend the money as soon as I am able. But I don’t approve of this waiver granted by Trump for skipping environmental studies, and I will remove that waiver as the law _also_ allows, and sadly that is going to delay thing. Oh no.’
This is because, say it with me: Biden understand how the law actually works, unlike both President Trump and unelected President Musk does. Also, President Trump literally cannot stop talking about how he’s doing a bunch of illegal things because he’s incredibly needy, and Musk has absolutely no self-control either. They have no ability to subtly manipulate the system in such a way that it _looks_ like they are operating within the law.Report
This is a great comment. It describes what happened and also describes why Trump got elected.Report
You might know the Nixon-era history better than I do, but my understanding is that’s not what Nixon did/said at all.
AFAIR, Nixon opposed some enviro project in New York administered through the EPA, and in fact vetoed and was overridden wrt the policy statute.
There was never any ambiguity as to where the money was supposed to go.
Here, there’s a lot of leeway one way or another. Let’s say Trump loses the above point in court and some judge rules he has to spend the money. Well guess what, Marco Rubio is functionally the head of USAID now and he’ll figure out a much different set of priorities to advance and therefore a much different set of disbursements.
For whatever has been appropriated by Congress and not yet spent. Let’s see how much more is coming down that pipeline.Report
No, there’s less. For multiple reasons.
The first is that we have have literally two additional laws after both Nixon and the first time Trump did this. It is possible to argue what Nixon did was legal. Which is why, tada, it was outlawed.
The second is you seem to think that USAID is some sort of slush fund that extra money ends up, and USAID decides where it goes. That…is not accurate. There are specific programs it has to do, with specific funding.
Also, the problem is not that ‘the person in charge of USAID has different priorities’, it is that USAID was shutdown and almost all the employees let go. Any policy prioritization of USAID money would be _inside_ the programs, it would be ‘We are going to spend this money for doing this things over in this country instead of this one’.
I.e. a government agency is handed $X to do one goal with five different ways to accomplish it in ten different locations, and $Y to do another thing with two different ways in five different locations. It has some discretion. It can alter which method it chooses to do stuff, emphasizing some and demphasizing others. It can decide that one of those ten locations does not really need the help, and focus on the other nine. It can shift some percentage of the money for the first to the second, someone up there said 10%, I don’t know if that’s correct but sounds right.
What it can’t do is stop doing the first thing for policy reasons, and the government certainly can’t shut the entire thing down, which is _explictly_ what Trump has said he is doing. That was the legal argument Nixon had.
It really is weird how Trump’s defender to like to iron-man how he _could_ have done something in a way that might hypothetically be legal, and meanwhile he’s just…doing things in a way that is blatantly illegal.
—
I had to keep reminding people: The president runs executive branch agencies (OR, rather, the cabinet does), but Congress _created_ them, it funds them, it controls literally everything about what they are or are not allowed to do, including _forcing_ them to do things. They are not some magical thing the president magically can do things in. Everything that happens with them is within the constrains that Congress set out.
Or to put it another way, for all the ‘run the government like a business’: The president may be be the CEO, but Congress is the board of directors and _owns_ the company. They have just delegated the functioning of the company to the president, but he has to follow every single rule they made. (Barring a few places where the constitution intersects, but that is not really relevant to anything he’s done.) In fact, any discretion that he has was literally granted by Congress, or at least not forbidden by Congress but they could. Constitutionally he has _zero_ discretion over spending.Report
I find “the omnicause” to be a concept both too ideologically loaded, and too descriptive to be helpful. I wonder if it would be better to talk about solidarity, both as an antidote to division, and means towards finding “Schelling points,” or at least, practical steps that people can take.
I have never been much of a Bernie fan, but he was onto something here:
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1234607609472331776
In times of anxiety, upheaval, and crisis, the reactionary retreats into every smaller circles: their race, their tribe, their “community,” their family, and the individual, and we see this in both the behavior and rhetoric of American conservatives and their political party, especially in this administration. Solidarity is the opposite of this retreat, and the best way to fight it. It says that in times of crisis, we have to come together, work together, and take care of each other. It opposes any division based on difference or narrow conceptions of identity. It tells us to work across and through difference, while celebrating it.Report
It doesn’t feel like solidarity, though. The omnicause is like solidarity + bundling.Report
Solidarity is something in very short supply these days. I’m not suggesting that a better description of what you refer to as the “omnicause” is “solidarity.” I’m suggesting that we need solidarity.
My own view is that we don’t have an “omnicause,” we have a greatly fractured cause, a party of a million non-profits, each, as a result of how they get their money and the incentives that creates, focused on their little corner of the political/activist universe. Those of us lying outside the NGO world are left being pulled in a hundred directions less because we’ve adopted an “omnicause” than because there are so many people to pull us, and no coordination between the pullers. A little coordination, a little cooperation, and suddenly the “omnicause” isn’t the perfect as the enemy of the good, but everyone working together to achieve the goals that make up the “omnicause,” but without tripping over each other. That doesn’t mean we work on everything at once, of course, and there will be disputes and debates and disagreements, but we work those out together.Report
That doesn’t mean we work on everything at once, of course
SO WHO ARE YOU SUGGESTING THAT WE LEAVE BEHIND AND LET DIE
Anyway, I’m of the opinion that the omnicause is a weakness rather than a strength (or, if it’s a strength, it’s a strength in service to a cause that is not particularly progressive).
But I say that as someone who sees what the term is describing and thinks that it’s a good enough term to describe the phenomenon.Report
I think the bottom line is that real solidarity is impossible without common interest. And the reality underlying a lot of this performative stuff is that there is no common interest, or the common interest is so nebulous and/or theoretical that it may as well not exist.Report
Have to start with ‘Mere Solidarity’ before we can work ourselves up to ‘Solidarity’
But in all honesty, it’s difficult to even get to ‘Mere Solidarity’ in America… and Bernie’s message of ‘fighting for someone else as much as you’d fight for yourself’ begs the question, which fight?
I suspect Solidarity plus Subsidiarity tied to the American premise of ‘The Great Truce’ could provide a modum vivendi — but only if Solidarity means a lot of people living their lives the wrong way. The difference between this and pure (Libertarian) Atomized Individualism is subtle, but real. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near unpacking those distinctions. I say this as someone who’s trying to improve an actual American Solidarity Party approach to Solidarity and Subsidiarity… it’s hard.Report
I think the biggest issue is the lack of groups to fight through. As I mentioned above, a party of a million non-profits doesn’t really help anyone join together, recognize their common interests, and work together. A union, on the other hand, can, as can other groups which have disappeared or atrophied over the last several decades. As a firm believer in dual power, I’m hoping one of the things that comes out of the horribleness of one of the major parties, and utter uselessness of the other, is the formation of the sorts of groups that help build it, and we already see people on the left calling for that, but the non-profit industrial complex, and the liberals whose ideas of politics are so wrapped up in them, will be resistant.Report
I have a very hard time celebrating people who want to- at best – to impoverish me and threaten my family so they can regain political power they think they lost.Report
Dunno why you’d be celebrating those people. Solidarity doesn’t demand that you work alongside the person holding a gun to your head.
I highly recommend this as a good discussion of the concept: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740355/solidarity-by-leah-hunt-hendrix-and-astra-taylor/Report