Is It Really a Coup?

More from the OpEd...

... What we've seen over the last two weeks and accelerating over the weekend looks like a coup, a hostile, undemocratic takeover of government. Merriam-Webster says a coup is "a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group." No violence so far because this is a coup fueled by tech bros, not the military.

But we're watching the alteration of government happen before our eyes.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls it "a new kind of coup," writing in Lucid about Elon Musk's seeming power sharing with Trump: "And here is where the U.S. 2025 situation starts to look different.

The point of personalist rule is to reinforce the strongman. There is only room for one authoritarian leader at the top of the power vertical. Here there are two." It is unusual, but it is still an effort to use extra-legal, undemocratic practices to radically alter American democracy, undoing the balance of power the Founding Fathers established between the three branches of government by consolidating power in the hands of the presidency as a complacent, Republican-led Congress looks on. ...

@#1 ... as a complacent, Republican-led Congress looks on. ...

Complacent?

Or cowardly?

One more excerpt from the OpEd...

... Richardson concluded: "The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical."

So, "coup" is the correct way to label the transformation of government we are living through. But with so much continuing normally, it's easy to doubt what you're seeing. Even experiencing it from the perspective of historians who understand this moment through the lens of history, it doesn't seem quite real. ...

Part Two of the OpEd...

Coup, Continued
joycevance.substack.com

... As we end this week, there are lawsuits. Lawsuits everywhere, challenging just about everything Donald Trump is trying to do that exceeds the bounds of lawful presidential power. The question is, will it be enough? Will the lawsuits work? Will the courts hold?

There is reason to be deeply concerned about Trump's Justice Department under new Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi unleashed a barrage of memos on her first day in office that made key changes to how DOJ operates.

They ran the gamut from creating a "Weaponization Working Group" that will investigate the Trump investigators, to prioritizing federal death penalty cases. There were 14 memos in all. We'll learn more about what each one does as Pam Bondi's DOJ gets to work, but one that jumps out involves disbanding TaskForce Klepto Capture, which, in its two years of existence, led to almost $700 million in assets being seized to enforce sanctions and restrictions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

On day two on the job, Bondi filed lawsuits against Illinois' governor, Chicago's mayor, and other officials, challenging that state's ability to operate sanctuary cities. Between the memos and the lawsuits, that's a lot to read, let alone understand. So it's impressive that Bondi also found time to do an exclusive interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News during her second day on the job, with the White House as her backdrop. ...

@#10 ... Front page, headliner Opinion-nutjob ...

From the About page of the Substack ...

joycevance.substack.com

... There's a wonderful story about Ben Franklin. As it's told, he was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and a woman shouted out, "Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?" (I love that it was a woman.) Franklin is said to have responded: "A republic, madam ... if you can keep it."

I'd like to be a part of keeping the republic. That's why I decided to start this substack, Civil Discourse.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to serve at the Justice Department for more than 25 years. I started out as a line prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Alabama in 1991. After ten years prosecuting criminal cases, I moved into our appellate division and served as the chief of that division before becoming one of the very first U.S. Attorneys appointed by Barack Obama and confirmed (unanimously if you can believe it in this day and age) by the Senate. ...

@#6 ... The U.S. Supreme Court just ordered Musk to Cease, Desist and destroy any information he downloaded from the U.S Treasury thus far. ...

Mr Musk may have already been selling the data to data brokers. My guess is that the data are untraceable now. ...

@#4 ... Or complicit? ...

Good point.