Wednesday, February 12, 2025

DO AMERICANS UNDERSTAND HOW LAWS WORK?

I keep thinking about Elon Musk's opening statement at yesterday's Oval Office news conference:



Musk said:
So at a high level, if you say, "What is the goal of DOGE?" ... I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. This may seem like, well, aren't we in a democracy? ...

So, if there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?

If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives, in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So it’s incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public, the public’s elected representatives, the president, the House, and the Senate, decide what happens, as opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there aren’t some good -- there are good people who are in the federal bureaucracy. But you can’t have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that is responsive to the people. That’s the whole point of a democracy.
Long before Elon Musk became our de facto president -- long before Elon Musk was born -- many Americans felt that our government was run by a large, expensive, out-of-control bureaucracy. The Republican Party has been fanning the flames of this suspicion since the New Deal, and now it seems to be achieving its ultimate triumph over liberal ideas of government. I understand why many Americans will respond to this. They've been primed to believe it all their lives.

But I want to talk about the idea that the "will" of the voters should be "decided by their elected representatives, in the form of the president and the Senate and the House." I think that's probably persuasive to many Americans -- but only because they don't understand a simple fact about government.

Governments enact laws. In Washington, those laws are enacted by Congresses temporarily made up a particular mix of Democrats and Republicans. The bills are signed into law by presidents, some of whom are Democrats, some of whom are Republicans.

When a law is passed, the current president and the elected officials who at the moment make up Congress tell us that we should do things a certain way long into the future -- long after this particular president and Congress are replaced by future presidents and Congresses. If we don't like the laws we've passed, the president and Congress we have at this moment or in a future moment should change those laws -- but those new laws will remain in effect after the revisers are out of office.

What Musk suggests in his opening statement -- and what the Trump/Musk administration is trying to put into effect, with the passive assent of the Republican Congress -- is a system in which every new administration starts at zero, and gets to throw out any law on the books that it doesn't like.

But that's an insane way for a developed nation to operate. And the Trump/Musk administration is even trying to toss out the constitutional principle that Congress gets to decide what the government will spend money on (with the president's approval), not a dictatorial president.

I suspect that most Americans don't think we're in a constitutional crisis because we just elected a new president and he should get to do whatever he wants seems like a simple and logical idea to them. I don't think they understand that a democratic country endures in part because its laws endure. Most Americans have probably never thought about this.

This won't seem like a crisis to most Americans until something Trump and Musk are doing affects them personally. I don't think they're invested at all in the idea that we're a nation of laws -- or at least that, until January 20, we were.