Ain't happening unless we repeal the Nineteenth Amendment.
Posted on 07/20/2025 5:04:12 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
A CRASH COURSE IN ARTICLE II. Among other things, the second Trump administration is giving the political world an education in the meaning of Article II of the Constitution, the article that establishes the executive branch and lays out the president’s powers. A lot of people do not like what they are learning.
“The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” it begins. The article outlines the process for electing the president, establishes qualifications for office, creates the oath of office, and details the process for removing the president. It lists the president’s powers, both sole powers, such as serving as commander in chief of the military and the power to pardon, and powers he exercises with the advice and consent of the Senate, such as making treaties, appointing judges, and appointing officers of the United States. Article II also says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Donald Trump came into office in January knowing that his opposition — Democrats, their associated activist groups, lawfare specialists, and media allies — would do everything they could to stop his initiatives. Before the recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is Trump’s sole, albeit really big, legislative achievement to date, all of Trump’s accomplishments in his first months in office have come through his exercise of the executive authority laid out in Article II.
The most successful strategy the anti-Trump coalition has used so far is what might be called Lawfare 2.0. For years, the coalition pursued impeachment, lawsuits, and criminal investigations against Trump. Now, it is filing lawsuit after lawsuit to stop specific Trump initiatives. It has had extraordinary success at the lower-court level, with many compliant judges enjoining the administration...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
And the sooner, the better.
What most have never understood is that a president was pretty much an elected king with nearly unlimited power that would be checked only by congress and the courts.
Just because most presidents never exercised that power (except Lincoln) doesn’t mean it never existed.
Thank you for posting this important article, synopsised. ;-)
Bkmk
If Fettgub wasn’t so big this wouldn’t be a problem. Best solution is to make it smaller — much, much smaller.
Ain't happening unless we repeal the Nineteenth Amendment.
The supreme irony here is that through deregulation and shrinkage of the Federal Government, Trump is effectively restricting the powers of the Article II Executive branch — which the Article III judicial branch has been fighting him on every step of the way in order to maintain its hold on the Executive branch in order to increase its powers.
“What most have never understood is that a president was pretty much an elected king with nearly unlimited power that would be checked only by congress and the courts.”
No, the president is not that, not even close. In our system as written in the Constitution, Congress holds the more power than any other branch. The Presidency is second. And the Judiciary is a distant third.
Congress can create laws, a president cannot. Congress can overrule anything a President does (executive order or veto) with 2/3 vote in both houses, and that includes an emergency declaration or whatever. Congress can cut off his funds. Congress can impeach and remove him from office in about a day. Congress get approval over a President’s appointments and treaties. Congress can even start the process to amend the Constitution.
Congress can create or close courts, and remove judges. Judges have to be approved by the Senate. Judges, even the Supremes cannot remove a President, nor a Congressman. They cannot raise and spend money.
A president is not an elected king in a Constitutional Monarchy.... not even close.
A president cannot raise money, create law, or get rid of a single lowly Congressman.
In direct order, Congress can do almost anything and the President and Judges cannot stop them if 2/3 of them agree.
Judges and Presidents have almost no control over Congress.
Progressives do not entirely understand the relation between Article II and the weaknesses of their own ideology. There is contradiction here that they created for themselves and they don’t see it.
Conversely, what most conservatives do not understand is, generally speaking, that progressive ideology even exists. Progressivism’s very existence is a mystery and has not yet even been discovered in the first instant. But beyond that, where conservatives do know that progressivism exists and is its own thing, they can’t really speak towards the particulars of progressivism’s key points nor what makes progressivism function.
Ever since progressivism was invented inside of the United States at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century and major progressive activists, authors, elected officials, judges and others, including but not limited to Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Colonel Edward House, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and many other people, the end goal has always been the Administrative State capped by the ultimate in expertise.
Many call the Admin. state the deep state these days. Its that whole unelected bureaucracy staffed with expert after expert, that is the crown jewel of progressive ideological desires. Everything the courts have done relating to it, everything Congress has passed relating to creating an agency leads to this momentous goal, and everything multiple Presidents before now have done to be passive about it have all gone toward manipulating precedent and making it established.
In order to make this super simple to understand, I’ll point to the Department of Education for an example. The Constitution does not charge the President with the power nor capability in regards to education and educational policies. This is done because Congress willingly “surrendered” that power to the Executive Branch via the 1979 law establishing the Department of Education.
Except,
And this is the part conservatives can’t usually understand.
Except,
Congress did not actually surrender the power. The idea that in creating the DoEd and placing the existence of the DoEd within the Executive Branch is tantamount to a surrender of the educational power to now be controlled by the executive is not something progressives ever expected but even moreso, they have rejected this. As far as the progressives are concerned, DoEd is ___still____ congressional.
It’s not that education then becomes an Executive job. That’s still congress’s, but by extension Congress controls the DoEd and in execution the President merely acts in the way Congress directs. Congress still owns education, the ideology and theory would dictate. If that confuses you it should, because that’s the fatal flaw of progressive ideology.
The conservative would say: You can’t put this in the executive branch. That makes it ......... (I know its crazy) ..... EXECUTIVE!!! But the progressives don’t see it that way. Progressives want these departments to remain as offshoots of Congress regardless of where they live. That’s a core part of Progressivism. And all of the relevant court cases over the last century have gone towards attempting to hamstring the President in a way that result in he cannot control a department that exists in his branch.
Progressivism has no real answer to this contradiction and they never really did. This was all just sunshine and lollypops and “we can make it work, trust us”. “We can force it to work, our judges will ensure of that.” “we can ignore it and make it go away.” “Not enough people know it exists, so it doesn’t exist”
It is Article II that places the whole of progressivism at risk because of the plain spoken language which states that these agencies are actually executive in nature and thus, progressives simply have to ignore it and act like Article II does not actually exist. This gets some into why progressives go so deeply far into indoctrinating students in k12 class and making sure no American children ever read their constitutions and know the Founders even exist but I don’t want to do yet another of my typical rants about progressivism in the school systems. I want to stick with progressive ideology here.
So the progressives have to have administrative agencies - it’s in their blood, it’s in their very DNA, progressives live eat and sleep administrative experts running unelected agencies. The American People cannot be trusted according to Progressives, they’ve stated it plainly in their books.
Now, what is the end result if any President were to wholly exert over the Department of Education? Well, as is stated in some of the comments here, that makes the Office of the President - and this is the key: - that makes ___in the topic of educational policy___ that makes the President into a 1x situational King.
Now what happens if the President wholly exerts over the EPA as well as the DoEd? That makes the President a 2x situational King. I’m adding departments on purpose for a reason, I think this will be easy for all of you reading this to understand.
Now what happens if the President wholly exerts over the EPA and the DoEd and the FCC? That makes the President a 3x situational King. Now he is King with respect to environment, education, and radio.
Now what happens if the President wholly exerts over the EPA and the DoEd, the FCC, and OSHA? That makes the President a 4x situational King.
Now what happens if the President wholly exerts over the EPA and the DoEd, the FCC, OSHA, and a combination of the TSA and FAA? That makes the President a 5x situational King. But only in those areas.
Since, we must recognize, none of these items are actually delegated powers of the Constitution, the FAA the FCC, the DoEd and all the rest of them are “surrendered”(but not really surrendered) powers by Congress now residing within the Executive Branch.
This is why progressives are freaking out, they did not actually intend for a rigid centralization especially if its the “wrong guy” doing the centralizing. They’re relying on a technicality wholly made up in their minds about a non-existent separation of powers where the line should be here but the line is actually over.............. there. (This is me pointing a couple hundred feet away) The plain text of the constitution could not be more clear. Regardless of what the Constitution says, progressives still desire the line to be elsewhere and they’ll use every power of propaganda they have at their disposal to fool everybody else into thinking the line is where they desire it to be.
Yes, none of these departments should exist. They are all flatly unconstitutional.
But even as of now, even Trump. Trump is not trying to get the Department of Education, or any other department for that matter, to be fully and formally abolished as a matter of Constitutional Congressional law. So then how do we get rid of these unconstitutional departments if all three branches refuse to abolish them and that even includes President Trump?
This is the actual final straw if we could ever get there. If one of these administrative agencies could be abolished, nothing, nothing could be more disastrous for progressivism.
Abolishing the Department of (x) would be the absolute pinnacle damage move that could be committed against progressivism. It’s assassin level. It’s ELE - that would be an extinction level event for them.
This is the area where I think perhaps conservatives and progressives have the least amount of understanding about each other is the disconnect about how Article II is viewed.
This complete lack of understanding is also the source of much of my motivation for creating open source audio books and being willing to put them out into the public domain for free. I have not seen any other single way that we can begin to learn the enemy - this learning MUST be made easier. And it MUST be free, the economics cannot; cannot, cannot, be a barrier no matter how little it can be said to be.
that is just it though, if 2/3 can not agree. Then a president is similar to an elected king in his powers.
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