The past three Presidents – Obama, Trump and Biden – have each wound up governing by executive order. True, Obama managed to squeak a healthcare bill through Congress – but even with that, Trump was complaining that executive orders were no way to run a country, that we needed real leadership. Now Trump is also choosing the Executive order route – and the branch of government contesting his executive orders is the judiciary.
I’ve watched the challenges of representative government from a school board – and much of what got accomplished was because three out of five board members were in agreement on that particular issue. It took a long time, and a lot of effort, to get a pay matrix for teacher contracts approved. It took even longer to get a classified pay scale voted into existence. The addition of the pre-school that started this Fall was first brought up in 2020. I’ve been taught how hard it is to get a representative democracy working with only five elected trustees and no political affiliations. How much worse it must be with 435 representatives narrowly split between two parties.
I think I’m seeing Trump make the same decision that Obama made – “if I can’t get Congressional authorization, I’ll do it based on my own authority.” Montana’s laws do not give a schoolboard chair that power – by law the board chair chairs the meeting, and the board has only a collective power, utterly lacking individual power for the chair. Still, the board chair does have the (unlegislated) power of asking advice from the board association’s attorneys and setting the meeting agenda.
So nationally, we’re seeing folks who disagree with Trump taking his decisions to judges who disagree with Trump – when the reality is that our House of Representatives are locked in a pattern of behavior where they can’t do their job. The problem isn’t the President or the Judges – a representative democracy fails to work when most of the representatives come from the extremes. As I was looking for a way to finish, I noticed this meme:
It’s not quite what I wish it was – but I’ve been called both a Trumpkin and a Libtard. I have the feeling that it’s more a question of where the caller sits on the spectrum than where I am. It would be nice to have more folks from the middle in Congress.
Trego's Mountain Ear 