I have a new piece out for Sublation on the state of democracy in the United States. There’s no paywall. You can read it here: https://www.sublationmag.com/post/how-democracies-cry-the-endless-wailing-of-levitsky-and-ziblatt
How Democracies Cry
Tag: Constitution
These Executive Orders Make No Sense
After weeks of failed negotiations between the House and the Senate, the President is attempting to provide additional stimulus through executive action. The orders are probably unconstitutional–all money bills must begin in the House of Representatives, per the “origination clause”. They will be challenged in the courts, and I doubt they come into force. That said, if the President had ordered a strong aid package, I would be willing to consider supporting a challenge to congress’ spending authority. Congress has neglected its duty to protect Americans from the economic consequences of our anti-coronavirus policies. The scale of the disaster is so immense that I would support trying anything that might help tens of millions of unemployed people stay in their homes and put food on the table. When wealthy senators sit on their hands and deny ordinary people the means of subsistence because they feel offering aid might diminish their “incentive” to take jobs that pay less than $600 a week, they get no sympathy from me.
Unfortunately, I don’t get to make a provocative argument that the President is justified in running over congress, because this President has taken action that doesn’t make any sense.
How Schulz Should Pursue a United States of Europe
Martin Schulz–the leader of the center-left SPD, Germany’s second largest party–has publicly called for the United States of Europe by 2025:
This is an exciting proposal–a strong union is precisely the thing to break the European Union’s deadlock (the nature of which I’ve discussed elsewhere). But it will be politically difficult to do, because the EU has understandably lost so much of the European people’s trust over the last decade. To regain that trust, the “convention” Schulz talks about needs to operate fundamentally differently from current EU institutions. Here’s how it could be done.
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How Brazil Got the Worst Austerity Program in the World
Brazil’s new president, Michel Temer, has introduced austerity via constitutional amendment, freezing Brazil’s state spending at 2016 levels for 20 years, allowing it to increase only at the rate of inflation. This is really dumb–if Brazil’s population grows, or Brazil has an economic crisis, or Brazil has to go to war, it will be trapped within 2016 fiscal parameters. So as its population grows, the same level of spending will be divided across ever larger numbers of people, and if Brazil gets into major trouble it will only be able to pay for emergency measures by slashing social spending. To make matters worse, the amendment disallows its own repeal for a 10 year minimum, so there is nothing anyone in Brazil can constitutionally do about this ridiculous rule until 2027. But you know what makes this even more incredible? Temer was never elected president of Brazil in the first place. What follows is the bizarre story of how Brazil’s broken constitution empowered a man committed to an absurd political agenda.
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How the Left Can Survive Under Trump
Over the last few days, many people have been panicking about what Donald Trump might do as president. There is a lot of fear. Because most commentators and academics are deeply hostile to Trump, many people writing about this are still deeply emotionally shaken by the result. This has tended to color the analysis and produce polemics. So today I want to take a step back and try to calmly, rationally assess what kind of threat Trump poses and what opportunities he creates. In this post we’ll focus on the threats, and in the next one we’ll talk about the opportunities
Benjamin Studebaker 